GENERAL JUDGING COMMENTS
These are observations and notes made by various judges during the judging process for the 2007 competitions. They should provide some tips on what entrants may have done right or wrong, and offer some ideas about how to tackle your entries for our current or future competitions.
These comments are in no particular order; they're thoughts jotted down as we went along!
Entering competitions: The first thing to do when entering any competition is to find out everything you can about the organisation holding it. Read their entire web page. Read about the judges. Suss out the situation. Then target your story as best you can, to fit the organisation's ethic. For example, using outright profanities when entering a competition run by a Christian company is probably not going to earn you brownie points. ;-)
Next, read and re-read the competition entry guidelines - and fit yourself to them. If it means re-setting out your story to suit them, take the time and trouble. It could add marks to your totals.
Some entries were marked down because they were inappropriate for the category into which they were entered - particularly some of those in the Christian catetgory. Using the Lord's name in vain, for example - not appropriate in a Christian entry. Writing about dead people's ghosts - not appropriate because not Biblical. No matter how good the writing or story itself, if it doesn't fit the category, it's a waste of time. My advice: If you aren't a devout Christian who has done lots of Bible Study and understands the Christian faith, it's unlikely you'll get high marks in a Christian competition.
Some stories had great strength in one area, but let themselves down badly in others. For instance, a story that has good content but is very poorly written or polished suffers in the marking process. Also, documentary disguised as short story rarely works. Brilliant, heart-wrenching real life drama is exactly that - but it isn't a short story for a competition.
Polish your work. Check your grammar. Make sure it has a beginning that hooks the reader, a middle that keeps the pages turning, and an end that has an impact on the reader - satisfaction, happiness, shock, sorrow, whatever - but don't tail it off and let the reader down.
Presentation is also very important. Set the story out to make it as easy to read for the judges as possible. The best way to read a story is with proper paragraph indents, and no gaps between paragraphs (except where indicating a time break of course). In other words, set it out as a normal book is set out. It's a fact that sans serif fonts (like Arial) are harder on the eye for the reader, so encourage the judges to feel favourably toward you by good setting out, good clear serif fonts (like Times New Roman), and attention to detail. See our Submission Guidelines for more.
Beginning, Middle, End! Every story needs all three! - In fact, the main problem with a great many of the entries was a poor ending. If your ending lets your story down, then no matter how good the rest of it was, we are left with a poor impression. Endings are almost more important than the rest of the story.
Punctuation was disasterous in some cases. In some entries we had to re-read sentences two or three times before we could make sense of them, because of wrong or no punctuation. Go get Lynn Truss's book, "Eats Shoots and Leaves" - please!! Or an equivalent. But if you want to be taken seriously as a writer, get your grammar and punctuation right. I can't stress this enough!
Watch your timeline. In one story the mother died two years prior to sending her son off with a packed lunch. In another, one character woke another up twice within two paragraphs.
Don’t be OVERLY descriptive. The story is lost if every sight, sound and taste is described in minute detail. Metaphors can be wonderful descriptive devices but don’t over use those either.
Don't be over-wordy. Another error was turning the story into a professorial dissertation, or an exercise in long clever words that have the ordinary person's head reeling after the first sentence, and giving up after the first (horribly stilted) paragraph. Make friends with your readers; trying to prove how good you are at sesquipedalian quirks will only alienate them. Well - unless they really are professors!
And if you are going to use high-brow language, you'd better be darned sure that every word is used correctly, and your grammar lives up to it, too. (It rarely does.) One such entry was so enamoured by its own cleverness that it tied itself up in knots and simply made itself not only laughable, but sadly grammatically incorrect in several places. We still don't really know what the purpose of the story was - if there was one.
Be very careful, in polishing, of ambiguities that make the reader do a double-take. One classic sentence, for instance, went: 'Still clasping the literature, Joanna entered the nearest coffee shop and, having ordered a cappuccino, sat down and glanced at it.' I leave you to ponder this, but I will say that the following sentence clarified that she was in fact glancing at the literature, not the coffee.
Another example was the very first sentence of an otherwise well-written entry: "To a blind man who used to see snow is a trigger, a carrier of memories, an evocation of beauty like almost no other." A simple comma could have prevented us having to read it twice to understand what the writer was actually saying! Sometimes the apparent rules of grammar must be bent in order to make sense of the sentence. :-)
It's all too easy to hear something in your own mind, and not "hear" it in the mind of your readers. One thing you can try is having someone else read your story back to you, and note where they stumble or look flummoxed, or misunderstand something.
Do your research! For instance, in one story the police stated that the suspect’s finger prints did not match the prints on the victim’s neck. In reality, it is rare that finger prints can be lifted from skin (although it's possible in certain instances). And if you are going to have a story based around a murder, it does a disservice to the reader to only state what wasn’t the cause of death and not what WAS!
Dialogue, dialogue, dialogue! You must write the way real people speak. Putting fancy words and high-falutin' grammar into their conversation just doesn't work. No-one talks like that. Well, except me, and people are always picking on me for it! LOL!
Develop your characters! It doesn't matter what happens to them if the reader doesn't relate to them in some way, or care about them.
Character, character, character! Each of yours should have his or her own voice. If they all speak the same way and say the same things, they become part of a large neutral sea of people. Be sure you know your characters, before you try to make them a part of a story. Learn their backstory; know them intimately. If you don't know them yourself, how will you introduce them properly to your readers? Strong characterisation is essential.
BUT - don't overdo it! Don't create characters with voices no-one can understand. Especially, don't put heavy accents into speech; it distracts, and most readers will become impatient with having to work out what the character is trying to say. By all means mention that John has a maddeningly difficult Scottish/Irish/American/Polish/ whatever accent, but don't put your readers to the test by making them have to figure it out. Nothing wrong with the odd inflection or missed notes here and there, but be careful with it.
Keep your characters true. A greedy man who "never tips anybody and always orders cheap stuff" would not likely be dreaming of selling an antique heirloom so he could spend the money to "treat himself to a grand vacation on the French Riviera and buy a new car he had been eyeing for sometime as well." And a grandfather would not leave valuable property to a son whom he knew mistreated his daughter-in-law and favourite grandchild (cutting them out of any inheritance), and then be happy in heaven because that son was killed and the property ended up with the wife and child after all.
Excerpts from longer works: There is nothing wrong with entering chapters from a book you are writing, but there are some basics to observe - the first being to please make certain that the reader would never know it was part of a longer piece. Your tale should read as a wholly self-contained story that will stand on its own two feet. No references that will bewilder your unsuspecting audience.
The right style/genre! If you are entering a short story competition, the CRAFT required is short story writing. Some entries were very documentary in style, making them unlikely to win up against true short stories. As articles for magazines they would be great, but please remember what kind of competition you are entering, and target it correctly. By all means base a short story on a documentary article you may have written, but ensure that the end result IS a short story.
Children's Stories: Unless the competition states it is for children's stories, it's usually a waste of your time and money entering. Children's stories just don't equate, in content, and are very difficult to compare with the rest of the entries.
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