PICTURE this: You’ve honed your craft and steeled your nerves and have been sending out your writing to contests for some time. After receiving many form rejection letters, then occasional notes of encouragement from editors, you start finding longer responses in your inbox. One is related to an exciting prize. The readers enjoyed your main character, and the central conflict in your manuscript was moving. The editors also admired the precision of your language. Your eyes scan the e-mail and find a “congratulations” in the final paragraph. “Congratulations,” you read, “on receiving an honorable mention.” Again.
As writers, we know that making a contest’s final rounds is an honor. Readers are engaging with your work, and the fact that you’re often close to the prize shows you have improved. Still, when this happens, it’s easy to feel trapped in a literary version of Zeno’s paradox, always getting closer but never reaching the destination. What might you be missing? What distinguishes an honorable mention from a winning entry? Here is what writing contest judges and editors have to say.
Above all, craft is essential and must be well executed in all facets of a winning work. Novelist Laurie Loewenstein, a judge for the Jamesclear, masterful, and controlled. By Chapter Two, the story is moving forward—characters are experiencing internal shifts caused by external circumstances.” The runners-up, says Loewenstein, “exhibit at least two of these qualities but not all three or not to as high a degree.”
