Common Contest Problems and Suggestions for Correcting Them

By
Anita Nolan

 

When I'm judging contests, the same problems occur frequently. Here's a list of commonly seen concerns and suggestions to identify and fix them if they appear in your manuscript.

As always--take what works for you and leave the rest.

1. Backstory Dump: Or, how to put the brakes on the pacing. A line or two of backstory that provides some critical information at the moment it's needed, especially in a way that adds tension to the story, is good. A six paragraph dump of information about the heroine's ex-husband, complete with details about his second marriage to his new wife and their new baby, and how she treats his child from the first marriage, his change of job, etc etc, is probably going to annoy the reader and have her skipping from paragraph to paragraph looking for the action to begin again.

With Backstory, keep it pertinent, keep it brief, and use it to increase tension.

Suggestion: Try to limit the backstory to increments of no more than one paragraph at a time, and preferably less. If you can increase tension by withholding it altogether until later in the story, even better.

2. Dialogue issues: When readers start skipping through a manuscript looking for the action to begin again, they often skip down until they find dialogue. Lack of dialogue is a common contest problem. Good dialogue moves the story, so you want to work for a fair amount of meaningful chatter on every page. Readers like dialogue, editors like dialogue, so make sure you have lots of dialogue.

Suggestion: Make sure every page of your entry has at least two or three lines of dialogue, and work for more.

Stilted dialogue is another problem. It's hard to write conversation that sounds the way we talk, without it being like we really talk. You don't want a conversation in your story filled with pleasantries, sweet nothings, and hmms and ummms. On the other hand, you don't want the dialogue to be an information dump, with long-winded sentences and paragraphs that regurgitate off-scene action or provides endless mounds of backstory. Make sure the dialogue moves the story along.

Suggestions: Try reading your dialogue back to yourself, or listen to someone else read it to you, or read it into a tape player then play it back. You'll get a sense of whether it sounds natural or stilted.

3. Telling, not showing: The clichéd phrase, "show, don't tell," describes the phenomenon perfectly. Telling is saying: "Rachel was hot." Showing is: "Sweat dripped down Rachel's face. Her damp tee-shirt clung to her, and perspiration stained the underarms."

Suggestion: Try reading through your story and highlighting the "was, felt, seemed" words, and see if the sentence surrounding them is telling or showing. If you're describing the symptoms of how someone felt, describing what they saw, etc., then you're probably showing. If you are stating a fact without description, then you might be telling, and want to improve that sentence. And use the five senses.

4. Hooks/Starting the book in the wrong place: Starting a book in the wrong place is a common problem with contest entries. Even if your story starts the morning of the day everything changes, we still might have breakfast with heroine, fight with her boyfriend, etc, before we actually get to the initiating event. Sometimes the boyfriend isn't even part of the larger story. Even though breakfast and the fight occur in real time in the manuscript (not as a flashback), all of that information is unnecessary and essentially backstory unless it relates to the immediate initiating problem.

Suggestion: Think about your story and where it starts. Do you jump right into the initiating event, or do you start somewhere before that so you can get in lots of information about your heroine so we know all about her before the story really starts? If the latter is the case, you've started too soon.

Hook: Agent Donald Maass says you only have about three sentences to get someone interested in your book. So make sure that initial opening counts. You want the reader to be asking questions by the time they've read the first sentence or two.

Suggestion: For ideas, try looking at your favorite books. What are the first lines? Do they make you want to read more? Try to have the reader asking questions after the first one or two sentences.

5. Point of View: A popular problem with entrants and judges. Some writers like to switch POV mid-scene, and others are POV purists and want to stay with one character's POV through an entire scene.

I'll leave the discussion of the correct way to handle POV to someone else because opinions vary wildly, but I will say this: in my opinion, the best way to handle POV when entering contests is to stay in one person's POV for an entire scene.

My reason is simple. Regardless of what a contest's judging instructions might say, some judges are going to penalize an entrant for a mid-scene POV switch, regardless of how seamless it is. That's reality. So no matter how good your switch is, if you make one, you put yourself at risk of being marked down.

