If you’re a novelist, you can spend months, sometimes years, living inside the same story, with the same characters occupying your thoughts and the same fictional world waiting for you every time you open your laptop. There’s a great deal to love about that. Watching a novel grow from the first tentative idea into a complete manuscript is one of the most rewarding parts of being a writer. But there are times when being so close to one story can become exhausting. You reach the point where you’ve read a chapter so many times that you can almost recite it. You stop seeing the unnecessary words because they’ve become too familiar. You begin wondering whether the story is working at all.

That’s one of the reasons I think writing competitions can be so valuable. They give you permission to walk away from your novel for a while and write purely for the pleasure and challenge of creating a completely different story.

A Holiday From Your Novel

Starting a short story can feel wonderfully liberating when you’ve spent months working on a novel. Suddenly, you have new characters to discover, a different setting to explore and perhaps even a genre you wouldn’t normally consider writing. There’s no enormous manuscript waiting to be completed and no complicated subplot from Chapter Twelve that needs fixing before it causes problems in Chapter Thirty. There’s simply a blank page and an idea. That creative freedom can remind you why you started writing in the first place.

Writing a competition entry doesn’t mean abandoning your novel. Quite the opposite. A few days or weeks spent concentrating on another piece of writing can give you the distance you need from your manuscript. When you return, you may notice things you couldn’t see before. A scene drags. A conversation is too long. A character disappears for several chapters. That paragraph you thought was beautiful might not actually be doing very much at all. Sometimes the best thing you can do for a manuscript is stop looking at it.

Competitions Teach You to Start Quickly

Short fiction doesn’t give you the luxury of spending several pages introducing your characters and gradually finding your way into the story. If a competition allows 1,500 or 2,000 words, you have to get moving. That means asking yourself some uncomfortable questions. Does the reader really need this introduction? Am I beginning the story in the right place? Could I cut the first three paragraphs and lose nothing important? It’s an incredibly useful discipline for novelists because those same questions matter when submitting to agents.

Your opening pages have a lot of work to do. They need to establish voice, create curiosity and give the reader a reason to continue. Writing short fiction teaches you not to spend too long clearing your throat before the story begins.

And once you learn that lesson, it becomes very difficult not to apply it to your novel.

Every Word Has to Earn Its Place

Then there’s the word count. Anyone who has entered a competition with a strict maximum word count will know the pain of finishing a story at 2,347 words when the limit is 2,000. Those extra 347 words have to go.

At first, it can seem impossible. Every sentence feels necessary. Every description appears vital. You convince yourself that removing even one paragraph will destroy the entire story. Then you start cutting. A sentence becomes five words shorter. Two lines of dialogue become one. An adjective disappears. A paragraph you were rather proud of turns out not to be contributing anything at all. Slowly, the word count comes down. And very often, the story becomes better.

Those dreaded words kill your darlings suddenly make perfect sense. A sentence can be beautifully written and still not belong in the story. Learning that is enormously valuable when you return to a novel. You become more willing to question your own writing rather than automatically protecting it. Does this sentence need to be here? Have I already made this point? Is this conversation moving the story forward? Am I keeping this paragraph because the story needs it, or because I happen to like it?

A competition word limit teaches you that cutting isn’t always about losing. Quite often, it’s about uncovering the stronger story underneath and making it shine.

They Make You Finish

Writers are very good at starting things. We have notebooks full of ideas, opening paragraphs saved on computers and half-written stories that we’re definitely going to return to one day. Competitions come with deadlines. That changes everything. Instead of endlessly tweaking an idea, you have a date by which the story must be written, edited, proofread and submitted.

There comes a point when you have to stop tinkering and press send. That’s an important skill in itself because no piece of writing will ever feel completely perfect. Given another week, most of us could find another sentence to alter. A deadline forces you to decide that the work is ready enough to leave your hands. And once you’ve done that several times, submitting your writing becomes far less frightening.

You Learn to Write Within Restrictions

Competitions often give writers rules. There may be a theme, a particular opening line, a genre, an unusual prompt or a strict word count. Restrictions can initially feel as though they’ll limit creativity, but they can have the opposite effect.

