thoughts, words, deeds

a contest history

Have you ever won a contest and found out the prize was something totally different then what was advertised? Write about your experience with real life contests.

I don’t think I’ve ever had a contest where I was surprised by the prize. I never count on winning. I’ve won writing contests—once for money and once for publication, and a few other times just for the winning. I try to only enter reputable contests, so I’ve never had a case where I found the prize to be less than advertised, and occasionally, it’s been more.

The ones I remember have mostly been writing contests through school. I won one of each—fiction, creative non-fiction, and poetry. The poetry prize was through AWP, and that was money, which was nice. I entered a poem that I had written here, workshopped in class, and then rewritten so that I liked it, and luckily someone else did, too. The thing about that prize is that every time it is offered, a different judge is used, so a poem that didn’t win one semester had a chance the next, if it pleased a new judge more.

The CNF piece I entered into the concentration awards—which was basically the end of the year awards that were offered through the English department. I was a fiction student, so I basically entered because I could, and I was surprised at the win. That semester, every single award was given to a non-genre student.

I entered one of my short-shorts (it needed to be less than 2000 words, so that’s not as short as all that) into a contest where publication was the award. That semester, two of us won, and we were published in sequential editions of the publication. It’s my only real publication credit.

Besides writing, I tend not to enter into contests. Competition really makes me feel ill.