An advantage of sticking with one POV per scene is that it forces you to seek out ways to show what the non-POV character is thinking and feeling. By becoming a POV purist, at least in your contest entries, you will become more aware of POV, so you can make your switches seamlessly if you decide one is needed. When you are published, do whatever works for you.

One additional advantage of becoming more aware of POV switches: It's less likely your reader (or contest judge) will find themselves in the POV of the dog or the computer, or ping-ponging back and forth between heads, sometimes within a paragraph, occasionally within a sentence. I've been all these places in recent contest entries, and it made me stop reading and go back and read again. You don't want your reader to do that. The more you become aware of POV, the less likely it is that this will happen.

Suggestion: Stick with one point of view per scene in contest entries to prevent having points deducted. If you are unsure about POV, find a good book on writing, or an article on one of the RWA chapter web sites that addresses this, and learn more.

6. Tag lines: "He said/she said" is unobtrusive. Adding a beat (she tugged his sleeve), rather than a "she said," keeps the tags from becoming repetitious. Beware the flowery tags, often accompanied by an adverb, and sometimes impossible to do, or just plain disconcerting. ("That's funny," she chuckled- you can't really chuckle while you speak- or - "I'll take you for everything you own," he growled menacingly - and the ever popular "I'm coming," he ejaculated. Ewww.)

Suggestion: Identify the tags and beats in your manuscript and make sure "said" predominates the tags and that the beats are meaningful and not repetitious. (So says I, the mistress of repetitive beats.)

7. Non-active verbs: Work to make verbs as strong as possible. Why should your heroine walk when she can strut, hurry, amble, stroll or saunter? This will help with another common problem: adverbs. Often, adverbs accompany a weak verb when one stronger verb will do. An example: Walk quickly. Why not substitute "hurry?"

Suggestion: Do a search and find for -ly words, then destroy them. And use your thesaurus to improve your verbs' strength.

8. Reaction before the action: This is often identified by lots of "as" and "when." "She cringed when the bomb exploded" would be better stated, "The bomb exploded and she cringed." In other words, make the action come before the reaction.

Suggestion: Go through your entry and highlight the "as" and "when" words, and then see if reversal is a problem for you.

9. Endless description: The initial attraction between the hero and heroine is a laundry list of physical features. A couple paragraphs of description stops the action.

Suggestion: Try working the description into the story in bits and pieces, rather than in one big info dump. Also, point out the non-physical points that attract the characters. Maybe he's nice to his dog; maybe she's helping an old lady across the street. I don't know, they're your characters. Make them sympathetic by showing their good qualities, not just listing physical attributes.

10. Sitting and thinking scenes: Agent Donald Maass suggests banning all kitchen, riding in a car, shower, and drinking tea scenes from the first fifty pages of your manuscript. (Yes, coffee counts.) While I wouldn't go that far, I would suggest that something significant has to happen during every scene. In other words, take particular care that you don't set a boring scene in a boring location. Make sure every scene is tension-filled. Or as Maass says: Make sure there is tension in every page (and he doesn't mean putting the word "TENSION" in the header of every page.)

Suggestion: If your character is sitting and thinking about someone, or having a conversation with someone about something that's happened or going to happen, think about cutting it. Every scene, every paragraph, in fact every sentence should serve a purpose in your story. They should drive the story forward. If this isn't happening in your entry, then be ruthless with the red pen and cut until it does.

11. Grammar mistakes: Judges all have their own pet peeves. Some resent the confused words (you're, your; their, they're, there), others focus on grammatical errors (misuse of the subjunctive tense, mixing singular and plural nouns and verbs, misuse of punctuation, etc).

Suggestion: If you have a problem with grammar, get a style book -- and use it.

Before sending out your next entry, why not sit down and pretend you're the judge? Print out a score sheet from the contest you intend to enter and judge yourself. Correct any problems as best you can. After all, looking at a manuscript filled with your changes is rewarding, because you've improved your story. Getting back a manuscript filled with a judge's red ink can be frustrating. So work on your manuscript until it shines, then enter a contest.

** Thanks to Donna MacMeans for her help in compiling this list.

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