And Think Most Writers Should Too
Happy New Year! I hope you had a lovely Christmas and that you and your family are well. This week I wanted to talk about something a bit different from the book reviews and the posts about all that I’m learning about writing and want to share with you. Instead, I thought I’d talk about all of the benefits I’m experiencing by entering various writing “challenges.” Why I enter writing contests and think that you should too!
This is at the forefront of my mind because I recently entered another Vocal Media contest. This time the requirements were that we submit a dystopian short story between 600 and 5,000 words, beginning with the following sentence:
The outside world was unknown to her, but she could see a glimpse of it through the window in his room.
This one frustrated me for quite awhile – maybe due to the very distracting time of year, maybe just because my story idea wasn’t coming together very quickly. However, in the end, I came up with a short story that I really liked (although I hope to refine it more in the future).
The entire process sparked my thinking about the nature of writing contests and what I’m getting out of them.
Discipline
A writing contest has a way of forcing you to write. There are deadlines, as I’m sure you know, and if the topic sparks your imagination, you only have a fixed amount of time to finish the required work. This one doesn’t benefit me quite as much since I tend to be very self-disciplined.
However, I have writer friends whose lives are much more multi-faceted than my own and finding time to write can be challenging. Frankly, when there’s always something else to be done, it’s easy to put writing on the back burner. I experience a little of that too.
It can be very helpful to have a specific deadline and to have to set aside a certain amount of time weekly or daily to get it done. It keeps the writing brain cells agile.
Experience
More than that, writing contests have a way of forcing you to practice writing things you wouldn’t otherwise. As you may have put together from my website and the contest I mentioned above, I don’t write dystopian fiction. I like to read it, but I have no experience writing it.
Writing in a different genre often looks and feels very different. It’s not just the subject matter, or the structural framework of the writing that’s different. It’s often the sentence structure, description and dialogue as well.
Gothic writing tends to be very lyrical and melancholic. There’s a poetic darkness about it, interspersed with all of those heavy spiritual and/or psychological thematic elements. It’s weighty.
Other genres are written very differently. Thrillers are very punchy and fast-paced. And the character growth and descriptions, even if you’re introducing a lot of depth like Ludlum’s Jason Bourne series, is executed differently. It’s more cut-and-dry than a Romance novel, or a Gothic one, or a work of Literary Fiction (although those vary widely).
My point is that the writing contests give me such a broad range of experience. And even if it’s in my own genre(s), they usually choose a subject that I wouldn’t, which requires me to step out of my usual writing mode.
Practice
Related to experience is the matter of practice. The smaller-scale requirements like those that are frequently required in contests, are an excellent place to work on refining specific skills.
For example, most writers, myself included, consistently work on the quality of their dialogue. It’s hard to manage that balance between natural conversation, subtext and unique character voices that’s required in dialogue. Similar things could be said of writing challenging types of scenes – those that are high in emotion like the culmination of a love story or the depth of feeling during a loss, or fight scenes and scenes that need to be highly symbolic or laced with pervasive thematic intent.
I work on all of these things as I’m completely a novel, but there’s a lot to be said for working on a short story or single section of a work in that it allows me to focus on refining these things on a much smaller scale. It’s a lot like running sprints to train for distance running. It seems like it wouldn’t work, but it does. It’s one of the best ways of practicing the craft.
Feedback
And lastly, when you submit to these contests, there are at least three types of feedback, any of which is beneficial.
First, there’s the explicit set of winners. In the contests I enter, there’s usually a winner, a second place prize and a certain number of runners up. It’s obviously very rewarding to be one of these. I placed as a runner up in the Fantasy Prologue contest. I posted my entry here if you want to read it. That gave me a real boost in my writing confidence.
Second, there’s also the feedback from other entrants, from those who are in the community but didn’t participate in the contest, and from family and friends who read your work. Obviously, I don’t always win. However, it’s so helpful to hear that others enjoy my work. As writers, we tend to lead something of an isolated work-life – not sharing what we’re creating with anyone until it’s at some point of completion. When it comes to novels, that can be a long span of time without any encouragement. But with these contest entries, you receive more frequent feedback. In addition, you can request more specific feedback from your contacts in the writing community. That makes short stories and smaller works – flash fiction or poems – great ways to receive direction on where to focus your efforts to improve.
And third, and possibly most importantly, these contests tend to be wonderful ways to witness how my ability is improving. When I’m working on a novel for years, it’s hard to see that I’ve grown as a writer. Stopping to complete something totally different and usually much smaller in scale is usually very eye-opening and encouraging as it gives me a reminder that I’m moving in the right direction.
Conclusion
I think you can see why I think so highly of writing contests. As a final note: they also give my brain a brief rest from my current manuscript without really taking me away for too long. That gives me a much fresher (and more experienced and confident) eye when I get back to it.
Let me know if you also enter writing contests, or have in the past, and what you thought of them. And look for my latest submission in the near future!
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