Our short story competition has now closed and we’re getting hyped up for reading. With aro
und 200entries, that’s a lot of words.
Why do people enter writing competitions? Or why should you? Well, because we’re writers ourselves, we believe there’s a lot of value in doing it.
Firstly, by entering a competition, a writer has the task of actually finishing a piece and making sure that it’s of publishable quality. Many writers do have trouble finishing a story, believe it or not. Have a look at your notebooks. How many starts have you made on a story and then abandoned it because you don’t know how to finish? It’s apparent when reading stories too because it can be going along nicely and then the end seems to let the story down.
Secondly, sending stories out, whether to competitions or as submissions to journals such as [untitled] not only makes a writer finish stories but it allows them to put them out into the world rather than keep them in the bottom drawer of the desk. This is how you improve as a writer.
So, we here at Busybird will be trawling through the [untitled] competition entries in the next few weeks in search of great stories to be included in our next edition due out in April.