Sorry We're Prosed: Should we be writing for competitions?

What I learned from targeting two literary prizes

Hello again,

It’s been both a productive and frustrating writing month for me so far. I’ve had several rejections including my fastest-ever one, with a turnaround time of just 10 minutes (horror writers will likely be able to guess which publication this was). But my most-rejected story of last year was also accepted for publication, and my story about a Jack the Ripper protest group was published on Litro.

These little bits of progress and setbacks that make up the submission process are just part of the writing rhythm. But now and then, if you are anything like me, you may have found yourself wondering whether there is something you could be doing to make your writing more successful, more in-demand.

This, on top of all the competitions open this month, got me thinking about how the value of deliberately studying what wins big prizes, and whether we should all be writing with these opportunities in mind.

Today I want to talk about these questions and dive a little bit into my own experiences with trying to purposefully write ‘for the win’ when it comes to big competitions.

Writing for the market

I recently read A Moveable Feast for the first time. Just as I was beginning to get a little bored of Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald crashed into the narrative and provided a counterpoint to the author’s serious way of thinking about writing.

This passage, in which Hemingway discovers how Fitzgerald tweaks his stories to be “salable”, stayed with me.

He had told me at the Closerie des Lilas how he wrote what he thought were good stories, and which really were good stories for the Post, and then changed them for submission, knowing exactly how he must make the twists that made them into salable magazine stories. I had been shocked at this and I said I thought it was whoring. He said it was whoring but that he had to do it as he made his money from the magazines to have money ahead to write decent books. I said that I did not believe anyone could write any way except the very best he could write without destroying his talent. Since he wrote the real story first, he said, the destruction and changing of it that he did at the end did him no harm.

It reminded me of the tension I feel when looking at places I’d like to publish my work. So often, I feel as though I’m getting the creative process backwards, seeing an opportunity and then thinking what I could write to suit it.

The true, artistic approach – the one Hemingway would endorse – would be to write whatever I feel most needs to be written, and trust in its inherent value to find it a home eventually.

But I have to disagree with him, and with Fitzgerald, that editing work to suit the place you’re sending it is “whoring”. Amending a story to better fit the demands of a magazine or contest could perhaps be seen as opportunistic, maybe even cynical. But it could also display a lack of arrogance, meeting editors or judges halfway. It might even make you see the work another way, and prompt changes that improve it.

Creating new work

There is a difference, however, between tweaking one’s work to better fit requirements and producing something entirely new for the explicit purpose of sending it somewhere.

The temptation to do this strikes me quite often.

One side-effect of trawling writing opportunities for this newsletter is that I constantly find myself wanting to submit to new places, especially contests.

The problem is that I often don’t have the right thing to send. My unpublished work might be the wrong length, wrong genre, or not fit the stated theme well enough.

Instead of accepting that these myriad concerns mean the opportunity isn’t right for my work, I frequently see it as a challenge.

Can I create a new piece of work that’s just right for this one opportunity?

The benefits

I am a firm believer that when you see a publication opportunity that excites you, that’s a good sign. And I don’t mean the generic, baseline excitement at the thought of your words reaching other people – that’s a given. That’s the desire that’s driving most of us to bother with this process in the first place.

I mean when you see something that resonates with you and what your work is all about. Maybe it’s the fact that the same title has previously published writers you love, or the way a magazine is illustrated, or a theme that inspires you. Maybe – it’s OK, we can be honest – it’s the prize money.

If those factors are there, but you don’t have anything to hand that suits the opportunity, why not write something new?

It also gives us the chance to look at what editors and judges say they want, to read past winners, and to aim for something appropriate from the very start of the creative process, rather than laboriously editing later.

And finally, targeting certain opportunities gives you a motive, and a deadline. Personally, I don’t like writing exercises; they feel too much like homework. Yet I acknowledge that writing for a particular opportunity is a similar practice. The themes might provide an interesting prompt, while the structure gives me a goal that keeps at bay the aimlessness that is part of writing, and which so often threatens to turn into self-doubt.

The drawbacks

Having said all of this, we often never know whether the effort we have put into targeting a publication or contest made any difference whatsoever. For competitions in particular, if you don’t make the longlist, it’s impossible to know how close you were.

Judges and editors can also be fickle, saying they want one thing and then seizing upon another when it crosses their desk. Other considerations could also be coming into play, such as whether two stories are too similar to each other.

Perhaps the biggest drawback to tailoring your work, especially if creating an entirely new piece, is that it might make it too specific, such that you can’t submit it elsewhere. I think this only really happens in very specific cases, but it is something to consider.

My first attempt to write for the win

Last year I wrote two pieces with the explicit intention of sending them in to particular competitions.

The first was for the Harper’s Bazaar Short Story Competition, an annual contest which, in 2021, had the theme ‘Threads’.

