Changing My Attitude about Writing Contests

Confession time. I dislike writing contests.

During nearly three decades in daily journalism, I grew to despise them and resisted entering them. That attitude carried into my writing career in fiction.

The work, I thought, can stand on its own. If people want to award it, fine. If not, I was OK with that.

Silly me. This, I realized, was the wrong approach.​

Unlike the newspaper business, the book business is much more of a solo endeavor. Yes, authors, particularly the ones who sell tens and hundreds of thousands of books, have a team around them that help them promote and market their books.

All the rest of the published world does much of this work with a team of one -- whatever the author can do on Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads, Amazon, Nook, etc. Any publicity for a newly published book can help. Any news can help. And winning an award qualifies as news.

Photo credit: Christie Davis

Essentially, entering manuscripts and books into writing contests is like buying a lottery ticket, only you're betting on yourself. If your writing can win the contest, catching lightning in a bottle, you figure to sell more book, draw the attention of book bloggers and reviewers and catch the eye of publishers who might want a crack at buying the next book.

I have to accept this because this is the reality. And if I don't accept it, I'm only hurting my career.

So for the first time, I'm in a writing contest. "Dead Odds" is entered in the Freddie Award for Writing Excellence, a contest held by the Florida Chapter of the Mystery Writers of America to honor unpublished works. Soon, I'll add a second contest entry to the resume, this one designed to attract the attention of agents, editors and publishers.

So off we go, like it or not. For most of my professional life, it was not.

Awards Show Journalism

I witnessed and lived through the creation of what I call "awards-show journalism." I can't speak to newsrooms, but I know that many of them adopted a philosophy that grew out of some major sports sections around the country in the 1980s.

Before then, newspapers followed a mission of finding news and writing it -- shootings, robberies, political scandals. Same thing in sports. Preview the game, write about the players and coaches, cover the game and then move onto the next one.

That changed with centerpieces.

Centerpieces were design elements built into the daily paper, usually the front of the paper, front of the lifestyle section or sports section. It was supposed to be the photo or story that drew the reader's attention. it was designed to showcase the best journalism or the best writing in the paper that day. Often, papers met the objective.

Then someone changed the objective. Years later, centerpieces were not about great journalism, per se, but about winning awards. In sports, the Associated Press Sports Editors organization created writing and section contests to reward writers of game stories, columns, features and enterprise (investigative) news and to reward editors for daily sections, Sunday sections and special sections.

A decade or so later, sports staffs started PLANNING out how they could win awards. Some even went so far to ensure that their very best writers -- columnists, typically -- stepped into game-story duty on days of big games.

Ever so gradually, newspapers started to care about winning awards.

Perhaps it was always thus, and my age only allows me to go back 30+ years and not half a century or more. I don't know.
Don't get me wrong. Papers, in my experience, never thought more about awards than the daily mission, don't get me wrong. But anything that takes your eye off the ball is a distraction.

Are All Writing Contests the Same?

How does this relate to book-writing contests?

It relates only to me, as far as I know. The sour taste of awards-show journalism left me unwilling to even look at a contest related to writing a thriller.

​"Well, maybe the reason you don't care for contests is . . . you're not very good."

A valid question. But the deep-seated reason has much less to do with talent -- which is what it is -- and more to do with the that given the choice between staying in the background working and being on stage, smiling and collecting hardware, I'd chose the latter every time.

The times I won spot awards in which editors stood up and blindly handed me a glass trophy, sweat rolled down my back and blood rushed to my head. Had I been at lunch when the award was handed out, I'd have gladly traded that trophy for a burger, medium-rare.

That was then. The thing about awards is, the people who given them actually enjoy giving them. And people should appreciate that part of it. I should.

Should I find myself in position to have the blood rush to my head again somewhere amid a group of peers, I need to forget about the sweat and smile. And be happy someone liked what I created.

That is, after all, the objective.