So, You’re Coordinating a Writing Contest… by Emily Cotler

So, You’re Coordinating a Writing Contest…
by
Emily Cotler

What, are you nuts?

Coordinating a writing contest is ridiculously time-consuming and largely thankless. It will cause your mailbox to swell. Your dining room table will be taken over by an invasion of large envelopes and address lists and self-addressed-stamped-postcards. The word tyvek will take on new meaning in your life.

Still want to do it? Yes? Really? Bless you. Thank you. Every member of your chapter has just breathed a lungfull of relief that the position has been filled and they won’t be solicited for the post.

Now that you’re locked in, here’s the bomb: your scoresheet needs work and you need to come up with guidelines and charts.

Charts? What? There were no charts in the job description. No, but maybe there should have been. Coordinating a writing contest is more than soliciting volunteer judges and making countless trips to the post office. It’s up to you to make the contest better. Here are a few tips on how.

The scoresheet. Look at it carefully. How straightforward is it? Where are its ambiguities? Most importantly, does it address the theme of the contest itself. What did last year’s feedback from judges and contestants target as good and weak points. Pass it around your chapter before the actual contest and ask for suggestions. Is the scoresheet fair? If not, consider it a bad hair-do and change it. For instance, some common problems with many scoresheets are hero/ine’s motivation, or external conflict. Are these things really discernible and crystal clear to a reader in the first chapter or two? Should an entrant be docked points if she has decided to hold off telling all in the first thirty pages? Are there points allocated to writing voice? Pacing? Title? Originality? Cleverness of plot? Maybe there should be.
Guidelines. Consider enclosing a set of judging guidelines with each judge’s packet. Guidelines that specifically recommend how to evaluate particular points will streamline the interpretation of the scoresheet and therefore of the contest itself. (See So, you’re judging a writing contest...-March HeartBeat.)
Charts. Several contests enclose ranking charts when they send entries back to entrants. The word on the street is that these charts are greatly appreciated. Of course there is no need to display the rankings so that Jane Writer, author of Bad Beating Hearts is advertised by name and book title as being the lowest scoring entrant. You’re not trying to make some poor woman eat a lot of chocolate. Rather a listing of entries by number, and then a charting of judges’ scores with the finalists identified in some fashion is a safe, decent, and informative method in which to give all entrants a clear picture of how they finished against the pack. Entrants find it very helpful in interpreting judges’ scores if they can see how they fared against that particular judge’s average. Detroit’s Between the Sheets contest gives great chart. Ask them for a sample.

Of course, a good contest coordinator encourages feedback and makes it easy for all participants to give it. My own two cents: I think there should be an industry-wide change from the word CONTEST to the word COMPETITION. Contest connotes a crap shoot or a lottery, whereas Competition brings the idea of entrants vying through skill for a top spot. But then again, I can only suggest since I am not nuts enough to be a contest coordinator. My admiration to those of you who are.