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I owe it all to a piece of dodgy chicken. Normally I was rarely home from work before 5.30pm – so had I not been prone on the sofa with a bout of food poisoning, I'd never have seen Richard and Judy proudly announcing, ‘We’ve already had thousands of entries for this, our first short story competition. You’ve got one more week to get yours in.'
I'd written 'Rapid eye movements' six months earlier, and submitted it to a couple of competitions. It had done nothing, but I liked the story, which was based on what I thought was an interesting premise: that it's possible to decide what to dream about before going to sleep. My protagonist, a depressed 20-something librarian, gives up her job and cuts herself off from family and friends in order to perfect 'directed dreaming'. As her dreams become more elaborate and captivating, her waking hours seem even more drab and banal. By the end of the story, she's contrived to spend most of her life in her dream world.
I looked again at the story, polished it up a bit, then sent it off and forgot about it. Three months later I received a call from the R&J producer, telling me that 'Rapid eye movements' had been shortlisted. They were planning a kind of mini-Oscars ceremony to announce the winner, so would I come to London, along with the other 14 finalists, the following Tuesday?
I was convinced I hadn't won – apparently there had been over 17,000 entries – and, as it meant using up a valuable day's annual leave, I nearly didn't bother going. But I was curious to see R&J in the flesh, and experience the build-up to a live TV show. So I put on my sensible black boots, crush-proof long grey skirt and favourite red velvet blouse. Finally l selected which dangly silver earrings to wear (l must wear the right earrings or I don't feel like 'me') and boarded the train from Cardiff.
Before the show started there was a lot of hanging about. The finalists, many of whom had been writing for years, oozed confidence, and we all made polite conversation whilst weighing each other up until our 'slot' came. We were stationed at tiny tables in the studio, sipping champagne, whilst the three judges commented on our stories.
At that stage, all I wanted was to hear Tony Parsons, Martina Cole or Suzy Feay say something positive about my story – and indeed there were several complimentary references to 'the one about dreaming'.
Then came crunch time. Judy announced the final three 'in reverse order'. Mine wasn't third. 'And in second place we have Jo Verity...' (Second? Wow!) But before she could get any further, Richard jabbed a finger at the golden envelope and hissed, 'No – it's this one!' Flustered, Judy corrected herself. 'Ooops. Sorry. The runner-up is John Galloway.'
I had a split-second to work out that if my name was still in that envelope, I must be the winner. Then – total nightmare – I had to speak on Iive telly... (l tried to eradicate that part from my memory but, thanks to friends and family, I have numerous copies of the show to prove how incoherent I was!)
My prize? An acrylic plaque, bearing the title of the competition, a silver bookmark (we all had those) and publication of my story (unpaid) in the following Sunday's Independent, where Suzy Feay was Literary Editor.
Why did my story win? I won't claim to have any definitive answers, but since then I have spent some time analysing which of my stories have done well. Of the 30 or so I've submitted, seven have been published, broadcast or won high-profile competitions – though not always at first submission. And the successful ones fall into two categories.
The first are character-driven. I start with a character that interests me and, once I've fleshed that person out in my mind, I dump them in a situation where I hope they will make their presence felt: a cantankerous old man in a hospital bed; a misogynistic divorce lawyer at a small-town social club; an egocentric sculptress at a Thanksgiving dinner.
The second are the more plot-driven 'what if' stories. What if a woman finds dreaming more appealing than being awake? What if a test-tube containing a fragile flower appears in a vandalised shopping centre? What if a woman buys a pair of boots and, in the box, finds a tiny pair of wings to attach to them?
l have to report that my 'what if' stories have been more successful in competitions. I think that, when there are hundreds of entries to plough through, the 'quieter' stories, those demanding more effort from the reader, are less likely to register with the judges. These may be better suited to anthologies, or collections where a balanced selection is called for.
So my first word of advice for winning win a short story competition is to choose a story which has a 'tingle factor' – some kind of startling premise, or surreal image, that will intrigue the reader. A while ago, I was queuing for a bus when a sentence popped into my head – 'Her name was Lola and she had 12 toes' – which was the jumping-off point for a new story. On another occasion I took the phrase 'I love you with all my heart' and played around with the notion of a lovesick poet agreeing to a heart-swap with a rational scientist. After the operation, would the scientist feel that romantic love stemmed from her heart and the poet from the chemicals in his brain?
