Things Your Mother Never Told You About Writing Contests
Want a cheap and foolproof way to learn more about your own writing and how to improve it? Like to know how editors can spot a good manuscript at fifty paces (without reading fifty pages)? Want to help RWAustralia and other writers (but don’t necessarily want those writers knowing where you live?)
Then don’t just enter contests – offer to judge them!
Sound too good to be true? Actually it’s not. Judging contests is one way where you can help other writers while doing your own writing a favor as well. So if you’ve never thought about judging contests or you have but you’ve written yourself off for any number of reasons, then think again - judging contests truly is a win-win situation.
WHAT'S IN IT FOR ME?
Bottom line? Lots! This isn’t just about feeling good, although I expect you’ll get a nice inner glow from knowing you’ve helped your fellow members, especially when you receive a thank you card or three from those who appreciated your advice - then you’ll be beaming from ear to ear. Even more so if they place, win or have their manuscript requested or published, you discovered a star!
But seriously, there is a wealth of stuff you’ll learn about your own writing by reading the entries from other will-be authors. It’s quite amazing, things that are flaws in your own writing yet you’re too close to see, will leap out at you in someone else’s manuscript. Plus ideas about how to fix them. It’s all about that fresh eye, and once you’ve judged that fresh eye comes in really handy with your own work. You start to become more critical – you can see what works and what doesn’t.
Plus you’ll appreciate what it’s like to be an editor. People ask how editors can make up their minds about a manuscript with only three chapters ("but the action only starts in chapter seven!") When you judge contests you’ll see what the editor sees – a stack of entries/submissions, all vying for the same thing. And you’ll notice exactly what the editor notices – some of those will grab you from the first paragraph, some the first page, others will be a struggle to get through while you look for the spark. I promise you’ll go back to your own manuscript with a more critical eye after that and really want to make it stand out.
You will be helping your fellow writers. This is a good one. RWA is a terrific organization – it gives so much to its members by way of an informative and entertaining monthly newsletter, an annual conference that makes you feel so good it should be taxed, by offering contests that can offer feedback and great prizes including the bonus of a quick read by an editor and with its great support through the ROMAUS Yahoo group email list and other groups. If you’ve ever wondered how you can give something back to your organization, judging contests and helping your fellow members is a terrific and practical way.
And this one may be last but not least – judging contests gives you great insight into your competition. You actually get to see what you’re up against as these are the same people submitting and looking to be published by the same houses. It can be quite an ego boost, seeing how far you’ve come when you recognize the mistakes you used to make when you started, but at the same time it can be daunting because it shows you how good the competition is and that you can’t afford not to make your work shine if you want the editor to sit up and take notice.
DEBUNKING THE MYTHS
Of course, there are lots of reasons why you wouldn’t be able to judge and I’m going to do my best to debunk some of the favorites right now!
Sorry, I don’t have the time
Time is precious. We all know that. The great thing about having more judges is that we all get asked to do less. Which means that when we do get asked to judge, we feel a heap better about it. You want us to feel good about having to judge your entries, don’t you?<eg>
Seriously, we have fantastic judges, but yes, they’re all busy people too and it’s nice to share the load. I know it’s not easy to find the time, but I’m guaranteeing you it’s worth it.
And there’s no obligation. No-one expects you to judge in every contest – if you’re invited to judge in a particular contest then it’s still up to you whether or not you can. But even helping out in one contest a year is a great contribution to our team effort.
I’m not qualified
Do you write romance? Do you read romance? Then you’re qualified. You don’t have to be published (though we certainly won’t hold that against you). I found it so hard when I first started out judging contests – like who was I to judge? What did I know? But you know, even someone starting out will recognize that things aren’t working, or that they are, or that this is the best thing they have ever read. No-one expects you to write an essay analyzing each point, but be honest, offer what advice you believe is constructive and you’ll surprise yourself how much you can help someone else. And it’s all anonymous - you won’t know the author and they won’t know you, not that you won’t be fair or constructive anyway.
I don’t know how
RWA has just the best score sheets. All you have to do is read the entry and answer the questions, it’s really that simple. But score sheet or no, I promise you will recognize a fabulous read when you find it. That’s a real joy when you’re scoring. It’s a buzz to have the winner announced and know that you picked that one to win!
Plus we offer you a set of guidelines every time you judge that will sort out most of your questions and offer you hints. And if you’re still not sure about anything, our friendly contest managers are standing by to take your call...
Don’t we already have heaps of judges?
