Lesson plan; Tiny Memoir Contest for Students: Write a 100-Word Personal Narrative

Can you tell a meaningful and interesting true story from your life in just 100 words? That’s the challenge we pose to teenagers with our 100-Word Personal Narrative Contest, a storytelling form popularized by Modern Love’s Tiny Love Stories series.

After running this contest for three years, receiving a total of more than 37,000 entries, and honoring dozens of excellent miniature teen-written memoirs, we have discovered the answer is a resounding yes.

So, we challenge you to try it yourself.

We’re not asking you to write to a particular theme or to use a specific structure or style, but we are looking for short, powerful stories about a particular moment or event in your life. We want to hear your story, told in your unique voice, and we hope you’ll experiment with style and form to tell a tale that matters to you, in a way you enjoy telling it.

And, yes, it’s possible to do all that in only 100 words. For proof, just look at last year’s 20 winning entries. We also have a step-by-step guide full of advice that is grounded in 25 excellent 100-word mentor texts, and we’ve published a rehearsal space where teenagers can begin brainstorming their own stories. We hope students will use it to get inspiration, experiment and encourage one another.

Take a look at the full guidelines and related resources below, and review the full rules here. Please post any questions you have in the comments and we’ll answer you there, or write to us at LNFeedback@nytimes.com. And, consider hanging this PDF one-page announcement on your class bulletin board.

The Rules

Please read these rules carefully before submitting an entry. You can find more details in the Frequently Asked Questions section below.

• Your tiny memoir should be a short, powerful, true story about a meaningful experience from your own life.
• It must be 100 words or fewer, not including the title.
• You must be a student ages 13 to 19 in middle school or high school to participate, and all students must have parent or guardian permission to enter. Please see the F.A.Q. section for additional eligibility details.
• Students from anywhere in the world who meet these age requirements may participate. However, submissions must be written for an English-speaking audience.
• The work should be fundamentally your own — it should not be plagiarized, written by someone else or generated by artificial intelligence.
• Your piece should also be original for this contest, meaning, it should not have been published anywhere else at the time of submission, such as in a school newspaper.
• Please also keep in mind that The New York Times has a global audience, including many families, so your submission should be appropriate for a broad audience. (For instance, please avoid cursing.)
• Only one entry per student is allowed. And while many of our contests allow students to work in teams, for this one you must work alone.
• As part of your submission, you must also submit an “artist’s statement” that describes your process. These statements, which will not be used to choose finalists, help us to design and refine our contests. See the F.A.Q. below to learn more.
• All entries must be submitted by Dec. 3, 2025, at 11:59 p.m. Pacific using the submission form at the bottom of this post.

Resources for Teachers and Students

How do you write a tiny memoir? Check out these helpful resources:

• The winners of our 2022, 2023 and 2024 100-word narrative contest: Nearly 50 teen-written memoirs on difficult friendships, first loves, embarrassing moments, and much more.
• A step-by-step guide for writing a 100-word narrative: Follow these six steps, from understanding the form and brainstorming ideas to writing and editing your final piece.
• Writing prompts: Our step-by-step guide has a related PDF full of prompts to help students brainstorm meaningful moments from their lives, and we’ve now compiled over 100 more of those jumping-off points. If those aren’t enough, you can find new narrative prompts every week in our Writing Prompts column.
• A “rehearsal space” for teenagers to experiment: This forum asks students, “What story from your life can you tell in 100 words?” We hope they’ll use it to brainstorm topics and try out techniques, as well as find inspiration and encouragement for their writing from others.
• Coming soon | Ask a journalist: Beginning Nov. 1, we invite teenagers to learn about crafting personal essays from Miya Lee, the editor of Modern Love projects. We hope you’ll join us! Learn more here.
• A personal narrative writing unit: This unit, originally created for our 600-word narrative contest, includes mentor texts, writing prompts, videos and on-demand webinars that teach the skills essential for any kind of narrative writing, including these 100-word memoirs. It also includes lesson plans on teaching with the miniature narratives found in the Times Tiny Love Stories and Metropolitan Diary columns, as well as a lesson for fixing wordy writing in your personal essays or anywhere else.
• Our contest rubric: The criteria we will use to judge this contest.