Judge's Notebook: What Actually Makes a Story Stand Out

Story and connection to the category make up 30% of your score, the same weight as execution. Yet it's consistently the most rushed part of an entry. You get up to 100 words. Here's how our panel reads them.

Be Specific, Not General

"I love my garden and worked hard on it" tells a judge nothing they can't assume already. Naming an actual plant, a specific mistake you made, or one real moment (the tomato plant that finally survived after three failed attempts, the bench you built from a neighbor's discarded fence boards) gives your entry a detail no one else's has.

Show the "Why," Not Just the "What"

We can already see what your space looks like in the photos. What we can't see is why it matters to you. The strongest stories answer a simple question: why this space, why now, why you? A sentence about what the space means to you does more work than three sentences describing what's planted in it.

Include a Real Challenge

Every space worth entering had some obstacle behind it: bad soil, no budget, a landlord who said no to half your plans, a first year of gardening that mostly failed. Naming the obstacle you worked around is often the single most memorable line in an entry.

Read It Out Loud Before You Submit

The single best edit available to you costs nothing: read your story out loud once before submitting. Generic phrases and filler tend to reveal themselves immediately when you hear them, in a way they don't on the page.

The Photos Get Them Looking. The Story Gets Them Rooting For You.

Think of your three photos as what gets a judge's attention, and your story as what makes them remember your entry an hour later, once they've read fifty more. Both matter. Only one is easy to overlook.