Writing Awards Success - A Tested New Strategy

The painful way to win fiction writing awards is to perfect each individual narrative and submit that story exclusively to only one competition. You simply wait till you have won, or maybe clearly flopped, and enter that story to another contest. Which means that one narrative goes back and forth between a half dozen award schemes in a single 12 month period.

To write down a good entry of around 2000-3000 polished words will take even a seasoned writer quite a few days, probably 2 or 3 weeks. So you can generate barely thirty or so really good entries a year.

No doubt, you could possibly boost your production but, if you're finalizing more than two or three stories every week, the craftsmanship is bound to suffer.

Just suppose eventually you become a very experienced entrant and bring home a respectable reward in around every three or four competitions you go into? Examine the mathematics. You enter fifty entries per annum and gain, perhaps, just over a dozen payouts. These awards may range between a trifling ten dollars up to a useful three-figure sum or more. Still you're going to be extremely unlikely to take home a lot more than two or three thousand dollars per annum in cash awards.

It's a mediocre pay back for umpteen hundred hours of hard work! You would be significantly better off, working in a bistro.

Of course, not many story writers consider their writing so cold-bloodedly. Most folks participate in award schemes to gain pleasure. But the truth is you can still get fun writing stories and get above $10,000 annually in writing awards if you construct the strategy sensibly. It means that you win twice over.

Just how do you do this? Send in a nearly similar basic entry to a lot of competitions at the same time!

Allow me to quickly make it clear. I don't mean post off the identical tale. A good number of competitions require that a short fiction story hasn't been published previously. Consequently it might be discouraging in the event you received a $10 prize and then saw that story published. Just a bit down the road, you realized you had received a one thousand dollar prize in a further competition for the self-same story.

Rightly and also morally, you would never bank that one thousand dollars. The judges would correctly withdraw your award and prohibit your stories in the future.

Instead, you could alter the story to the competition theme. If a corporation celebrates its 25th anniversary with a Silver styled competition, make Silver the theme of your tale. Where it's a Thanksgiving holiday theme, let the tale occur at Thanksgiving holiday. However, if it's a science fiction genre, locate the narrative in any distant time or maybe venue. And so on.

So long as the core narrative is compelling, it can be adjusted to just about any theme or category in moments. Modify the names of your people plus places, the explanations, snippets of dialogue, and other incidentals.

You can do it in just a few minutes, although you may need to spin entire paragraphs. Then the tale is fresh plus, given that it's tailored far more specifically to that particular award scheme, your chances of being successful will be very much better.

Is this reasonable? Look at just about any classic fable. Its basis is certain to echo the storylines of numerous other previous stories. St George and the Dragon has shown up in lots of disguises across the world as well as throughout historical time.

Public relations copy writers frequently compose an individual central article for their client, and then adjust that to send to a dozen periodicals. The publishers really don't mind, if the various publications do not play competitively with each other.

Short story contests do not compete with one another, either.

This wily method boasts a long literary defence. Remember, Shakespeare hardly ever invented a storyline . Throughout his plays, he basically copied a story - and tailored it to the projected audience.

It's a win-win contest system.

The greater you vary the tale, needless to say, the more specific it becomes. Ethically, you ought to change each and every tale to the maximum degree you are able to. But it is much easier to rewrite or adjust a good core tale for a number of non-competitive competitions than to create an entirely different story for every single competition!


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Dr John Yeoman, PhD Creative Writing, is chairman of the writing awards centre Writers' Village. A university tutor in short story writing, he is a veteran contest judge. Discover hundreds of clever plans to gain money prizes in his big manual How to Win Writing Contests for Profit. Claim it free now at:
http://www.writers-village.org/writing_awards