If you’ve got 10 minutes to spare and a good story to tell, there’s a local tellers competition eager to hear your work.

The eighth annual Dan Williams Local Tellers Competition is now accepting entries for the contest this fall. Anyone who lives within 100 miles of Athens is encouraged to film themselves telling a story no more than 10 minutes long, then visit athensstorytellingfestival.com to submit their video online. The audition footage doesn’t have to be a fancy, as the camera of a cellphone will do in most cases.

Stories must be family friendly, but they don’t have to be comedic. Event organizer Wayne Kuykendall said the main requirement is that it captures an audience.

“Most people locally are telling more humorous type things to captivate people, but there’s been some that are really good without being funny,” Kuykendall said.

He recalled a storyteller who shared a great tale about their grandfather that wasn’t funny at all. He also used the late storyteller Kathryn Windham as an example, saying, “she could have you dying laughing or she could have you crying.”

“We want someone who can project well, have it in a good orderly fashion to tell and captivate an audience,” Kuykendall said. “It doesn’t have to be laughter, and it doesn’t have to be with tears — just something that piques their interest.”

It does have to be clean, he said. Cursing and “raunchy humor” aren’t allowed in the competition.

The story told at the competition doesn’t have to be the same story in the audition, though the person auditioning does need to be a true amateur. In other words, they must be a nonprofessional who has never received payment for storytelling.

“We’ve had some really good ones” in years past, Kuykendall said. “Some locals that have won it could have been on the national tour, as far as I’m concerned.”

The winner of the competition will perform with professional storytellers during the Athens Storytellers Festival’s olio. The deadline for submissions is Oct. 1.