Lessons Learned Judging Contests

Right now, all my spare time goes to reading manuscripts for a contest. This isn't the first contest I've judged, nor is it likely to be the last. Although the effort is certainly time-consuming, it's also a great education. I thought I'd share some of the lessons learned, lessons that apply to any contest you enter.

1. Read the directions. I know you're probably thinking, well, duh! But I can't tell you how many people goof this up. They misread the word count or the number of layouts or the sizes or word length or whatever. They don't include everything that's requested. I suggest you print out the rules and highlight them as you check them off. Ask someone to double-check your efforts. It's easy to get confused when you are nervous, and all of us get nervous when we enter c0mpetitions.

2. Don't annoy the judges. Another, duh! However, one person in this contest sent me a testy email demanding to know why I hadn't acknowledged receipt of his manuscript. I hadn't acknowledged it because I was out of town doing booksignings, and I hadn't seen it. I gave his work a fair reading, but another judge might not have been so forgiving. The rules said not to send anything that required a signature for receipt, which is a pretty clear indication that they didn't want the judges to be bothered. (Yep, that's what that means.)

3. Do put your name on everything you send in. When I judged the Best of British Scrapbooking and Card Contest, I was shocked at how many entries were not properly labelled. When a judge is comparing a lot of entries, it's easy for your work to get separated from your cover letter. Make it clear what's yours. (Of course, if the contest is a blind contest, ignore this.)

4. Use your head when you package your entry. One of the Best of British entrants copied six of her layouts onto one sheet of paper, then folded that paper into itsy bits and stuffed it all into a tiny envelope. It came out looking like an origami project gone wrong. Two of the manuscripts I received were packaged in stuff that caused a huge mess, with stuff falling out, sticking to everything, and generally causing havoc. Another chose a box so big that I might have to add an addition to my home to store it. Another taped and bound her manuscript with such gusto that I spent twenty minutes trying to release the papers and a half an hour prepping the packing materials for the recycling bin. One person three-hole punched his manuscript and put it in a binder. Most readers prefer loose pages. That means we can slip them into a bag and haul them around with us easily. The binder was definitely overkill, although I appreciated that he was trying to make it easier on me, it wasn't.

5. Be honest but not stupid. Don't tell the judges you just whipped this project out in your spare time for a lark. Look at it from a judges' point of view. Here we are giving these entries our best, spending our time on them, ignoring our own work, and a person who didn't give this much effort is basically dissing our craft! If you don't care, don't enter. Leave the field open for people to whom the contest matters. Also, don't tell me how many contests you've entered and lost. That does not inspire confidence!

6. Tell me about yourself, but don't go overboard. One entrant in the Best of British did ten layouts all featuring photos of her. She was sprawled over a sofa with a rose in her teeth and the header was "BEAUTY." She was posed in a half shadow of a doorway with her head cocked back and her eyes closed. That one was called, "MYSTERY." By the time the other judges and I got to the fourth entry--"SEDUCTIVE"--we were rolling on the floor laughing. Needless to say, she didn't make it to the finals. By the same token, tell me your background, but twenty pages of stuff or a page that looks like it came from a publicity kit are not going to help you. They'll just make my eyes glaze over.

7. Make sure you mail your entry in plenty of time. It's really sad when an entry shows up after the deadline. Mail delivery can be unpredictable, and usually if you ask, the folks at the post office or at Fed Ex or wherever will give you the broadest range of arrival times. So do yourself a favor and mail/send your entry in early.

Then move on.

Yes, move on.

Don't fret about this contest. You learned something by getting ready for it. You completed something important. You grew. So you've already benefited, you see. And someone, somewhere saw your work and formed an opinion of you. If you don't make it to the winners' circle in this contest, you might still advance somewhere, somehow in another.

Yes, it's hard. Yes, you are nervous. And yes, we've all been through this. Remember that the judges know what this feels like. And we're rooting for you. We sincerely hope you'll do well, because we enjoy seeing good work.

How to Make a Contest Judge Very, Very Grumpy

The organizers of the contest I was judging sent an urgent email saying that a few of the judges had opted out at the last minute. Would I review two more entries?

Of course, I said, "Yes."

One of those is still upsetting me.

You see, this particular entry featured a charming and highly original story idea. To my mind, it was "high concept." It was a big idea that causes people to smile and say, 'Ahhhh!"

But the writer didn't proof her work. The 30 pages were riddled with extra spaces between words, lack of indentation for paragraphs, missing spaces between words, extra periods at the end of sentences, misspellings, verb tense mistakes ("lead" for "led"), and a total disregard for common usage of commas. At first, I simply marked these using the yellow highlight function. Toward the end of the piece, I started to get hacked off. Really annoyed.

You see, a contest entry or a query for an agent should represent your BEST work. You are consciously, and by definition, trying to set your best foot forward. To ask anyone to read your work when you haven't gone through it and polished it to perfection is like asking a guest to come over for Thanksgiving dinner to a dirty, messy house. A house festooned with wet towels, cans overrun with garbage, dirty toilets, and a grubby floor.

Wow, you are thinking, Joanna, you've really gone off the edge on this.

Maybe. But then again, maybe not.

You see, writing is my profession. I worked 40-hours a week in college to put myself through school. I went into massive amounts of debt to buy an education. Despite my full-time job, I still graduated cum laude, and it would have been summa cum laude had I not gotten tripped up in a statistics class. I take my work very seriously. I believe that publication is an honor. A privilege. I take my readers very seriously. Their attention is an honor. Their time--and mine--is a nonrefundable resource that is precious.

Even today, I struggle to improve my writing. Recently I asked an English teacher for clarification on "which" and "that" usage. I'm still working to perfect my skills with those words! And even in this article, I will stop and look up spellings and meanings of words as I go along. Every piece I write is edited many times over. That's just part of the job.

So when someone submits a piece for evaluation, I give that piece hours of attention. Yes, you read that right: HOURS. I was told to expect to spend 45 minutes judging each piece. I spent 2 and 3 hours per piece. I did not give them a cursory look and then assign numbers to the heuristic grid. I highlighted comments as I went along. I line-edited the submissions, and used the strike-through function to show wordiness. I noted missing commas, missplaced modifiers, faults of logic, and sequencing errors. Such editing in the marketplace is valued at $5 a page, on the low end of the professional editing scale. Each contest piece was 30 pages long. So I offered each contestant $150 worth of my time.

Which in this case was wasted. I say "wasted" because this particular entrant obviously didn't take the contest seriously. Didn't spend the time necessary to master the basics of our craft. Didn't put in the baseline effort needed to prepare a story for a contest, much less for publication.

In short, I guess I'm miffed because I was willing to "waste" my valuable time...but the person submitting that particular entry wasn't equally willing to spend his/hers!

Here's the shame of it: He/She had a wonderfully creative idea for a story. He/She was gifted with a delightful imagination. These are God-given talents. All this editing stuff can be learned! But those talents are gifts.

Then there's the underlying premise of any competition: The entrant promised me his/her best work in exchange for my time and attention.

And I was cheated.

What a shame.

Is it any wonder that I'm still sort of grumpy about that particular entry?