Remember how I insanely finished my novel to enter the TAG Hungerford contest? I knew that a last-minute finish was a bad thing for that novel, but the value for me of actually getting something finished to enter the contest far outweighed the inevitability of not getting anywhere with the contest. But now that the award procedure is almost over (there are three shortlisted novels now, although the winner won’t be announced until February 2009), I’ve got even more value out of the process.

I recently received a “thanks but no thanks” letter from the Hungerford crew, but with it came something very interesting – a judges’ report on the process. Not on my manuscript in particular, but a general overview of how the judges felt, and a few of the points they made were especially interesting to me:

• There were 28 entries. Apparently this is less than the previous couple of years, but not a bad number. I was surprised it was so low. There are some two million people living in Western Australia now, and the only requirement for entry is that you have not previously published a book. But perhaps it’s really not that common to get a full-length novel ready for submission. Anyway, it’s almost encouraging that there might be less competition out there than I thought.
• Most of the entries were “realist fictions”, a category into which my manuscript would also land. The judges mentioned that many seemed to be written based on personal experience (yes, some of mine falls in this category too). Trying to write further away from my personal experience is something I’ve been trying to do with this NaNoWriMo novel and it’s been quite freeing. But it’s not easy – after all, doesn’t every writing class say, “Write what you know”?
• Major problems including careless plotting, poorly-constructed characters, badly-handled dialogue and bad spelling and punctuation. My passion for apostrophes and their relatives rules me out of the last one, I’m fairly confident, but the first three problems – well, I probably still need practice with all of these. But apparently so do lots of other writers!

Future novel contests for me

So, practice, practice, and more practice is needed, I think, to improve my writing skills, and a whole lot of editing too. But entering these kinds of contests – respectable ones that could lead to a “big break” for a writing career – is an important goal of my writing, so I’d like to keep the future contests in mind:

• The TAG Hungerford contest is running every two years at the moment, so presumably my next deadline there is June 2010.
• The Australian/Vogel award, which is for writers under the age of 35 (a couple more years!), is usually held every year, so I hope to have a novel ready – no, I will have a novel ready – for May 2009. And May 2010. And I think I still scrape in for May 2011, but that’ll be the last one.

Know any more good novel contests? Please let me know in the comments.