Every so often my Mom, who is an artist, talks about entering art contests held by, say, the National Parks Foundation or California State Parks. They are what I call literal art contests. They don’t want imagery or symbolism or abstraction–they want pictures of the parks. Half Dome in spring or a deer grazing on the side of a mountain, that sort of thing.

From what I can tell, the CBC Literary Awards is the writing equivalent of those art contest. The Canadian award has a podcast of this year’s winners available online. I listened to the first place English winner, chosen from 5,000 original unpublished submissions. It’s very Canadian. There’s ice fishing, hockey players, pot smoke, etc.

But it’s a good story, to be sure. Give is a listen if you get some time. (via)

~ Joy

I have a really hard time coming up with titles for things that I write, or naming things in general. After coming up with a killer first sentence, I forget that the first thing people will actually read is the damn title.

I normally end up with a boring title, erring on the safe side so I don’t have something laughable or cliche as the title. Don’t want to be too long. Don’t want to do the one-word thing. Don’t want to give away any surprises. Don’t want to be ham-handedly cryptic. There are the don’ts; what are the do’s?

I don’t know! Maybe you do. Here is my personal list of don’ts for various writing-related things … feel free to add some do’s (or more dont’s).

1) Literary Journals: If you are starting a new one, right on. You might not want to put the word “train” in the name. There are at least four something-trains or train-somethings. Why? I don’t know. Plus, at least two of the trains are really good. So you will look like a copycat. Bonus don’t: Literary/Art/Mythology references are tricky to do. Give yourself a solid pretentiousness check beforehand.

2) Blogs: If your title or description includes “musings” or “rants,” you’re not alone. Not even close to alone.

3) Books: I want to remember what your book is called! When it is a super-long name or has a super-long subtitle, I have a really hard time remembering it (and thus finding it). Help a sister out. (Check out Bookseller’s list of the oddest book titles of the year here.)

-Marcia

Short and sweet because I’m busy:

Feb 5, 2008 meeting: Word Pirates wrote for 20 minutes based on the titles of Goya’s Caprichos.

Feb 19, 2008 meeting: Word Pirates shared tales of living in the Bay Area and then wrote an essay around the “My Word” section of the San Francisco Chronicle. Guidelines here.

~ Joy

Word Pirates,

Remember that time I had us do an exercise around the Modern Love column in The New York Times. Well, dig those out and start working on them, because they could get you a book deal.

The New York Observer has an article on how many book deals have come out of that column. Apparently there are lots, including one of the latest books pimped by Oprah, Eat, Pray, Love. And more:

The most recent deals came just last week: Ellen Graf sold a book titled The Thirteenth Horse Won, based on a column she wrote about marrying a Chinese businessman she barely knew at the age of 46; and Melanie Gideon, an Oakland-based writer, sold a book called The Slippery Year, which was pitched “as similar to Elizabeth Gilbert and Nora Ephron, a bittersweet and wise month-by-month account of the year in her life during which, upon turning 43 and confronted with her own mortality, she chooses to wake herself up, embrace the passage of time, identify what matters (and what does not)—and ‘finally decide to live,’” as the industry newsletter Publisher’s Lunch put it.

Good to know there is a method to my madness after all.

~ Joy

Hmmm… What do you think? Should I install a staircase like this in my house?

More here

~ Joy

Kelly Spitzer of “SmokeLong Quarterly” and Ellen Parker of “FRiGG” ask a group of writers about money … Do you only write for publications that pay? Do you pay reading fees and contest entry fees?

They seemed to agree that pay wasn’t a concern when considering where to submit their stories.
Dave Clapper, also of “SmokeLong Quarterly,” said of reading fees:

When working as a stage actor, I never had to pay to audition (and the potential pay there dwarfed these prizes, while the potential audience was smaller). Why should writing be different? Do painters pay galleries to have their work considered? Sculptors? Dancers? Singers? Maybe I’m wrong and some of these disciplines do require fees to be considered, but it seems like literature is the only artistic field where this is the accepted norm. Why?

