Writing Awards Success - A Tested Fresh Strategy

A painful technique to succeed in fiction writing awards could be to refine every single story then post the item specifically only to one competition. You hold off until you have got a prize, or maybe clearly failed, and then enter that tale to a different award scheme. Hence a particular story proceeds the rounds of four or five award schemes inside a year or so.

To compose a strong entry of about 2000-3000 polished words will take even a seasoned writer many working days, quite possibly weeks. So you deliver typically fewer than thirty really good entries each and every year.

Certainly, you could possibly increase your production but nonetheless, if you're finalizing much more than two short fiction stories each week, your quality is certain to suffer.

What if at last you become a greatly proficient contestant and earn an acceptible award in every three contests you go into? Look at the numbers. You enter around 50 tales every 12 months and obtain, maybe, just over a dozen cash payouts. The cash payouts might just range between a token ten dollars up to a worthwhile three-figure sum or maybe more. Still you're going to be lucky to win beyond two or three thousand dollars every year in payouts.

It's a bad profit for many hundred hours of work! You'd be better off, serving coffee in a restaurant.

True, only some story writers consider their job so analytically. Most people enter contests solely for amusement. On the other hand, you might as well gain pleasure penning creative fiction and moreover take home above $10,000 every year in writing awards if you plan the strategy intelligently. And that means you succeed both ways.

How do you manage this? Send in the same core story to several competitions all at once!

Allow me to hastily explain. I don't mean to say submit the word-for-word same entry. A large number of award schemes require that a short fiction story hasn't been in print previously. Consequently it would be unfortunate if you got a $10 reward and had the tale published. A little later, you discovered you'd obtained a $1000 prize in a further award scheme with the self-same tale.

Rightly and honestly, you would not bank that one thousand dollars. The judges would rightly remove the award and exclude your entries in the future.

Alternatively, you could vary the story to the competition theme. Imagine a commercial enterprise remembers its 25th anniversary with a Silver styled contest, have Silver a key element of your tale. When it is a Thanksgiving holiday theme, make the tale take place at Thanksgiving. However, if it's a fantasy genre, position the narrative in any distant time or maybe setting. And so forth.

So long as your fundamental narrative is good, this can be modified to just about any topic or genre in moments. Switch the names of the characters plus areas, the expositions, snippets of conversation, and other small particulars.

You can accomplish it in just a few moments, even when you have to rewrite complete passages. Then your account is 'new' and, given that it's customized far more exactly to that competition, your odds of being successful will be a lot higher.

Is this reasonable? Examine virtually any timeless legend. Its plot is sure to mirror the storylines of several other previous stories. Bluebeard's Cupboard seems to have shown up in many disguises all over the world as well as all through the ancient past.

Editorial PR copy writers commonly write just one main feature article for a clientele, then modify that to submit to many publications. Their publishers really don't bother, if these periodicals don't seek the same market as each other.

Writing contests tend not to contend with each other, either.

This astute strategy has the benefit of a long historical precedent. Keep in mind, Shakespeare hardly ever devised a plot . For all his works, he simply copied a plot - and adapted it to his market.

That's a win-win contest system.

The greater you change the story, of course, the more distinctive it becomes. Morally, you need to modify every tale to the maximum amount you can. Yet it's far easier to redo and adapt a very good basic story for many non-competing competitions than to produce a uniquely distinct story for each and every one!

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