Every feather in place for the chicken show – or – judging stories and how to not send an entry to a literary competition
I’ve just finished judging the stories for this year’s Page Seventeen competition. The editor’s got the stories, judge’s report is all locked in, and I’m really looking forward to knowing who the winners are (like many literary competitions, Page Seventeen is anonymous entry, the editor removes all names and identifying material from the stories before I get them) and I hope even meeting some of them at the launch.
There were times during the judging when I really wished that I could talk to the people who’d sent those stories, though, and it wasn’t always to tell them how much I loved their stories. To this end, there are a few things I’d like to say to anyone who is thinking of submitting a story to a competition and who is maybe feeling a little worried about what to send in, or a little miffed because they’ve sent in lots of stories and never won.
First of all, bear in mind that this is a competition and there are rules. These rules are not just a rough idea of what to do. They are the rules. This is a competition for the best (in the judge’s opinion) short story, so give yourself all of the best chances to win.
Use a font that’s easy to read and a point size that makes it legible. I’m talking a serif font in at least 12 points. If you don’t know what a serif font is, well you should. You’re a writer. If you really don’t know, then use your dictionary (and don’t tell me you don’t have one of them if you’re a writer because to me that is like a carpenter who doesn’t bother with a hammer). If you’re not a writer and you’re reading this, well a serif is the little burl thingy that you see on the end of letters. The point of the serif is that it leads the eye along and makes the words easier to read. Go with Times New Roman or Courier.
Again with the rules: if the word limit is 3000 words (a very common word limit in Australian lit competitions) then do not make your story longer than 3000 words. Trust me, the judge is not going to get carried away with the brilliance of your prose and, wiping tears of joy from her/his eyes, award your masterpiece first prize. More likely, she/he is going to take one look at your twenty-seven pages, compared with everyone else’s twelve and not even bother to read the first paragraph. It is always going to be possible to surgically extract a few extra words from a story and 99 times out of a hundred the story will be improved. If it really needs to be that long, find a competiton it will fit into. Don’t enter a horse into a dog-show.
In some competitions, you are allowed multiple entries. Now here’s something I have long suspected as an entrant, and proved to myself as a judge: you can tell when one person has submitted three stories because they all look the same. Before even reading them, I note that their headings are all in the same bold font, or that they all have the page number on the bottom left-hand corner and the name of the story on the top right-hand corner, or they all have line breaks instead of indentations and cute little curly things in the paragraph breaks. Try to make your stories look a little different, to give them an individual edge. Now I’m not talking here about using paper with bunnies on it or putting a floral border around it and using some fancy script for the font. Just a subtle thing. A different font for the heading, slightly wider margins, 6 spaces for your paragraph indents instead of 5.
More difficult is your choice in theme. For many of us, writing can be a kind of therapy and we need to write the same thing over and over, to explore our options and our understanding of how the whole damn cosmos works. Thing is, if you do happen to send three stories about the same thing – say, something along the lines of two neighbours who both grow giant pumpkins for the local show and one has a dog and the other has a cat and they both pretend to hate each other but when one pumpkin fails then they begin to work together and we (the readers) know that we have seen the beginning of a wonderful relationship – then the judge is probably going to pick that all three have been written by the same person. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing, there are probably a lot of pumpkin fans out there, just sayin’ is all. You might want to take a really critical look at your stories, pick out your best pumpkin story and then submit something else that’s not about pumpkins at all.
I was utterly bewildered by more than one entrant who had apparently submitted their proofed story instead of the edited version. Seriously. I’m there reading and there’s a word crossed out, an underline, an insertion. I’m trying to read a story through editor’s marks. Are you kidding me? Who does that? Look, the Royal Melbourne Show is coming up next month. Go and take a walk around the animals. Check the ones that have blue ribbons on their stalls or cages. They’ll be the neatest correct entries, not the ones that have been owned by somebody who couldn’t be arsed giving them a proper bath. I’ve seen what they do with chooks. First, they have a bath. That’s right. A chook in a bath. Gently washed in warm water and then rinsed so that all the soap is gone. They get their toenails clipped and their combs and wattles (if they have any) spruced up. They get dried in the sun, on a nice grassy spot and sometimes there’s even a bit of hairdryer action so that they get nice and fluffy and at the end of it all every feather is in place and they look fabulous. Now, please use this chook metaphor for your story. Do edit it and proofread it, then send the corrected version to the competition because the judge is not going to put a blue ribbon on a story full of editor’s marks.
Don’t write notes to the judge on your story. Bribes should be submitted in a plain, brown envelope, or an esky with an ice pack, if it’s a hot day (chocolate bribes are less acceptable when they are all melty). If you are not sure about which words you want in your story, then you need to go back and re-read the story and make that decision.
Okay, now that I’ve had my whinge-n-bitch session, I will say that at the end I felt so sad at having to cut some stories off my shortlist. I wished I could have spoken to those writers to tell them how good their stories were, that just a tweak here or there would have put them over the line, and to keep writing and to keep entering competitions.
As for the stories that did make it, well, you blew me away. All of you. It was very close and I had to think carefully about my reasons for choosing the way I did. This year’s Page Seventeen is going to be awesomer than ever.
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