Short story competitions - what I wish I’d known earlier

I was recently interviewed by Joanna Nell, author of four funny, warm and clever novels, for the fabulous Writes4Women podcast (our chat to be released in a few weeks’ time). Joanna asked many excellent questions, including what advice I had for short story writers. We spoke about what makes a short story good, but ran out of time to talk specifically about short story competitions, which is a subject close to my heart.

So, why bother with short story competitions? Why put ourselves at risk of rejection? Why pay the money? (more on that later) Why not just wait until we can send a whole stack of stories to a publisher?

Here’s why I think competitions can be helpful:

1) They force us to finish something. You can’t send a story fragment, or a half-done piece that you’re sure one day might be good. The desire to submit to a competition helps overcome inertia.

2) They encourage us to stop mucking around with a long-completed story. It’s great to be careful with work, and not send it out too soon, but if we’ve edited a story multiple times, with at least one good ‘rest’ (a week or two, minimum), chances are it’s ready to send off. And a competition deadline can prompt us to finally press submit.

3) Competitions teach us to deal with rejection when we don’t place. We all have work rejected, even writers with multiple published works. It’s brutal and the first knockbacks cut deep (perhaps because we’re so uncertain of ourselves in the earliest days). As a fan of submitting to competitions, I’ve been sliced and diced so many ways I’m practically a salad, but I still put myself out there. I figure you can’t win if you don’t enter!

4) Making a longlist, shortlist or even winning helps get our names out there as writers. People start to notice — Ah, there’s Nicholas Knickerbocker again. While this kind of attention is not essential, I think it can only help when we’re eventually submitting to agents or publishers. We have a track record, a resume.

5) Those longlistings, shortlistings or wins are a shot in the arm each time, an encouragement from a discerning reader that our work is appreciated. My short story collection, If You're Happy, was published after it won the Unpublished Manuscript Award at the Queensland Literary Awards in 2020. This competition win resulted in publication.

I figure you can’t win if you don’t enter!

Over the years, I’ve sent work to almost 100 competitions (mostly unsuccessfully, but with wins, too, here and there). When it comes to submitting to writing competitions, I have a few thoughts.

1) Don’t pay an entry fee that isn’t consistent with the prize. For example, I wouldn’t pay an entry fee of $50 for a 1st prize of $200. That’s ridiculous. There are several competitions with free entry, and many with fees of $10 per entry. The Writers Studio has a great list of 2023 competitions and opportunities here.

2) Research the competition, and the judge or judges, if you can. You might find an interview with the judge where they say something like ‘I love stories that explode from the starting blocks and don’t relent until they fall gasping over the finish line’. This judge may not appreciate your quiet, tender piece about a dying man and his dog. It can be well worth a few minutes of googling.

I’ve had the experience of sending a story I loved to an Australian short story competition, and not even making the longlist (out of around two hundred entries). Without changing that story, I sent it to the Commonwealth Short Story Prize a few months later, and the story was longlisted out of over six thousand entries. Which proves yet again there is no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ when it comes to writing — assessing it is so subjective.

3) Above all, remember that not placing in a competition doesn’t mean you’re no good as a writer. I recently had the honour of judging a short story competition, which involved reading 92 short stories. It was bloody hard to choose the winning, highly commended and commended stories. There were some beautiful stories that I couldn’t recognise, pieces that came within a whisker of being selected. I wished I could have offered words of appreciation to every writer, because, hand on my heart, there was not one story that didn’t have at least some element that sparkled. It made me realise that when we writers don’t receive a mention in a competition, our work may well have still impacted the judge in a significant way.

4) If you win, or are commended in some way, revel in it! Dance on your desk, eat cake, sing! Competitions often receive a deluge of entries, and to get even a mention shows your work truly caught someone’s attention.

Do you have any advice to add? Leave a message in the comments.

Happy submitting and best of luck! 💛