Competitive Writing

Now I'm not talking about lining up ten writers in front of ten desks and setting them a time limit to write a competition piece but then again....

Once you start looking there are a lot of competitions out there for writers. Short stories, flash fiction, novellas, novels, plays and scripts on every subject imaginable. The question is should you write competitively or should you try to fit your existing pieces to the competition?

Often I will see a competition that I think I might have a pre-written piece for only to find that the closing date was last week or that the required word count is either half what I have or double.  It's another huge mountain to try and climb but I think competitions can be a great motivator especially to write new things.

I recently entered a couple - one was nothing but dialogue and the other is for a radio play. Obviously I hope to win win win but actually what I'd really like is the opportunity to see how the other entrants prepared for the comps, what they wrote and most importantly the inner thought processes of the judges.

The judging feedback I got from Pen to Print was patchy at best - in fact it sounded like they had read a completely different piece of writing!  Not that I'm desperate for heaps of criticism but sometimes it is really useful to have a decent critique otherwise how will we ever improve?

Perhaps we should propose competitive writing for the next Olympics, see who steps up to the plate. Any takers?