Give a writer an entirely blank page and the possibilities are endless. Give them a photograph, the word lost, and 1,000 words, and suddenly the brain starts making connections. What happened just before that photograph was taken? Who is lost? Is it a person, an object, a relationship or an opportunity? Does lost even have to mean what we first assume? Prompts can take your imagination into places you wouldn’t otherwise have visited. You may even discover that you can write in a genre you’ve never attempted before.

They Help Build Resilience

Of course, we need to talk about the part nobody enjoys. The fact that you probably won’t win. You may not be shortlisted. You might not even make the longlist. That doesn’t necessarily mean your story wasn’t good.

Judging writing is subjective. Another story may have connected more strongly with a particular judge. There may have been hundreds or thousands of entries. Your piece may simply not have been the one chosen on that occasion. Writers have to learn how to survive rejection because it appears everywhere in this profession: competitions, agents, publishers, magazines and readers. Competitions can help build that resilience. You submit. You hope. You wait. Sometimes you’re disappointed. So you write again. That ability to continue matters enormously.

And Sometimes You Win

Then comes the lovely part. Every now and again, an email arrives. Your story has been longlisted. Or shortlisted. Perhaps you’ve been highly commended.

Maybe you’ve won.

There’s a particular thrill in knowing that people who didn’t know you sat down, read your work amongst hundreds of other entries and decided yours deserved recognition. Enjoy that moment. Writers spend an extraordinary amount of time doubting themselves, so when your work receives recognition, allow yourself to be proud of it. Then add it to your writing biography. And, if you’re querying agents, consider adding it to your query letter too.

Competitions Can Strengthen a Query Letter

Agents receive an enormous number of submissions, and there’s no magical sentence that will guarantee your manuscript is requested. The novel still has to do the heavy lifting. But being able to say that you’ve won, been placed or shortlisted in a recognised writing competition can be useful.

It tells an agent that your writing has already attracted the attention of independent judges. It suggests you’re actively developing your craft and putting your work into the world. It won’t rescue a weak manuscript, and neither should it be treated as though it will. If the opening pages don’t grab an agent, a competition win isn’t going to make them overlook that. But when you’re trying to present yourself professionally as a writer, credible achievements help build the picture.

And if you haven’t won anything yet, don’t convince yourself that means you have nothing worth mentioning. Keep writing. Keep submitting. These things accumulate over time.

Choose Your Competitions Carefully

There is one important word of caution. Not every writing competition deserves your money or your manuscript. Before entering, look at who is running it, who the judges are, what previous winners have received and exactly what rights you’re granting when you submit. Read the terms and conditions.

If there’s an entry fee, ask yourself whether the prize, reputation and opportunity justify it. There are plenty of reputable competitions, including free ones, so you don’t need to enter everything you see. Be selective. Entering ten well-chosen competitions with work you’re proud of is far more sensible than throwing money at every deadline that appears on social media.

Winning Isn’t the Only Prize

This, for me, is the most important point. Imagine you enter a competition and don’t win. What have you lost? Perhaps an entry fee and a little time. But what have you gained?

You’ve conceived a new idea. You’ve created new characters. You’ve written a complete story. You’ve worked to a deadline. You’ve edited to a strict word count. You’ve made decisions about what deserves to remain on the page. You’ve practised letting your work go and allowing strangers to judge it. And you’ve finished another piece of writing.

That doesn’t sound much like failure to me.

The prize money is lovely. The certificate is wonderful. Seeing your name on a shortlist is totally uplifting, and having another achievement to add to your query letter certainly doesn’t hurt. But perhaps the greatest value of writing competitions is what happens to us while we’re entering them. We become more disciplined. More adventurous. More economical with words. More accustomed to deadlines and rejection. We learn to finish what we start, and occasionally we discover stories we might never have written otherwise.

So, if you’re currently buried in the middle of a novel, wrestling with edits or preparing to query agents, take a look at the writing competitions coming up over the next few months. Find one that catches your imagination. Give yourself a word count, a deadline and permission to write about completely different people in a completely different world.

You might win. You might not. Either way, you’ll come back to your novel having exercised a different set of writing muscles. And you may just have another story you’re proud to call your own.

Lynette E. Creswell is a multi-genre author, editor, writing competition judge and mentor. She’s worked with writers through Hammond House Publishing, helping emerging authors develop their craft and strengthen their storytelling.