Sorry We're Prosed: Writing for contests
How I wrote a story for two contests at once, and got shortlisted in both
Hello again,
It’s been a while since I did one of these, so for newbies, this is one of my periodical newsletters where I share some thoughts about the writing and submissions process.
If you’re only interested in seeing opportunities listings, that’s fine — just hold tight and the next edition will be with you shortly. But a little pro tip: I do sometimes put bonus listings at the bottom of these longer posts as a thank you for reading them.
Today I wanted to revisit a topic I first wrote about a while back. In a previous edition, I asked: should we be writing for contests?
Having had some recent success doing just that, I wanted to share my experiences.
Why write for competitions?
If you’re a writer actively submitting work for publication (especially poems and short stories), your best chance of a boost to your career — and wallet — is often competitions.
But there are trade-offs, the main ones being that you often have to pay to enter for a very small chance of winning, and that if you gear your work towards a competition, it can have less reusability elsewhere. Perhaps worst of all, you can end up writing something that doesn’t feel like you.
Here’s what I concluded in my previous post.
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.
First of all, I’d like to counter that final sentence. The works I was referring to there were no exactly uncreative, and looking back, I’m glad I wrote them.
I would also say that since then, I’ve become less concerned about writing something that feels out of place in one’s oeuvre or that doesn’t feel like your own voice. If anything, writing for contests should be like a writing exercise that can give you a chance to try something new.
Sure, maybe you don’t usually experiment with form, or write character-focused domestic dramas, but who cares? Do you really think you can’t do it if you try? One of the most exciting things about contests is how many there are, serving all kinds of niches. Sometimes when I’m reading listings of current opportunities, I’ll see a contest for a type of writing I’ve never even thought to have a go at, and that can be all it takes to prompt inspiration.
How I wrote for two contests at once
One thing I decided, based on my previous experiences of writing for contests, was that it pays to be efficient. I wanted to write a piece that could be plausibly entered into more than one.
Sometimes that might just mean keeping it below a certain length, usually just 2,000 words, so that it can meet various restrictions. But most recently, I wanted to try writing a piece that combined two different themes.
For this I chose the theme of the Alpine Fellowship Writing Prize, which was ‘Flourishing’, and the Writers & Artists Short Story Competition, which was ‘Love’.
I chose these because they were two nice, broad themes, and both contests are free.
While I played around with a few ideas about plants that fit ‘flourishing’, nothing really suited ‘love’ as well. Then I started thinking about mothers and babies for some reason. Maybe because children can flourish as they grow, but I think I was also mulling how people tell pregnant women they are ‘glowing’, which somehow felt related.
Frankly I’m not sure where the story came from — isn’t that the beauty of writing? — but once I had it, the whole thing came out in a series of scenes. I wrote short snippets without worrying too much about which order they would eventually go in, which was a very freeing experience for me.
The resulting story, ‘Alphabet Spaghetti’, is about a young mother whose previous aptitude for words (she’s a crossword setter for newspapers) disappears when her baby arrives. She speaks less and less, until a change at the end of the story opens up both her heart and her words again.
It sounds quite cheesy when I write it out like that! It is certainly an emotional story, maybe even a bit sentimental.
But I think that shows growth on my part. In my previous post, I noted that a story I wrote to enter the Harper’s Bazaar Short Story Competition one year had not, despite my efforts, met the level of emotion I sensed in most of the winning stories. I realised later that I was afraid of not being able to handle emotion well enough in the piece such that it wouldn’t come off as mawkish.
But in this instance, I was much more willing to let the emotion lead, and not to care if it comes off as twee in the end. While this may be due to my own lessons learned, it was definitely helped by the W&A theme. You can’t write about ‘love’ without trying to dig into what it is, what it feels like, a subject so studied we need never write another song about it and yet we always will.
All in all, I actually think that I came up with a better story by combining two themes than I would have done writing for just one alone. To make an incredibly generation-specific analogy, it’s like when two Digimon combine to make a bigger, better Digimon. Or something like that.
The exercise also helped me shake off some cobwebs and produce a full-length short story for the first time in what felt like ages. I think the other good thing about competitions is it gives you a purpose, and a bit of motivation to just get something done.
The results
Now the bragging bit! I just want to say that as much as I’m proud of my story, I don’t want to come off as too ungracious here. But I think what’s exciting is that this experiment actually worked in terms of getting me to write and submit something that suited the relevant contests.
My story was shortlisted in both the Alpine Fellowship and the W&A competition. Hooray!
I’ve been short/longlisted for the Alpine Fellowship before, though it was of course very exciting to make the list again. Something about my writing does seem to work well for this particular prize so it’s always a priority for me to make sure I enter, and because it has a theme every year, that makes it a good motivator to produce something new each time.
For W&A, I’ve entered before and not got anywhere, so I was really pleased to make the shortlist. It was doubly gratifying that the guest judge was Naomi Booth, whose work I have read and admire.
While it didn’t win either prize, the bright side of that is that the story remains unpublished, so I can send it elsewhere. This is another upside of having written with two themes in mind: it can probably adapt to various other themes too, rather than being excessively focused on one. Parenting, words/language, and identity should all work as well.
This is definitely something I’d do again, and I particularly liked having the themes as both inspiration and guide. Unthemed competitions can seem so broad to me, it feels good to have at least one thing to work towards. I’ll be looking out for more of these and including them in future opportunities round-ups too.
I would love to know if you’ve written something which responded to a theme, or for a specific contest. Did you have any success? Were you pleased with what you wrote?
As usual, thanks for reading this far and taking the time to chat writing with me. Here are a few bonus opportunities that will have closed by the time I send my next monthly listings.
For its 50th anniversary, feminist publishing house Virago is hosting a free short story contest for underrepresented writers. Please have a look at the full eligibility requirements. They are seeking original, feminist short stories inspired by a synonym for ‘Virago’. Closes 1 July.
Film magazine Bright Wall/Dark Room seeks essays on the theme ‘Heists’ by 5 July. They can pay $50 on publication.
Martian Magazine is open for reprint submissions until 30 June. Pay rate is 4 cents a word.
Writers from the North East of England, or whose work celebrates this area, may enter the Lindisfarne Prize for Crime Fiction until the end of June. The entry can be either a short story or the first two chapters and synopsis of a work in progress. The prize is £2,500.
The current reading window for The Memoirist Quarterly closes on 2 July. They take essays and memoir, and pay $50 on publication.
Bye for now!