The Contest Boggle

Karen Templeton wrote a recent post about contests that brought up some fascinating points.

Since I'm new to all this, I have yet to fully understand the mystery that is the RWA writing contest. It goes like this: Each chapter holds a contest, in which entrants send in their first three chapters. These get judged by chapter members - anyone. The high scorers go to the next round where they get read by agents and editors who have volunteered for the job.

You could, like, win.

That's it.

Here are the negatives:

1. It costs money.
2. You don't win anything, especially money.
3. Agents and editors regularly admit that they almost never sign anyone from a contest. The dreck is so bad that Anna Genoese once referred to contest judging as "picking the best of the worst." (And yet, they still judge them. Are they optimists?)
4. There are no criteria for being a judge, so your work could lose out if your judge is an idiot.
5. The politics are hopeless and indecipherable. The judge could hate your genre, your punctuation, or heroes with blond hair. The judge could have a bad day. The judge could also skew your marks so that her friends score higher than you.
6. Every contest is only about the first three chapters, so you could lose to someone who has spent a year on the same three chapters and written "All work and no play makes Johnny a dull boy" for the other 250 pages.
7. Winning is meaningless, because there are a hundred of these contests, and agents and editors all say not to bother putting a win on your query letter.

Here are the positives:

1. You could get valuable, intelligent feedback on your work.
2. An agent or editor could fall in love with your writing and rescue you from obscurity.
3. ???

Ms. Templeton writes from the POV of a judge, which seems equally pointless as any negative feedback is treated with hysterical defensiveness from the writer and the judges have to curb their honesty.

Am I the only one who thinks that all of this is weird?

Then there are the Rita and the Golden Heart, the "big" yearly contests for published and unpublished works, respectively. At least this contest is about a full manuscript, but still, it costs money and the politics are out of control. Oh, and the winner doesn't win anything.

In the end, you're really only entering contests for your own amusement, as Ms. Templeton points out the unpleasant fact that good writing won't necessarily get you published anyway. Which is similar to a point I made once here, that everyone says your work must be utterly original and superior even to be considered - yet dreck still gets published anyway, only no one will own up to it.

I'm open-minded, so I've entered exactly one contest, the results of which should come out in the fall. I duly sent in my vaunted three chapters and paid my fee. I'll try anything once.

Maybe I'll get rescued from obscurity, but it's unlikely. I think I'll be hanging out here for a while.