RWA is lucky to have a list of dedicated people willing to judge. However, due to the increase in the contest schedule, the decision to ensure every entry will have at least two first round judges so ensuring at least two critiques, and the sad but inescapable fact that people have other commitments from time to time, all means that RWA could do with a bigger base of judges. And let’s face it, why should we have all the fun?J
I only read sexy/historical/inspirational/whatever romance
We don’t want to send people entries that they wouldn’t normally be interested in reading. When you register you’ll be asked which lines or styles of romance you like. And you’ll also be asked if there are any types of romance you particularly don’t want to see. This helps our contest manager match you to the entries, so that you enjoy your judging experience and the entrants benefit from having someone who knows the lines they’re judging.
I’m hooked – What do I do now?
Simply drop our Contests Coordinator an email or write to our snail addy at PO Box 1236 Neutral Bay NSW 2089 and you’ll be sent out a form to complete.
It’s that easy!
Competitions: Your Fast Track To The Editor's Desk
Who needs an editor anyway?
Why are you writing? Ask yourself that question.
If you’re writing for fun, for personal gratification, for the sheer joy it gives you to create characters, plots and fantasies from and beyond your wildest dreams, then that’s great. That’s reward enough and you can keep writing to your heart’s content and this talk is no doubt redundant and you can adjourn to an early afternoon tea.
If you’re writing for all of those things I just mentioned – and in addition you’d like to end up published in the process, so you can share your creations with the rest of the world – then unfortunately there’s a big spanner in the works, and that spanner comes in the shape of an editor.
Editors, we all know from the stories we’ve heard, are great hairy beasts with huge, blood drenched fangs and sharp claws. They take no greater delight than to tear your "baby" – your very own work of art - into shreds, and along with it, your ego and any fantasies you ever had about getting paid to write.
We know this is true. If editors were truly nice people, why would they send out those horrible rejection letter containing lines such as –
"Unfortunately this particular submission is not up to publication standard";
"your approach lacked the extra degree of emotional punch and excitement for which we look";
"you tended to develop the minor characters and background details at the expense of the relationship between the hero and heroine";
"the conflict between the hero and heroine is not strong enough to sustain the length of the novel"; and the killer punch
"I wish you the best of luck in placing your novel elsewhere" (because you’re going to need it!).
So who in their right mind would want a fast track to an editor’s desk? You’d have to be some sort of masochist to line up for abuse like that.
I have to admit. I’m that kind of masochist. And if you want to be published and you don’t want to self-publish, then you owe it to yourself to be that kind of masochist too. For unless you self-publish, editors are the one thing standing between you holding a pile of loose leaf papers double spaced in 12 point courier and you holding a printed book, featuring a picture of some gorgeous hunk, preferably in a suitable state of undress, and with your name splashed over the cover.
As writers intending to be published, we owe it to ourselves to get that manuscript as much exposure as possible and to get that manuscript on the editor’s desk as quickly as we can.
So where do competitions come in?
I may have exaggerated a little earlier on when I said that editors are great hairy beasts with huge, blood drenched fangs and sharp claws because I know for a fact, and I’m reasonably confident published authors will back me up on this, that editors aren’t really like that – not all of them anyway.
Editors are in fact, desperate people. They are desperate to find the next Nora Roberts, the next Penny Jordan or the next Jennifer Crusie, before that other mob sign her first. They’ve got lists to fill, deadlines to meet and they need the best possible books to fill those slots and meet the sales quotas expected of them.
Basically, they want to buy books – the best possible books they can find. But they’re very busy people. They have to look after their current stable of authors and their submissions, they have to attend and speak at conferences. No doubt they have to go to staff meetings and justify their continued existence. In their spare time they might pick up something off the top of the slush pile, dust it off and read it. After all, they do read everything – eventually.
However, these editors are desperate to find new authors and they’ll take shortcuts. What romance writers’ competitions offer the editors is a shortcut to talent. These entries have been selected from up to 100 entries as being the best in their class. The editor knows immediately these are going to be worth reading and in most cases, editors are only too happy to take on the task of judging or reading the final entries, because they know there's a good chance of finding that talent.
Competitions give you the edge
Competitions give you an edge in several ways:-
By helping you get over "submissiphobia", so when you do come to approach editors, you’re not afraid to send off your work;
By helping you to hone your writing skills, by taking on board the comments of critiques from readers where helpful and/or by forcing yourself to develop specific skills – i.e., query letter and synopsis writing;
By getting you used to working to deadlines, so that when you are eventually published, you know you can work in with what your editor demands;
By giving you qualifications for your query letters. It’s going to catch the eye of the editor if you can say in your query letter that this book or an excerpt from it won or placed in a romance writers’ competition; and
By getting your work in front of editors eager to find new talent in a fraction of the time it might otherwise take.
I’m a big fan of writing competitions and while this discussion today really concentrates on this last mentioned point, I think it’s important that we just note that the benefits of entering competitions are many and varied.
What competitions? How do I find them?
In the last few years there’s been an explosion in the number of romance writing competitions. Here is a summary of those the "local" romance writing organisations co-ordinate:
Romance Writers of Australia currently have six small contests, one full manuscript contest - The Emerald Award - and one short story (Little Gems - with the top placegetters being published in an anthology).
