Twelve Quid and a Prayer: My Decade of Feeding the Competition Machine

I did the maths last month, mostly because I was procrastinating, and the total came to just under £740. That's a decade of entering writing competitions. Seven hundred and forty quid, give or take the free ones, and precisely zero trophies on the mantelpiece.

And yet I'm not here to tell you it was a waste. Bear with me.

The first one is always Bridport

Everyone starts somewhere, and for a lot of British writers that somewhere is the Bridport Prize. It's the big one — the one your local writing group mentions in hushed tones, the one with actual prize money and, more importantly, actual readers on the other end. My first entry was a story about a man who repaired vending machines. It did not get longlisted. It did not deserve to.

But something odd happens when you pay twelve pounds for the privilege of being judged. You finish the story. Properly finish it — the ending rewritten, the adverbs culled, the title agonised over for a full evening. That story would have sat in a folder marked 'drafts' forever otherwise. The entry fee wasn't buying a prize. It was buying a deadline.

The economy of the almost

Here's how the circuit actually works, for those lucky enough not to know. You write the story. You polish it within an inch of its life. You pay your fee, usually between £8 and £15, and you hit submit, and then you wait. The waiting lasts anywhere from six weeks to six months. Then you get an email, or more often you don't, and you check the results page anyway, scanning for your own name like a gambler checking the horses.

I've had two near-misses in ten years. One story made a shortlist of twenty-five from about 2,000 entries — announced with great fanfare, no prize attached, no feedback offered. The other got a personal email from a judge saying it was 'this close'. That email is printed out and stuck to the wall above my desk, which my partner finds hilarious and I find entirely reasonable.

What the money actually buys

Let's be honest about the transaction. Competition organisers are running a business, and entry fees are the business model. Some are better value than others, and after ten years I've developed a rough hierarchy.

Worth it: Bridport, the Bristol Short Story Prize, the Northern Writers' Awards (subsidised, and the northern bias works in my favour), and the Fish Publishing competitions out of Ireland. These have track records, real judges, and — crucially — a history of winners going on to agents and deals.

Sometimes worth it: The smaller regional ones. The local arts festival competition with 60 entries is a genuinely better use of £5 than a mega-competition with 5,000, purely on odds. I won a Hertfordshire literature festival thing in 2019 with a story I'd been rejected from four bigger prizes. The prize was £50 and a bottle of something drinkable. I've never valued a win more.

Rarely worth it: Anything that promises publication in an anthology you then have to buy, or that charges £25 for the privilege. There's a whole grey economy of competitions that exist to harvest fees, and they're easy to spot once you've been burned once or twice.

Losing on purpose

The friend who talked me into my first entry — the same one from the WhatsApp writing group, though she'd deny the influence — put it better than I can. She said competitions are the applause track of the writing world: you hear them in the background, they keep the show moving, but nobody's actually clapping for you.

That sounds bleak. It isn't, really. Once you accept that you are almost certainly not going to win, the whole thing gets lighter. You enter to have something finished. You enter because a story needs an audience of one judge to justify existing. You enter because in February, when the days are short and the novel is going badly, a deadline in March is a rope thrown across a gap.

Some years I've entered eight or nine. Last year I entered three, and honestly, three felt healthier. The circuit rewards a certain obsessive temperament I'd rather not feed too often.

The practical bit

If you're going to do this, a few things I wish I'd known at the start:

• Read the past winners before you write. Every competition has a house style, even when it swears it doesn't. Some love the quiet domestic story; some want the twist. Write to the room.
• Recycle ruthlessly. A story that didn't place at one competition can absolutely place at another. Judges differ. Timing differs. One of my most-entered stories has been rejected eleven times and shortlisted twice.
• Count the entries, not the fees. A £10 fee for a competition with 300 entries beats a £5 fee for one with 4,000. Do the division.
• Set an annual budget. Mine is £60. When it's gone, it's gone, and the stories go to magazines instead, which is a different kind of rejection with better reading material.

The strange optimism of it all

I'll keep entering, is the thing. Not because I believe the phone call is coming — though a small, embarrassing part of me always does — but because the twelve quid buys something no other part of this job sells. It buys a finished story, a date on the calendar, and one more lottery ticket in a game where the real prize was the discipline all along.

That's a rotten line for a competition entry, mind. I'll rework it.