It's Competition Time!

Short story writers love a good competition. Or a bad one. Or any that we feel that we have a chance of winning to be honest.

It’s not the prospect of prize money that gets our creative juices flowing. Indeed, many of the prizes on offer are hardly worth winning. Twenty-five pounds for first prize? I mean, it’s always nice to have a little cash in your pocket but that’s not why we enter. No, the real benefit of winning a short story competition is the kudos that it brings with it.

It vastly improves a writer’s credibility when offering work to editors to be able to type something like, ‘…submitted by Shaun Finnie, winner of the prestigious Bridport Prize for short stories 2012’. That sounds a lot better than ‘…submitted by Shaun Finnie, some bloke who’s desperate for a break as he needs to pay his gas bill’.

The downside of competitions as that they usually demand an entry fee. It’s not normally much, just a few pounds or dollars in most cases, but if you enter a lot of contests every year then there’s no way you’ll ever win your cash back in prize money alone. Or use the prize money to pay your gas bill.

So perhaps there’s another way to use writing competitions to my advantage? Maybe I should look into setting up my own? It wouldn’t get me the acclaim that winning a prize does and I’m sure I’d have to read a lot of dross to find the golden nuggets but it would sure make my bank manager happier. And I’d get to play God with other fledgling (and established) writers’ careers! I’d be able to (hopefully) pick a handful of very good pieces to praise, but the rest I could treat the same way that editors and competition judges have treated me in the past. Ah, I can feel the power rushing to my head already. ‘You haven’t won: you’re fired!’  I could get a white cat to stroke thoughtfully while I read the entries as well.

Suddenly the idea of this is much more appealing. It would be like being paid to be a literary critic. How long have I wanted to pen something like, ‘Dan Brown, you’re books are badly written reworkings of other ideas, designed solely for the crass manipulation of people’s deeply held beliefs. I accuse you of being nothing more than a ruthless hack. That’ll be fifty pounds please.'

Now getting cash to write things like that really would be worth the effort.

© Shaun Finnie 2012