Diving back into writing competitions - Podcast
A few years ago, I submitted several short stories to competitions and was happy when one ‘Without You’ was published in the Writing Magazine in the UK in 2019 and I won £100. Super happy.
And another ‘When Susan met Rose’ in March 2020 which was published in The Forgotten: An Anthology from Michael Terence Publishing available at amazon.
I hadn’t won a monetary prize, but my story was highly commended which meant publication. I was on a high. I had a choice. I could carry on entering competitions or I could focus on my novels. My first draft pile was towering above my head, and I knew I needed to do some serious rewriting and editing and get some books out into the world.
I choose my novels but thought I might have time for some short stories too. I was wrong.
Writing time was gobbled up with everything involved in preparing books for publishing, and then looking into marketing as well as writing educational articles which actually brought some money into the bank so I could afford professional editing for my books.
There was no time or space for writing short stories, except for a flash fiction challenge in November, which I loved.
This year I no longer have articles to write each month, which is sad for my bank account, but great for my writing desire to first draft again.
I am back searching for competitions, writing short stories and the first will be submitted at the end of this month.
There are several good reasons to enter writing competitions.
1. You write more as there are deadlines to meet, you flex those ideas and writing muscles and gain in confidence, especially if you win.
2. You can experiment and try writing in new genres, try out different writing styles to meet the expectations of the competition. This expands your writing skills, and you may find a surprising genre that suits your voice.
3. Every time you enter a competition someone reads your writing. Many of these readers are editors, literary agents, publishers, and other authors. Your name is being seen, and if your writing is a good story, is well written and there are no spelling mistakes or terrible grammar, this is a step towards being a known author. The more times people see your name connected with good writing the more chance your published novels will sell.
4. You could win. This can mean gaining anything from being published in an anthology, online, or in a magazine, a cash prize, time with a literary agent, or an award. All of these are valuable for marketing, especially an award. You’ve all seen the words ‘Award winning novelist’ on the front of books, haven’t you? And doesn’t it compel you to look again, and maybe buy it? After all they must be good if they have an award. Any win is an opportunity for marketing your writing.
I love the short story I had published in the anthology, but the front cover of the book was dedicated to the first prize winner, and it didn’t shout about my story, although now I’ve looked back at it, it does fit with my theme, in a way. I’ve never made much of this achievement and think it’s about time I did. I’ll be sharing more about this collection of short stories soon.
5. There is always a chance that your writing will wow a judge and they will offer to mentor you, be your literary agent or want to see more of your writing with a publishing deal in mind. It does happen, not often, but it does.
6. You end up with lots of short stories, which, if they don’t win, can be submitted to other competitions, after edits of course. And if they are not published then you can collate them into a book and self-publish them.
I am short story writing for all of the above, but also for me. To bring back my free-writing, fast first drafting, I miss that buzz of so many words flowing like water from my fingertips, the buzz of my brain zipping from one ‘what if’ to another, the fun of finding out what I care about, what message I want to share with the world.
There are a couple of downfalls with writing for competitions.
1. It takes time to search and find the competitions your writing is best suited to. You need to watch out for scams, check out the previous competition winners and the quality of the writing.
2. Most cost to enter so it’s important to set yourself a budget. I shall enter lower cost competitions to start and then see how it goes. There are free competitions too, and if you subscribe to a writing magazine, they may have a reduction for subscribers.
3. Most short story competitions will set a limit around the 2000-word mark, they do have to read all the entries, so they are short, and this means concise writing is needed. I’ve written hundreds of flash fictions which are a great way to learn the skill of packing a whole story into a small space. And there are a lot of flash fiction competitions out there.
What I found interesting is that I had lost the free-flow writing habit. I sat and stared at the screen. This first competition I am entering at the end of the month has no boundaries, no theme, no prompt. What was I going to write about?
Me, stuck for a story idea is so weird, normally I have too many. I didn’t know what to do to get the flow going so I re-read the two winning stories from before. This was a mistake. They were so well written, I loved them, but I couldn’t wite like that? I had, I did, these were mine, but that huge doubt cloud blocked any ideas from getting through. Crazy huh? They were good, I’d written them, and I could write that level of quality. Silly self-doubt.
I decided to look at some prompts and spent an hour sitting in my writing hut, trawling writing prompts and copying a couple down, but none of them sparkled.
Then I had an idea while cooking tea.
Where had this idea come from?
I was listening to an interview with Neil Gaiman the other evening and his answer to ‘where do your ideas come from?’ was funny and inspiring. He said writers often make up something daft as there really is no answer to this question. So, what is my daft answer? Where did this snippet, this visual snippet of an idea come from?
Well, in my head there is a room which is only accessible when I least expect it. As soon as the door swishes open, I am in there, it has some strange vacuum, I think. Anyhow, this room appears to be empty although curious rainbow coloured mist swirls around me. I wait. The mist stops swirling and a golden plinth appears. On it is a plain wooden box. Inside this box there may be a photo, an object, a word, or a character. Once I touch the idea it is activated and zips up my arm firing neurons as a terrific rate. It is a baby idea and will need time, space and most importantly words to grow.
That’s when I start writing.
This time it was a photo I was gifted with. A photo of a house. An abandoned house.
I set aside one hour a day to write something, anything about this house, a character appeared, and a story evolved. It’s like magic really.
I didn’t allow myself to edit or timeline, just write. It was hard to break the habits after rewriting and editing for so long, but I did it. And it felt good.
It was five hundred words too many. Perfect. It was also in the wrong order, and something was missing.
During the rewrite the missing something glistened from the words and with a swap around of several sentences and changing the atmosphere the story felt complete.
It wasn’t finished, it needed refining, words removing, words adding. It sometimes took ten minutes to discover the perfect word in one sentence, but I was not in a hurry. I was savouring the flavour of each word, as you need to with a short story. The word count grew, shrunk, and then clicked into place.
Now I’ll leave it alone for a week before listening to it, reading it aloud, finding beta readers, polishing, and then submitting.
There are a few things you can do to help boost your submission up the ranks
1. Make sure you have read the guidelines carefully. You don’t get your admission fee back if you submit wrong.
2. Read past winner’s stories, this helps you understand what type of story the judges like, all stories are subjective.
3. Ask another short story writer to beta read yours and accept their thoughts graciously.
4. Edit. Poor spelling and bad grammar will generally mean your story is rejected in the first round.
I was curious, though, as to what it costs to get a 2000-word story edited by a professional, or even if it is needed, so I’m investigating this through Reedsy, who have provided me with some great editors in the past. I have asked five editors for a quote. So far these have ranged from 275 dollars to 350 pounds. Ouch. I am probably going to give a professional edit a miss for now.
Wish me luck and let me know if you’ve entered competitions, are thinking about it, or are a winner.
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