Writing Competitions….and the Winner is……
Posted By annette young on November 3, 2009
Writing competitions can be great fun and financially rewarding too.
Few writers, who have entered writing competitions, cannot help but become addicted to the thrill of trying to outwit other competitors. The buzz of striving to produce the best piece of writing possible can be quite enthralling and the sheer act of writing and pitting your wits against others is that it has the added benefit of helping the writer to achieve focus on the end goal.
I started seriously entering writing competitions many years ago, and although I didn’t think that I had much chance of winning, was quite surprised and then extremely proud of the fact that my work was short-listed and some submissions also won. This sense of achievement spurred me on in my own writing endeavours and I often wonder whether I would have been so successful now in my freelance career if I hadn’t of entered different competitions and got that first, early taste of success.
Since those humble beginnings, I have judged various writing competitions and then set up my own. I try to stimulate the minds of the writers by providing a variety of themes so that writing remains exciting and not a chore. Favourite competitions include those with a restricted word count because I know how difficult it can be to produce flash fiction in a minimal amount of words, of course the harder a competition can be, the more the seasoned competition writers like to enter, because it pushes the creative boundaries back yet further.
Think about stories that you could conjure up in just 100 words? Difficult isn’t it? Where do you start the story? How do you finish with a twist ending? Or perhaps you would like to enter the first chapter of your novel in a competition? Put that creative entity out there and see what feedback you get.
Competitions – exciting, unpredictable and addictive and next time you fancy a challenge, you now know what to do.
Annette Young
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