... you need to learn a few things about how contests work. Maybe you already know. Many won't. I've told this story here before but it's important and worth repeating.
A few years ago I was appointed by a state Arts Commission as one of three out-of-state judges who would select ten scriptwriters to receive a $7000 fellowship each. Wow! Oregon has never given this much money to writers, let alone scriptwriters, who usually are treated like second-class citizens in writing communities. At any rate, there was myself, a professor in Texas and an artistic director in California. A white male, a black woman, and a gay man. How politically correct.
We were given 70-odd scripts from which to select the ten winners. We considered the scripts, made our private lists, and met on a conference call to select the winners as a committee.
We each had made our Top Ten list, the ten writers who would get the fat fellowships if each of us was the only judge. And guess what? Not one writer made more than one list! We had no agreement whatever, NONE, on what the best ten scripts were.
THIS IS EVERYTHING YOU EVER NEED TO KNOW ABOUT WRITING CONTESTS.
For the curious, this is how it turned out. We decided that everyone's top three got a fellowship. Nine awards. One to go. We spent hours and hours making this last choice. I got my #4 for the reason that he was a screenwriter. All 9 awards had gone to playwrights.
The moral: contests are a crapshoot. The winners have to do with the tastes of the judge, not the material. NOT THE MATERIAL. Different judges select different winners.
So if you lose, don't sweat it. AND IF YOU WIN, DON'T FEEL TOO GOOD. You just got lucky. You got the right judge for your material. Some other judge would not be so warm about your work, trust me.
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