I used to think that writing contests were a waste of time. Unless you won. And even then, it depended on the prize.
It all started in the 7th grade when my teacher required us to enter a local essay contest about a historical person born in February. Since it was a class assignment, I silently questioned what these contest coordinators were smoking when they came up with the topic, and spent weeks researching, writing, rewriting and revising an essay on Thomas Edison. The genius girl down the street, who went to a different school, decided the weekend before the deadline that she would enter the contest – voluntarily! – and her only purpose was to score higher than me.
Imagine if you will the fight scene from West Side Story minus the dancing. Replace it with bespectacled 11-years old girls who spent way too much time at the public library and wielding extensive vocabularies.
Multi-syllabic words were exchanged. Territories were marked. Bets were made.
Genius Girl won second place.
The only thing I received was a ‘complete’ notation from my teacher.
Not only does it go to show that the 7th grade is a rude awakening to the injustices of the world, but I was really ticked off. I knew I had to win the next year. I just HAD to.
The next year the contest coordinators came up with a topic that was a real doozy: everyday life in Colonial America. I found myself researching and arguing the importance of pubs and taverns to our country’s forefathers. I worked harder than I ever thought possible, determined to wow the judges. Boy, did I ever. I won all around first prize.
I felt vindicated… for about five seconds. Then I discovered that first place winners received the honor of getting up early on a Saturday, putting on a dress, and reading their award-winning essay in a ballroom packed with very patriotic old people.
After surviving that breakfast (and I still have flashbacks while suffering high fevers) I was ready to forget about the incident unless I needed to put Genius Girl in her place. But, unfortunately, it didn’t end there. Because the contest coordinators sent my essay to state level. And I won first place. Again. Which meant getting up REALLY early on a Saturday, traveling across state and doing the whole shebang again – this time to a larger ballroom with even more patriotic old people.
I thanked my lucky stars when I failed to reach the top three spots in the Regionals.
So it’s no surprise that I rarely enter writing contests. This is why I managed to surprise myself in August 2003 when I did something completely out of character. I entered an excerpt of “Six Weeks to Sensuality” in the Lori Foster’s Brava Novella contest. I had just sent an unsolicited partial of a different story to Brava, but I thought the contest would be a quicker route to get my work in front of the editors. That is, if I managed to reach the finals.
A week later I was on the phone with my friend Jenna Petersen, and we were clicking around Lori’s site when I found out that I was the first finalist. Poor Jenna wasn’t expecting me to shriek in her ear. Her hearing probably hadn’t return when days later I got ‘The Call’ from Kensington about the partial of “Wicked Ways” that I sent in to Brava before the contest. Because of the way the contest was structured, the editors weren’t going to know who the finalists were until several months later.
Now this is probably the part where you’re expecting to hear that I captured top prize in the contest. Oh, puhleeze! This is my life we’re talking about, remember? I didn’t win – and here’s the weird part: it didn’t matter. Because the editors liked my contest entry and expanded my original contract to include “Wicked” Women 101.
And that was when I realized that you don’t have to win to get something positive out of a contest experience. Writing contests aren’t a waste of time – as long as you have a good reason to enter them. Okay, yeah, it took me a while to figure that out. And I still can’t help wondering what Genius Girl is up to these days…
