Improving your odds

Enter fewer prizes, on purpose

A year of eight well-matched entries beats a weekend of twenty. Match on four things: form, length, eligibility, and what the prize is for. A flash piece does not belong in a 3,000-word story prize with the ending chopped off. A novel opening does not belong in a memoir award because the fee is lower this month. The filters on the calendar are there for this. Genre, age and region will remove half the list before you have spent a penny.

Then ask what you want back. Cash is fine. Publication in an anthology is a credit. An agent introduction is a meeting you would otherwise have to beg for. Mentoring is useful if you still have a draft to finish, which is how Megan Davis has described the Bridport novel win. Production, for a script, is a different kind of yes. Rank the prize by the reader, not by the number on the poster.

Read last year’s winners

This is the least glamorous good advice, and people skip it. Winning stories and poems are often online, or in a cheap anthology. Read three. You are not looking for a formula to copy. You are looking for the level. Some prizes want a clean plot with a turn. Some want a voice that is odd from the first line and stays odd. A few want the theme in the title and will not pretend otherwise. If your piece is in a different room from the winners, send it somewhere else.

The opening has to work tired

Judges read in batches. Your first page is in a pile with forty others. It does not need a trick. It needs a person, a pressure, and a sentence that sounds like it was written by someone who will still be in control on page four. If you are entering a novel award, the synopsis has a job too. It should tell the story, including the ending. Agents on those panels are checking that you know what the book is, not that you can keep a secret.

For poems, read the lines aloud once after you think you are done. For flash, cut the sentence that explains the last image. For scripts, the first ten pages are the competition. A lab or a fellowship, like the one Elise Brown won, is often judging whether this writer can be in a room, as well as whether the pilot works.

One reader, before the fee

Not a committee. One person who will say if they were lost, bored, or unconvinced, and who is not trying to rewrite it as their own story. If you can, pick someone who does not love you. Give them the rules as well as the piece, so they can tell you the theme is only present in the last paragraph. Fix that. Then enter.

If the prize offers feedback, take it once. You do not need notes on every entry. A single set of comments from a judge who reads this kind of work is worth more than another hour of moving commas.

Treat a listing as a result

Jo Browning Wroe was shortlisted. Julie Ma has pointed out that Gail Honeyman, Laura Marshall and Neema Shah found their way into print from competition years in which they did not win. Longlists get agent emails. Highly commended gets a line in a biography. When you write the cover letter later, “shortlisted for the Bridport Prize” is a fact a stranger can check. “My writing group liked it” is not. Enter at least some prizes that publish the list.

Spend the fee like a grown-up

Free prizes exist, including some with real readers. Writers of the Future is one example on the calendar, with quarterly deadlines and no fee. Small fees are reasonable for a prize that pays, publishes, or puts the work in front of an agent. A high fee for a prize with no named judges, no previous winners you can find, and a vague promise of “industry exposure” is a different product. Look at who won last year. If you cannot find them, that is information.

Set a yearly budget and stop when you hit it. Entering is part of the work, not a tax on hope.

Keep the admin smaller than the writing

A simple list is enough. Prize, deadline, fee, word limit, whether the judging is blind, whether you have entered, result. The calendar will not enter for you, and the bookmark on this site lives in your browser only, so a note on your own machine is the copy that survives a new phone. Send the file they asked for, named the way they asked, in the format they asked. Then go back to the book.

Enter again

Stewart’s own line on this is plain: competitions can be won, and they are worth entering more than once a year. The writers on the previous page were not one-shot miracles. De Waal won flash twice. Ma had a string of silences before Richard and Judy. A single no is a no to that piece, in that round, from those readers. It is not a career verdict. Send the next finished thing to the next open prize that fits.