Write Better: Tips and tricks

Why didn't I win?

At halftime during the Patriots' miraculous comeback in Superbowl LI, my boyfriend leaned over to me and said, "It's not that I don't like winning. I just hate losing more."

And that is my inspiration for today.

Contests and awards are a tricky part of the writing world, and often very frustrating. They're great if you win. They can really stink if you lose, as we all do from time to time. Many of us are left wondering: Why not me? Where did I go wrong?

When you worked super hard, made your edits, and really felt like you had a chance this time, sometimes it can eat at you. So I wanted to go over a few reasons why you(and me, and everyone else) has at some point experienced the sour taste of defeat.

I see a lot of articles about how to win and how to succeed, but not as many about why you didn't win today. So here we go:

1. The other entries were better than yours. Yes, you may have written the best thing you've ever written, but you might not be the only one. Your best may not compare favorably to other people's, either.

2. You lost, but you lost by a hair and never knew it because most contests don't bother sending out personalized rejections to all participants. Sometimes margins of victory can come down to a single point and you just barely didn't make the cut. Where you end up ranking is just below the winner, but you're still lumped in with that really crappy story you didn't even know how it got in. Would knowing make you feel any better?

Probably not, unless you thought you were the absolute worst entry or that it was an honor to enter. For most of us, losing is still losing and it's gonna sting like stepping on a bee in the middle of the night while you're on your way to the bathroom.

3. Judges are human. Humans have likes and dislikes, even when they try and be neutral. You might've run into one who hates *hates* when a protagonist has to deal with zombie children. Sorry. They've seen it a million times before and yours isn't the exception. Or just the opposite: They might have a soft spot for sexy scenes and favor hot stories over ones with less 'action'. Or perhaps they don't accept stories published on Wattpad, who knows.

4. Judges are inhuman and they're using metrics and statistics you can't compete with. For example, winning an award for the number of reads on a story. Or you need to get 100 votes in two days to get judged. If you don't have the resource or time, sometimes your story is fantastic but you just haven't amassed enough guns to trade fire with the big boys yet. It's annoying, but it's not on you. Yay.

5. Judges are using the contest to find certain types of stories. Yours is good, but it's just not the right one for the contest. They held a contest looking for hoofed creatures.  However, they specifically want antelope. You wrote caribou. It's nothing personal and they did say caribou were allowed; they're just looking to appeal to the huge market of antelope readers right now and someone submitted a good antelope story. 

6. Not following the rules. Sometimes we call this cheating. In fictional contests, however, it almost always means you ignored or didn't read the rules and got yourself eliminated. This usually happens to people who either didn't read the rules in the first place, or they think their entry is above the rules. Things like:

"But I only went over the 500 word limit by 4 words!"
"I know you want stories about spotted cats, but seals can have spots too :-)!"

"Just lie about your age/country so you can enter and if you win, tell the truth."

etc.

7. Your story was not good. This is put on the bottom of our list because most of us would rather blame the other 6 reasons above. Someone is better than us, someone has more followers than us, the judges like other types of stories more than ours....But it's true. In many contests there's always a small, competitive group of people for the judges to agonize over and a lot more average and poorly written stories. Most of the "not good" comes from people who don't bother to edit. If your story is riddled with typos, you didn't bother to check to make sure your sentences made sense, etc, there's a good chance you lost because your story wasn't good.

How do I win?

Well, sometimes you don't. That's life. There's no magical formula for success, although in writing contests, following the rules and using proper grammar go a long way in getting you out of the bottom 50% who don't. There are times where you're going to really, really want to win and you lose. And you've got to keep going on. But if you want to know how to win, you've got to put in the time and effort. You've got to spend more time improving than you do complaining about everyone else being ahead.