Unhealthy Competition

Last year I entered a well-known writing competition on a lark. 

Unlike the lark, I’m not an early riser, and I confine my song to the solitude of my car with the windows rolled up and the stereo cranked up high enough to ensure that no one will inadvertently hear me, not even myself.  So, my reference to the lark is done primarily on a whim, which is very meta if you think about it.

So anyway, to continue the bird theme, I managed to write a short story in time to beat the contest’s early bird deadline. I didn’t do this to save five dollars off the entry fee, but because I knew if I didn’t write the story and submit it sooner rather than later, I’d be overcome by inertia and crushed by the machinery of my own procrastination. (I like to imagine that my procrastination is a wheat combine, and I am always running just a step or two ahead of it.)

The word limit for the short story division was 1500 words (or about 8 double-spaced pages).  I groused (the second bird reference for those of you keeping track) for a week or two (or three … and just ahead of the combine) about how 1500 words isn’t even enough runway to get a proper story off the ground, let alone soar like an eagle (three). What kind of theme or characters could I possibly develop in only eight pages?  Even the most insipid tripe requires a proper four or five thousand words to really bring out the savoriness of the tripe.

That’s when it hit me.  What if I parodied the word limit itself in a story?  What if I compressed an entire romance novel into a mere 1500 words?  More specifically, what if I wrote the equivalent of a Hallmark™ Christmas movie in a mere eight pages? 

The idea titillated (a fourth and somewhat obtuse bird reference if you stretch your imagination) me.  I accepted the challenge and set out to write the world’s fastest paced Christmas romance known to mankind.  A Christmas romance on nitro.

It took some doing!  My first draft weighed in at a whopping 1525 words.  You might think it would be very easy to trim 25 words out of a story, but you’d be wrong.  When the story is already a super-saturated, compressed, hyper-refined confection, the removal of a single word could make the entire structure come crashing down, turning the souffle into scrambled eggs.

It took seven or eight revisions over the course of a month, but I finally got the story distilled down to its barest essence.  It is the Everclear® of short stories. It is 100% cacao. It is ghee. (Note that none of these things are very good for you in large quantities.)

I submitted the story, confident that it would at least make 250^th place in the honorable mention category.  Aim low, that’s my motto!

One of the insidious things about writing competitions is how long you have to wait for a reply.  This particular one required a wait of about six months.  Six lo-o-o-ng months of pretending not to think about it.  A half a year of deluding myself into thinking that I had not, in fact, submitted a story to a writing competition, thereby fooling the impish spirits that derail such things. I don’t believe in jinxes, but everyone knows that inadvertently thinking about something you entered into a writing competition will sink your chances of winning.

So anyway, after waiting for a half a year, I received the obligatory form email thanking me for my entry while letting me know in the gentlest possible terms that there were at least 250 other entries that were better than mine.  And, possibly two or three thousand more.  They didn’t actually compare my entry to tripe, but they did include a recipe for Trippa alla Romana.

I was unfazed.  I am proud of my little short story—my sweetened, condensed milk of a romance traveling near the speed of light. I enjoyed writing it, and that’s all that matters. 

And 8,457^th place is not nothing.