Romance Writers of New Zealand run the full manuscript Clendon Award, as well as several small competitions (The First Meeting, Opening Chapter, short story competition etc).
That’s about 12 contests in 12 months, just in romance organizations throughout Australia and New Zealand. If you look at competitions run in the US, there’s plenty more.
But does it work? Are competitions the fast track they say?
I’ve heard anecdotally that some US writers looking to get accepted by a certain line, will target every competition where the editor of that line is final judge or gets to read the winning entries, until they’re published.
Forget anecdotes though, because our own Aussie and Kiwi writers have shown that doing well in competitions is a big step towards getting published. Just through New Zealand’s Clendon Award, four writers have been picked up in the last few years.
First cab off the rank was Fiona Brand, with Cullen’s Bride, an Intimate Moments. This book won the Valerie Parv Award in 1996, the Clendon and Emma Darcy Awards in 1997 and was picked up for publication shortly thereafter.
Frances Housden won the Clendon in 1999 with The Man for Maggie, also an Intimate Moments imprint. Frances has recently had her second book accepted. The second place getter that year, Bronwyn Jameson also had her Silhouette Desire aimed book – In Bed with the Boss’s Daughter - picked up. The 2001 winner, Melissa James sold her book, Dark Knight, a few months after winning the Clendon. Melissa’s book will appear around February 2002. Melissa’s also gone on to have another book picked up by Harlequin Romance. It seems that once the publishers know you are publishable, they’re more likely to take a serious eye to your work.
These are obviously the big success stories. From being a contest co-ordinator for RWA, I know of other cases where finalists have received positive comments on their entries and been asked to submit those or other works. There’s no doubt in my mind that winning or placing in these competitions has anything but positive to your writing career.
The Downside (sure, there had to be one!) and general advice
No Guarantees
As with most things in life, there are no guarantees. Just because you win a competition, does not mean that editor is going to buy your book. What it does mean is that Editor is going to look at your submission one heck of a lot earlier than they might otherwise have done. You still might end up with a rejection, but it’s going to be a lot sooner than if you’d gone the normal QLS, partial then complete route which can take up to 18 months or more, and in general, you’re going to end up with a lot more detailed advice from the publisher than you otherwise would. In the editor feedback from RWAustralia's "cute meeting" contest in 199, each finalist received a page of critique on the good/bad aspects of the writing and which line it would be suitable for.
But you’ve got your name in the Editor’s face! Make sure you keep it there by following up this work with another, even better and showing that you’ve taken their advice to heart.
Be selective!
Don’t try to enter every contest going. It’s a sure fire way to shatter your attention span and keep you from ever finishing anything. If you have to enter a whole series of competitions, make sure you’re building your book along the way – maybe a first kiss for February, the first chapter and synopsis by April, the Valerie Parv three chapter comp in September and aim to have the whole book completed in time for the Emerald Award in October. (Obviously if you can write three books a year you can ignore this advice – you already know how to focus your attentions)
Seriously, writers can get bogged down in entering competitions and then suffering "competition paralysis" after the closing date as they sweat on the results. This isn’t good for a writer. You need to be able to forget all about one project and carry on with the next.
Who’s the editor?
Think about who is the final judge and what lines they represent. It’s still worth entering competitions for the feedback and the credits they give you if you final, but don’t think that an editor for a dark and angsty line is going to be able to buy your prize-winning light-hearted romantic comedy. They may like it, and they may even be able to refer it to someone else in the firm, but it’s less likely to appeal to them directly.
Feedback?
If you want feedback, then enter competitions that give you that. Don’t enter the Emma Darcy if you want feedback. Save your money for the Clendon Award instead. With postage and entry fees to consider, along with all the printing costs, you want to get the best return for your money. Know what you want and go after it
In Conclusion
I’d like to finish with a quote from Leslie Wainger that appeared recently on the e-Harlequin website in response to a question about contests:-
"…Obviously there are a lot of them, not all created equal. And you could spend your entire life entering and never get any "real" writing done. However, lots of books have been bought after an editor judged them in a contest. The RWA Golden Heart is particularly fertile ground that way, and I’ve personally found several fabulous authors judging contests in Australia and New Zealand. I think that contests that get your book in front of an editor (rather than other writers) are best, and from my point of view, I prefer to judge something representative of the whole book, rather than a love scene or something else specific but out of context."
That’s the editor’s take on it. Now it’s over to us writers to dish them up the goods they’re looking for. Good luck all.
First presented at the South Australian Romance Writers 1 day seminar November 2001
Copyright © 2008 by Trish Morey. All rights reserved.
Cover art copyright © by Harlequin Enterprises Limited ® and ™ are trademarks of the publisher
