El Andalous - Writing Competitions

Blossoming!

I’m taking a break this week from talking about my trip as those blogs take longer to write. I can never remember all the details, so it takes me a while to decide which photos were from where and then to double-check it on the internet. It’ll be back to my adventures in the desert next week!

Anyway, as soon as I got back – well, almost – I wanted to enter a couple of writing competitions (RevPit and WriteMentor). The first competition has a prize of a full development edit by a professional fiction editor (thus covers things like character development, pacing, voice, plot) and the second competition was a prize of a four-month mentorship by an established author. Someone reported that their child was a bit astonished that you’d enter a competition where the prize was to do work!

Submitting to RevPit was stressful. I think I had to submit my first five pages and a query letter, plus a statement as to which three editors I wanted to apply to (you can only apply to two, but the third is a backup). Entries were accepted in a two-day period, but each editor was capped to a maximum of 100 applicants. I filled in my entry form twenty minutes after entries opened, and already around five of the editors had reached their cap (including my third choice). If your own choice is not available, you have to rewrite a blurb for another editor that you’d like to choose. But I was worried that my new choice would become capped as I wrote my new blurb.

Anyway, all was well, as I got my entry in before my first two choices were capped, but phew, it was a nail-biting few minutes. I ended up getting completely sucked in by RevPit. The twitter site (yes, I’ve graduated to twitter, albeit kicking and screaming) was busy with teasers (mostly just information about how many entries were in which genre, etc) and 10Queries. The 10Queries was a series of tweets from the editors’ submissions giving anonymized feedback on an entrant’s query and five pages, but could be generalizable to a lot of people. Each editor did at least ten of these, but many did quite a bit more than that. Anyone whose entry was used is told at the end that the 10Queries belonged to their entry.

It was interesting to see the feedback. I really lucked out in that one of the editors who I’d applied to promised to give feedback to anyone who’d submitted to her and who requested feedback (so I requested, of course). The generalised feedback was interesting to read; around 90 percent of the middle grade entries seemed to be getting the “wrong voice” comment (too old, too young, too formal, too old fashioned). This is why I’ve been stressing about my middle grade voice (middle grade is for readers 8-12 years old). For first five pages, much of the feedback was about being sure to introduce the setting; including goals, motivation, and conflict (all three); show don’t tell; don’t start with the inciting incident – show the normal life first (but in action). On queries, feedback mostly seemed to be about including both the plot and the character arc; don’t give the whole plot; plus the common failings (inappropriate word count, include a small bio, start with the blurb, etc).

The feedback I got was (to my complete horror!) that my point of view in my second chapter wasn’t clear (what?! I was sure I’d nailed that!). When I looked, I could suddenly see exactly what she meant. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t seen it before. The other gem was that I needed to give more characterization in my initial pages. This was another revelation. I didn’t think I could do it better than I had, although I did think my first pages lacked a certain je-ne-sais-quoi. I stared and stared at my opening page for about an hour and then realized that I could add in some opinions rather than just the mystery element that I had focused upon and bingo! I think I found my voice. Brilliant. So I won, even though I didn’t win.

There were many self-care tweets as people get very stressed as they wait for results to be announced and see all the feedback wondering if it applies to them. So there were suggestions to switch off, get back to writing, meditate, etc.

WriteMentor had very little going on via twitter and didn't have any caps (phew!). For this, I had to submit my first chapter (which is very short), a query, and a synopsis. I think their philosophy was that the tweets increase stress (which they do, but I can handle it!), so not much was tweeted until the results were announced. Here too, I didn’t win, but I was very lucky to get some feedback (mention time traveling theme early on, clarify a few things in the synopsis).

All in all, I am hugely pleased at having entered these competitions and my novel is better as a result. I couldn’t want more than that. I’m now testing a few queries to agents to see if I’ve finally hit the sweet spot…