Entering Writing Competitions
Having returned from France - a lovely break with family in the beautiful French countryside, deer in the garden, a cornucopia of orchids: fragrant, pyramidal, bee and lizard, a pool for the children and all the usual delights for the grown-ups of ridiculously cheap but good red wine and cheese as only the French make it - I’m hoping I might get down to some writing. Or at least get down to reviewing and organising the various pieces of work I have in progress in different notebooks!
I am very aware that I have too much writing in hiding. In notebooks and on my computer I have stories and poems long since finished. I have some that need more editing, some I’d even forgotten about. They present too many wasted opportunities and not enough direction. So how to get my writing life back into some kind of shape and to give it a sense of purpose? I need to make a list that’s for sure. I need to prioritise and get things in some kind of order and one way of doing this is to enter the work for competitions or submit to magazines, journals etc..
There was a time when I regularly entered competitions, but that was some years ago. It’s not something I do now with the exception of the odd novel competition entered with the support of my publisher. But why not I asked myself when a competition newsletter appeared in my inbox this week? Why not enter this particular competition when I have any number of short stories tucked away in files unlikely otherwise to ever see the light of day?
Entering writing competitions or submitting for publication can have very positive outcomes in a writing life. To be clear I’m not talking here about winning or even being placed in a competition. I think the benefits outweigh the results, so in this newsletter, I’d like to share with you my thoughts on the value of submitting work, of putting it out there in the world.
Any work we enter or submit has to be the best it can be. This means we spend time editing the work down to those last word choices, down to the musicality and rhythm of our sentences or lines, down to flow, clarity of meaning etc. How good is our beginning? How well do we end? All of this makes us better writers.
Many competitions have word limits. This may mean editing work down from say 2500 words to 2000. This might seem like a difficult, even impossible task but take it from me it’s not. It is quite possible and in my experience often makes a story stronger and more powerful. I’m reminded here of an exercise suggested by Ursula K Le Guin, in her great book on writing, Steering the Craft, which she entitles - A Terrible Thing to Do. Guin says, Take any piece of narrative pros you have ever written between 400 to 1000 words and cut it by half. Do this terrible thing to it. This doesn’t mean cutting a little bit here and there, snipping and pruning, though that’s part of it. It means counting the words and reducing them to half of that many while at the same time keeping the narrative clear and the sensory impact vivid, not replacing specifics by generalities and never using the word somehow. What she suggests is in having to weigh our words like this we find out which are lightweight and can be dispensed with, and which are gold. Believe me this kind of cutting can intensify style and the overall power of the writing.
Preparing and entering our work in this way means that in giving it our full attention we are valuing what we do.
We are honouring the work.
We are bringing it out of the dark providing an opportunity for it to be read.
We are making our story or our poem work for us as writers. For me entering competitions meant I was able to build a CV as a writer. In certain competitions you can also have the option of feedback on your work which can be very valuable, although I’m conscious that this is at an extra cost. Competition entries can also soon add up but there are still free comps out there.
My general advice would be that it’s worth spending time and looking widely at submission possibilities or competitions and finding those that really suit your work. Starting small can be good. I started small. Some of the bigger competitions have huge numbers of entries and your work has better chance of being noticed in less well known prizes.
Of course there are drawbacks. It’s not for everyone and I would definitely caution getting too invested in the success of an entry. Many competitions have thousands of entries. I have judged competitions with other people where we think very differently about which story should win; to succeed you need to find a reader receptive to your work and that can often be a question of luck.
Any competition success I had came almost out of the blue. Whenever I thought I might have a chance in a competition I got nowhere. Those I’d forgotten about entering were the ones that came through for me, the Costa among them. So if you can, and for your own peace of mind, you need to let your story go and not concern yourself too much with the outcome.
If you’re submitting a lot of work then you do need to keep track of what you’ve submitted and to where, but other than that I think it is best forgotten about once it has flown from your inbox. If you’re thinking all the time about a particular story in a particular competition and then when the results come out you find that you’ve not been placed or honourably mentioned it can be quite a downer. I know I’ve been there! Which is why I try, if I do enter anything, to forget about it as much as possible.
Read the competition rules carefully. Check what the situation is with word limits and simultaneous submissions. You don’t want your work to be disqualified and your money wasted because you haven’t followed the rules.
Good luck if you go for it. HERE is a good source for comps etc 2025.
But if you really don’t want to put yourself through this, and I can absolutely understand why you might not want to, I believe it’s equally valid to prepare your work as if you were submitting or entering a competition and then gather it together and make your own pamphlet or your own book. You could also use a platform such as this - Substack - to publish your work.
For those of you who are new here, this is what I decided to do with my memoir, Handmade. I don’t have a large number of followers, but I do know that the work has been read and has reached people beyond this platform. This means a lot to me as do the messages I’ve received from readers. If you would like to read it - you can start here: Handmade PART 1 - the other parts follow and can be read or listened to at your leisure.
This of course is a form of self publishing, which is frowned on in the elite publishing world. But many great writers have self published, among them Margaret Atwood, Virginia Woolf and Beatrix Potter. I’ve probably said this before, but it’s worth repeating: making our own pamphlet or book in whatever way we choose is a valid creative act. It is a way to honour what we do as writers. We are not writers because we have external validation, we are writers because we write. And as I like to remind people, no one says to an artist that they can’t hang their painting on the wall or give it as a gift to a friend or make beautiful prints to sell from it.
Why shouldn’t we celebrate our work in this way?
Finally our donation to Medicins Sans Frontiers stands at £652.27. I will be adding to this total significantly in the autumn from workshops etc, in the meantime if you would like to join me please consider a subscription to Writing Days - (just a one off, later cancelled is welcome)
I am thinking about other ways I could raise money here or with a link to my website - PDFs of workshops? A series of online workshops? If you have any ideas I’d love to hear them, please do contact me.
As always - thanks for reading Avril x
Love the phrase ‘I have writing in hiding.’ I very much relate to this. And the concept of sharing it as honouring the work. Thanks for sharing 🙏