The Thing About Contests
I've always had a love-loathe relationship with contests. Most people do. I never imagined that I would create and run one myself, but the International Amy MacRae Award for Memoir has become one the projects I care about most deeply. Yet it also makes me ache.
Let me explain.
I love that the contest inspires people to craft their writing into polished form and take the gratifying (if terrifying) next step of getting their work out into the world.
I love celebrating excellence in memoir writing, a form with unique power to unite and illuminate its creators and its readers.
I love helping to raise the profile of deserving writers, providing them an opportunity to have their work more widely appreciated by readers and potential publishers.
And I love honouring Amy MacRae's life and legacy, to raise awareness and money for an important cause.
This contest is a beautiful, beautiful thing.
But I don't enjoy this part at all.
Every year, this moment makes me question and reconsider the entire venture. Because this is the point in the process when the contest is about to delight a handful of people and disappoint hundreds.
* * *
Of the hundreds of submissions we receive every year, fewer than 25 stories make up the longlist. The writers of the remaining stories will no doubt feel disheartened, and I completely understand their disappointment.
Every year, I receive emails from some of these downcast writers, people who want to let me know just how discouraged they feel, how hard they worked (and did everything I said! and even hired an editor!) and how they still didn't make the longlist. This just proves that I can't write, some say.
It's devastating reading.
Every year, I try to remind people that Every Writer Faces Rejection. Every. Single. Freaking. One. It's not an anomaly, it's not a measure of talent (or character), it's part of the process that writers everywhere endure. So, rather than taking rejection as evidence that you are not a writer, it's also possible to take it as evidence that you are.
Contests might feel like pronouncements of judgement, but they aren't. Not really. What they are, at best, are attempts at an impossible task: to take something that is inherently and inescapably subjective, and to somehow judge it objectively. The best we can aim for is broad, almost aqueous, consensus, and that is what we do.
Contest readers (i.e. first-round judges) are seasoned writers whose divergent styles, tastes, life experiences, preferences, and ways of seeing and being in the world, mean that, while they do their utmost to be objective and fair, they read, assess, and respond to the stories in wonderfully diverse ways. They make different choices, have different favourites and rankings, and every single arts contest anywhere in the world (except maybe North Korea?) is the same.
It might be helpful for me to share that two previous winners of the Amy Award saw their stories rejected multiple times from other contests and magazines before they struck gold. In both cases, the writers took their rejected stories and kept working on them, revising and tightening and seeking feedback, before revising and tightening some more. Even then, these writers submitted their stories to the Amy Award knowing that they might be passed over again. Of course, they hoped to win or be shortlisted, but what mattered was the decision to continue to hone their writing and the willingness to take another risk. Because that is the work of a writer.
As we all know, writing is not a matter of sitting down and crafting brilliant prose day after glorious day. The task, most often, is to craft horrible prose, to take a hunk of an awkward idea and patiently, devotedly, attempt to give it shape. To sculpt it and stand back from it and chew on the proverbial pencil and then sculpt some more and stand back some more and think wow it's great only to stand back again and see that actually it's crap and what were we thinking and tinkering some more and realising that now we've tinkered it to death and it's so banal it hurts to read and what is it even trying to say and hang on this bit's quite good and a surge of enthusiasm and yet more fiddling and sculpting sculpting sculpting and standing back to see that no it really is shit (and so are we) and we might as well just give up on the whole thing because who cares if this story ever gets written anyway.
It's often at this point that we glance down, give it one more read, and notice that, hey, the writing is finally beginning to light up from within.
* * *
A few of the stories that are submitted to the Amy Award blaze and crackle from the first sentence onward. Others have powerful embers, and the flame, if properly tended, is well on its way. Still others have a quiet light that calls for breath and sustained attention. And yet others are early sparks, fireflies of ideas that need the right container to hold them, the right backdrop to begin to see how luminous they could become, and the right tools to make that happen.
But all of the stories are offerings of the heart. And I respect and admire and honour every single writer in this contest.
In the meantime, though, if you have submitted your work to a contest (any contest!), could I invite every entrant to celebrate NOW the fact that your act of submission has already made you a better writer? While you're at it, you might want to lift a glass and toast the bold risk you took by sending your story out in the first place. (That officially makes you A Writer. Cheers.) And finally, regardless of the outcome of this or any other contest, you have already won the only prize of true and majestic value, the sacred honour we probably all take for granted too often: another day in this fleeting, precious life.
Alison Wearing is a bestselling, award-winning author, playwright, and performer. She is also a memoir writing coach and the creator/facilitator of Memoir Writing Ink, an online program that guides people through the process of transforming personal stories into memoir. Alison leads writing retreats internationally, and otherwise devotes herself to being a force of kindness, colour, and joy in this world. www.alisonwearing.com