My second piece of advice is to build up a 'library' of short stories that you’re happy with. For me, this works far better than trying to conjure up a story from scratch for a particular competition. Unless a story is already simmering away in my mind, I can't simply produce something on demand. I find Mslexia's 'Showcase' themes are really helpful to spark off ideas, and I try to push them to the limit: to approach the subject from an odd angle so that it's more fun to write and encourages originality. When a piece is finished, l put it on the shelf to mature for a few months. This means that when a new competition comes along, I have a stock of worked-up stories to choose from.
My third piece of advice is to match the story to the competition. Every competition has its own particular 'feel', often suggested by where the winning story might be published, or the kind of language used to set out the rules. Does the whole thing feel trendy or traditional, zany or flashy? Winning has a lot to do with correctly identifying the kind of story that would win that particular competition.
When I entered the Western Mail (a kind of Welsh Daily Mail) competition, I decided against literary fiction and chose something simpler and more uplifting. The previous year, when driving past a shuttered and graffitied row of shops in a down-at-heel part of Cardiff, I'd wondered what it would take to rehabilitate the area. 'The experiment', written in the form of a myth, won the competition.
The story tells how a run-down neighbourhood is transformed when a test-tube containing a single yellow freesia flower appears, without explanation, on the window ledge of a boarded-up shop. It is smashed repeatedly, but mysteriously gets replaced every time. Gradually, local people make their own contributions – more flowers, trinkets, candles, a length of velvet –until the ledge becomes a kind of shrine to hope, and triggers the refurbishment of the derelict shops and houses.
My fourth tip relates to this last one. Don’t attempt to adapt your story to please a particular set of named judges. The style of the competition is more important than the writing style of the adjudicators. You mustn't assume that a judge who writes humorous fiction will go for a funny story. Judges are selected because they are professionals and will not be bound by their own proclivities.
So to my fifth tip: put all your energy into reaching the shortlist – which means that you'll have something to put into the covering letter of your next anthology or magazine submission. That means making sure you engage the reader in the first few sentences. Don't ramble on about the weather or the landscape unless it's pertinent. A story should start as near the end as possible; if it works without the first paragraph, why is that paragraph there? And choose an intriguing title – a phrase from the text often works well. My story entitled 'The party' got nowhere; the very same story, retitled 'But there must have been some good times', was selected for an anthology.
My sixth tip: examine any of your stories that make the shortlist. This is a valuable indicator that a story 'has legs' (sorry, but that's the phrase publishers use). If it's in the last 50 of, say, 1,000 entries, it must have pushed some of the right buttons. See where you can tighten it up. Cut the flab. Lose bland adjectives. Replace adverb-verb combinations with better verbs. Try rewriting it in a different tense - changing to the present tense can give a story a different pace. Read the final draft aloud - it's amazing how easy it is to overlook a repeated word or unintentional double entendre. When it’s as good as you can make it, get someone that you trust to read it. I have found constructive criticism from fellow writer at Cardiff Writers' Circle really helpful, not only with improving my work but also in honing my self-critical skills.
My final tip (though it seems obvious): make sure you've complied with the competition rules. To the letter. If it states, 'A maximum of 2,500 words, double-spaced, Times New Roman, 12pt on white paper’, do exactly that. lf you don't, your manuscript may go straight in the bin. (They keep the money, of course.)
Did winning the R&J competition change my life? After the show Martina Cole warned me to expect my phone to be ringing off the wall with offers from agents and publishers. ln fact I received just one call: from Janet Thomas of Honno Welsh Womens' Press, who had already contacted me when I had a story published in Mslexia. She wanted to know if I had 'anything longer' to show them – good for me, but a sad comment on the status of the short story in the UK. As it happened, I'd just completed my first novel, which Honno went on to publish the following year.
No, winning short story competitions hasn’t changed my life. But it has done what I'd hoped it would. It's proved to me that I can write. And that's all l really needed to know.
JO VERITY had a successful career as a medical illustrator and graphic artist before turning to writing in her 50s. Following that first novel, Everything in the Garden, she has gone on to publish five more novels.
This is an updated version of an article that was originally published in Issue 27 of Mslexia.
