How wonderful it is to finally win a writing competition! Entering a writing competition is like buying a lottery ticket. You know the chances of winning are very small, and that if you saved all the money you spend on entering them you could probably live off the interest (slight exaggeration), but you can’t help thinking that maybe this time will be the time you do win. And I did! I won third prize in the “Claire Apps: Creative writing for all” competition in November 2010 with my short story “The Castle”.
You can read “The Castle” on the website “http://writing-experiment.webs.com, under “Competition Nov 2010 results” and “Short stories”.
http://writing-experiment.webs.com/competitionnov2010results.htm
The theme was domestic violence, which is obviously a difficult subject, so I wrote the story like a modern-day fairy tale (hence the castle in the title). As a writer, you want to make your readers understand what living in a violent situation is like, but more than that, you also want to make them feel what it’s like. However, you don’t want your readers to feel battered by your words, or for reading your story to be a stressful experience. And you also don’t want to be too melodramatic either, or the writing won’t ring true. I was aware of the need to downplay the violence itself, even though violence is melodramatic; living with domestic violence is living in a constant melodrama.
The word limit was only 1,000 words, which is a very small space in which to set a scene, make something happen and have some kind of resolution. I adapted the story from part of my first novel, which because it’s unpublished and took a long time to write, feels like a mammoth waste of time. However, it was good endurance training for writing my current novel, Nights in Paris, which I’m still young or naïve enough to hope will be a success.
There’s a song about love in the fabulous film Cabaret, set in 1931 Berlin, that could also apply to entering writing competitions. Liza Minnelli, astonishing and gorgeous in the role of Sally Bowles, sums it up perfectly: “Maybe this time I’ll be lucky, maybe this time I’ll win. Not a loser anymore, like the last time and the time before.”
