Entering a writing competition is a great way to get your work out there and build your career, to get your foot in the door and to start a track record leading up to getting published. Matt Freidson, Deputy Director of Creative Future, shares ten tips for entering a competition.
1. Always submit your best work—if it’s your second-best, it’s not going to knock out someone else’s most accomplished piece.
2. Always read the rules and eligibility! Don’t get knocked out on a technicality.
3. Always proofread your work and get someone else to do it for you—it’s useful to get a second set of eyes.
4. Format your piece double-spaced and in a 12-point serif font (like Times New Roman), not a sans serif font (like Calibri or Arial).
5. Definitely don’t use a strange font or put your title in rainbow colours or similar to try to make it stand out—it just makes it hard to read.
6. Similarly, don’t include illustrations or photos unless these are explicitly accepted in the rules. It’s the writing that counts.
7. It doesn’t matter if you enter early or right at the deadline, but don’t rush just at the last minute and send in something that’s not your best work.
8. Similarly, if you miss the deadline, don’t plead to enter late…out of fairness to other entrants, competitions can’t accept late entries.
9. Keep track of your entries so you can send out that best piece to another competition if you don’t make it through—keep plugging!
10. If it’s a competition you really admire or think you’re a good fit for, keep trying! Usually it’s different readers and judges each time. You can even go back over your piece, polish it and re-submit it—several Creative Future Writers’ Award winners have won after two or three tries.
There are a LOT of different literary competitions, and you could spend not only many, many hours entering them but also hundreds of pounds on entry fees. Choose wisely! A free competition will get more entries, and a higher-priced one will have fewer other writers to go up against…but it’s a bigger investment. Set yourself a budget for how much you can spend on entries fees and stick to it.
It’s a good idea to look for competitions which are more specific for you—only for women, for the North, for working class writers, for particular genres or themes, or similar. It’s easier to stand out in a less crowded field.
Finally, competitions by definition receive far more entries than they can award prizes. Don’t be disheartened if you don’t win—it’s not a reflection on your work. Just doing the writing and entering is an achievement.
Matt Freidson is the Deputy Director of Creative Future. He has run the Creative Future Writers’ Award since 2018, the UK’s leading free to enter literary competition for unpublished, underrepresented writers. He has personally read thousands of entries, managed the judging, and supported dozens of winners. Matt has also published over twenty short stories in literary journals and anthologies, and his novel is available here.
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