To the Flame!

 I entered a writing competition. I didn't win. I don't normally enter writing competitions. I don't think they're particularly useful. If you lose, and there's only one winner, you don't know why you lose, so you learn nothing from the experience. Generally speaking you don't know what the judge is looking for, there's no brief, so you're just hoping that what you think is great is going to chime with what they think is great and, on this occasion, we did not click. This was speed dating on a wet Wednesday after a bad day at work. Also, the story was about a crushed snail and, typing that, I can sort of see why they didn't go for it. It just sounds unpleasant. But maybe the judge likes unpleasant. Maybe that's their bag. That's the risk. Perhaps it wasn't unpleasant enough. 

No, it was the right amount of unpleasant. It was delicately calibrated that way. 

Other reasons not to enter are: it costs money, so this venture like the rest of my writing career is a sunk cost. Also, the competition might be a foregone conclusion. I'm not suggesting corruption or nepotism or insider reading, but there are people who are IN the arts, and people who have their noses pressed up against the window of the arts. And that's my snot on the glass, baby. Also, and this is the kicker: I have never won anything in my life. Never. Not a coin toss, not an Omaze house, not an argument. This is not quite true. As a nine year old, a sunflower I pretended I grew came third in an East Sussex area "Grow The Biggest Sunflower" competition. I did not grow it. My dad grew it. I barely went into the garden to see how he was getting on. Batman was probably on. I had to maintain the fiction that I did grow it even as I was forced on stage during school assembly and required to wave my prize - a book on gardening - above my head like it was the FA Cup, while everyone in the school cheered. I was mortified. Around the same time, at a school fair, I entered a raffle. The top prize was a bow and arrow (I mean, it was the seventies, but was that really wise for a primary school?) and I desperately wanted it. I didn't get it. What I did get was a ladies plastic rain hat that had been wrapped in newspaper. Those were the two things I won. Nothing since. 

It's also one of those things, like winning bursaries that don't actually give you any money, or going on writing retreats to do what you'd do at home in a refurbished windmill, or joining writing courses given by unpublished writers, that I'm just going to have to sit out. That last one, fair enough. You can always learn. You don't need to have published a book to give good advice. I've published three and my advice is worthless. It's part of a culture of, I guess, hobbyist writers. I don't have the money to have my underwritten, cobbled together on the day prose dismantled by someone in a French Worker jacket staring over your shoulder out of the window at an orchard. I just can't afford it. And it sounds weird. But okay, if that's what you like, fair enough. 

So why did I enter? Because someone came to me and said you should enter this competition, and they caught me at moment where I was feeling optimistic and saying yes to a lot of things. So, I said yes. 

The competition said no. 

But, and it's fair to medium, good to firm but, I spent several days working on that story, which I had assumed was already written, really interrogating it, pulling it apart, paring it back, breathing air into it. That story, when I paid my PayPal and pinged it at the competition, was as perfect as I could make it. It was shiny, revving, growling. A dream machine. I was pleased with it. And I'd rewritten it because of the competition. 

I'm going to approach every short story as though grooming it for competition. And then I won't enter one.