Nothing in my arsenal would have fit this theme, so I was faced with a choice between not entering or producing something new.

I chose to do the latter for several reasons. First, the competition has an impressive roster of previous winners. It’s also free to enter. Winners get a weekend away and also get published on the Harper’s Bazaar website.

One thing I should flag for anyone thinking of entering this year’s competition (which closes on 15 March), is that, as previously flagged by the brilliant Sian Meades-Williams, this clause in the terms and conditions is a bit concerning:

By entering the competition and in consideration for Hearst publishing your entry, you assign to Hearst the entire worldwide copyright in your entry for all uses in all print and non-print media and formats, including but not limited to all rights to use your entry in any and all electronic and digital formats, and in any future medium hereafter developed for the full period of copyright therein, and all renewals and extensions thereof, any rental and lending rights and retransmission rights and all rights of a like nature wherever subsisting.

While I’m not aware of anyone actually having a problem on account of this clause, this also made me think it might be a good idea not to submit something I was very attached to, in case it jeopardised the chances of getting that published elsewhere. Of course, I would rather Hearst removed this from the terms entirely.

Once I had made the decision, I decided to go whole-hog on the assignment. I read all the previous winning stories and noted down the common themes between them.

In case you’re interested, here’s what I concluded:

·        While the competition appears to be open to all, it tends to be won by women, most in their 30s or 40s. Presumably this is because those are the people who make up most of the entrants, and indeed the readers of Harper’s Bazaar.

·        The stories are generally realistic, i.e. no magic, no sci-fi, no horror. You get the sense that many could feasibly be the author’s own experience, even if they are not. However, there are occasionally stories with elements of the unreal, such as Aisling Flynn’s 2019-shortlisted ‘My Sister, My Sister’.

·        Something else I noticed while reading is that many come across as somehow timeless. There might be a detail here and there which tells you it’s at least the late 20th Century, but there are many which could be set either now or 30 years ago.

·        Family and death appear frequently as a topic. See Huma Qureshi’s 2020 winning story ‘The Jam Maker’ and Aingeala Flannery’s 2019 winner ‘Visiting Hours’ - which both feature dead or dying fathers. ‘Proper Order’ by Jan Carson is a depiction of a family dealing with a grandmother’s slow descent towards the end of life.

·        Stories narrated at least in part by children are a winner. Look to the 2021 winner, and again to those 2020 and 2019 winners. You’ll see they successfully carry off that way of writing with two meanings - what the child sees and what the reader understands.

·        The endings of relationships also appear more than once. Ruth Tudor’s ‘The Space Between’ (2019 shortlist) is a character portrait of a woman who has left her marriage. Daisy Johnson’s 2016 winner shows a woman revisiting her dead boyfriend’s childhood home. Kate London’s ‘We Do Not Deal in Guilt or Blame’ (2019 shortlist) is a portrayal of a relationship slowly becoming more controlling.

In brief, I think what makes a Harper’s Bazaar winning story is best summed up by what the judges said of last year’s winning story by Jennifer Kerslake: “It could so easily have tipped into sentimentality, but never does. It remains on the right side of moving and utterly poignant.”

These are stories that tread the ground of what we might call mainstream women’s fiction, through prose that is at once confidently literary and accessible. Once I’d established this, I got to work.

I didn’t set out to create something cynically calibrated to hit every point on the list; I still had to enjoy writing it. I knew I didn’t want to write from a child’s perspective, nor about death, so I focused on turning points in relationships.

What I ended up with was a story about a theatre costume designer realising her journalist boyfriend is probably never going to become the supportive partner she’s wishing he would be. The costume-making details related to the ‘Threads’ theme, and also mirrored the strained thread of the relationship.

The story didn’t win. And the nature of competitions means I have no idea how close or far off it was from doing so.

What I can do is read the winning entry, and re-read my own work with a bit of hindsight.

On reflection, I think my piece probably didn’t get close enough to that strong emotional centre which is running through all the winners to be in with a shot. I was focusing more on relevance to the theme and overall atmosphere.

I also knew from the start that my piece wasn’t entirely like previous shortlistees, and I couldn’t quite find the balance between my own voice and the audience. I’ll talk a bit more about this at the end, but let’s first look at my other attempt.

My second attempt to write for the win

The other opportunity for which I wrote a specific piece was the Grazia x The Women’s Prize first chapter competition.

This one challenged writers to write an opening chapter that followed on from a first paragraph penned by author Dorothy Koomson. There was quite a lot of information packed into that opening, which I parsed to see what they might want:

I’m very good at pretending I believe in love. No one can tell that I don’t. I can act as if a ‘special someone’ makes my heart flutter; I convincingly swoon at other people’s romantic joy. I even rustle up tears when a relationship ends. But my heart is a patchwork of honour badges, each stitched over a scar from believing in love before. So being a love sceptic keeps me safe and pain free. And then I fell down those stone steps near Brighton Pier. A stumble, a trip and several sharp bounces down, and there I was at the bottom. Agonised and humiliated. Too ashamed to move.