Me? I’d prefer to submit to places that pay, even if it is a token payment that simply acknowledges that you gave them something of value. However, I wouldn’t call it a hard-and-fast rule, and it would depend on how much I loved the publication.
As far as reading fees, I feel like “labor of love” goes two ways. OK, publication, I concede that you aren’t in it for the cash either. But if you want to be a publication, you have to process the submissions that come your way. I realize it’s not a racket. These literary publications aren’t laughing and rolling in piles of money on round, velvet-covered beds. But if you are using writers to fund anything, your publication will probably go under soon anyway.

Reasonable contest fees are a little different, since this is a competition for a prize. There will be a winner and, if you win, you will get something. (Unless the contest is judged by Zadie Smith, see previous post) As long as it’s not some literary Ponzi scheme, these fees can be a way of ensuring a contest remains manageable with serious entrants, in addition to providing some funding. (This differs from a reading fee in that fewer people will submit something without the promise of a financial pay off)

What do you think?

–Marcia

Zadie Smith refused to award a prize in a contest she was judging because no one was good enough for her.

This is a difficult thing to write. Just like everybody, we at The Willesden Herald are concerned about the state of contemporary literature. We are depressed by the cookie-cutter process of contemporary publishing, the lack of truly challenging and original writing, and the small selection of pseudo-literary fictio-tainment that dominates our chain bookstores. We created this prize to support unpublished writers, and, with our five grand, we put our money where our mouths are. We have tried to advertise widely across this great internet of ours and to make the conditions of entry as democratic and open as we could manage. There is no entry fee, there are no criteria of age, race, gender or nation. The stories are handed over to the judges stripped of the names of the writers as well as any personal detail concerning them (if only The Booker worked like that!) Our sole criterion is quality. We simply wanted to see some really great stories. And we received a whole bunch of stories. We dutifully read through hundreds of them. But in the end – we have to be honest – we could not find the greatness we’d hoped for. It’s for this reason that we have decided not to give out the prize this year.

This happened to me once. I sent a short story into a fiction contest only to be informed months later that the judges were not going to award the prize because they felt no one was good enough to win. It was insulting to me and to everyone else who entered. It was also rather suspicious too, since they charged a $10 reading fee.

Well, guess what Zadie Smith? Contests are crapshoots. People send you entries and you pick the winner from whatever you get. The sampling of stories you receive is not symbolic of the state of current literature. It is a matter of how well-advertised the contest was, how much time you gave people to respond, and whether people (read: good writers) even care about your prize to begin with. As a judge, it’s your duty to pick a winner from whatever you get. Anyone who put on a writing prize is implicitly agreeing to this little contract. To not pick a winner is breaking a trust.

Also, what’s up with this?

Once again, the judges and I, we are absolutely certain there is great writing out there on this internet. Many of the entries we received suggested it. But we didn’t receive enough.

But you only have to pick one winner, right? Then there doesn’t need to be “enough” good writers, only one. Seriously, am I missing something here?

Again, contests are crapshoots. If a contest gets a bunch of bad entries, then it’s supposed to be the best bad writer’s lucky day. But to not pick a winner because no one measured up to some ideal in your head is lame and a cop-out.

Worse, it’s not doing your job.

~ Joy

I am torn. The person who wrote this is one of those self-satisfied people I usually ignore, and yet I rather agree with his 101 Reasons to Stop Writing so far. Especially No. 1: You Don’t Buy Books.

One of the things I got from the Word Pirates’ experiment with NaNoWriMo: By the end of the month, the website was bragging that participants had written over one billion words. Imagine if all those people had read one billion words instead. I’m all for people following their dreams, but if no one is reading books, there’s no point in anyone writing them. Or, as the self-satisfied dude said in an interview, “The biggest problem facing the publishing industry today is that the people who should be buying books are instead trying to write them.”

Luckily, Word Pirates are voracious readers, so we’re good.

~ Joy