B.W. was there too.

Love, a clumsy protagonist, and the seaside. I guessed that romance with some garnishes of comedy and mystery might do the trick.

The idea of falling off a sea wall immediately put me in mind of Jane Austen’s Persuasion, so I made my character an English teacher mulling the parallels between the novels and her own life.

Funny enough, runner-up Savitri Patel had the same thought, incorporating references to Austen into her piece. Hers, however, is from the perspective of a companion robot, using a genre approach that I probably would have been too nervous to enter into a big contest.

Meanwhile the winning entry by Naomi George features a protagonist bumping into an old acquaintance from school, something which my attempt also covered.

And the other runner-up, Imogen Tazzyman, used the implication that the protagonist is hiding a dark secret. I did this too, but hers is much more dramatic, creating a memorable cliff-hanger ending.

You can read all of these first chapters here.

While again I can’t know whether my entry was written off on the first read or made it any further, I feel more like I got closer to what the judges were looking for, sharing elements with some of the top entries. What I didn’t do was go bold enough. The winning entries got readers hooked with immediate worldbuilding and intriguing twists.

I think this illustrates the drawback of crafting work to a somewhat conservative idea of what judges might be looking for. I never would have thought to take a left turn into sci-fi territory, yet Patel’s entry shows that it can be done not just well but in a way that really shows off the author’s creativity.

The downside with this contest is that the work I produced is difficult to use anywhere else. For a start it includes someone else’s words at the beginning. It’s also written as the beginning of an imaginary novel, so has references to threads that would need to be tied up by the end.

But I’m still happy with what I produced and would be happy to have another go.

Conclusions

I don’t have any qualms about writing for the market, or for editors, or judges. Ultimately, I want to see my work published.

What I learned from my experiments, however, is that I have a line. I want to keep writing in my style, about topics that interest me, even when I’m gunning for recognition in a particular prize.

While this acts as a safeguard for my integrity, it also leads to mixed results. Sometimes I arrive at a happy medium between the twin demands of competition and creativity. Sometimes I arrive at something that satisfies neither.

These attempts to write for competitions also showed me that playing it safe will get you nowhere. Winners may not always be showy, or take visible risks, but they are doing something original that makes them rise above the pile.

Ironically, I think my desire to synthesise the entries with my own style may be holding me back from being bold enough.

In writing for the Harper’s Bazaar contest, I shied away from writing about death or family, or really any of the emotive subjects that I saw in the winning entries. I justified this by thinking, “that’s not my kind of topic”.

But if I’m writing something entirely new, why not try something new?

And here we come, again, to Hemingway.

The writer is often credited with this piece of advice: “Write hard and clear about what hurts.”

The trouble is that I can’t find any evidence that he said it, and fear it may be misattributed or made-up. This hasn’t stopped it from appearing on countless Tumblr blogs and Redbubble mugs.

Nevertheless, it gets at something that feels true enough, and which lines up with one of my discoveries from this experiment. The reason I did not want to try and emulate the emotional Harper’s Bazaar winners was partly that I was afraid.

I was afraid of being too vulnerable, and I was afraid of being unable to gracefully tread that thin line between the moving and the sentimental. I was afraid of failing after putting everything out there, so I wrote something safe.

In short, what I have learned is that the greatest opportunity on offer from writing with these contests in mind is not just the possibility of winning. It’s the possibility of expanding the scope of my work beyond the boundaries of what I would normally write.

That doesn’t mean abandoning my style or my ideas. But it does mean facing up to the element of the competition that frightens me most. For this instance, that might be accessing a real emotion, but for others it might mean writing in a more experimental form, or engaging fully with a genre.

I think it is better to do this than to produce something that is similar to the rest of my work except that it adheres to a particular theme. Because so often these stories will not be bold enough to make an impact in a competition, and not imaginative to sit alongside my other work.

Right now I’m making notes on what I could write for this year’s Harper’s Bazaar Short Story Competition, which has the theme ‘Treasure’. Though the chances of winning are slim, I’m excited to put what I’ve learned into practice and push my writing to a new place.

Until next time

All of this is very subjective, and I’d love to hear your thoughts on whether we should be writing for particular competitions, or perhaps certain magazines or themes.

Please also let me know if my analysis of what tends to win a particular competition is helpful - this is something I’m interested in doing for other contests and compiling in future newsletters.

The next list of prose-writing opportunities will be out in the first week of March. Please sign up if you haven’t already to make sure you get that to your inbox the minute it’s out.