I want to enter some writing competitions. Now would be a great time to doubt myself, right?
There are two competitions I want to enter in April, and just thought of doing so has awoken my only ever-slightly dormant anxiety dragon.
Guess it’s time I question everything I thought I knew about writing, right? Wait, did I use that question mark correctly?
I never did learn what a gerund is! It’s no use, I’ll never amount to anything. I should just give up now.
But quitters never win. It’s that knowledge that has kept me going all these years, plodding away at my various writing projects – and starting multiple new ones – regardless of how tough or draining or demotivating it all can be.
We need a different approach than mindless worry. Here’s what I’m trying instead to stop fear getting the better of me – and may help stop it getting the better of you, too.
1. Enter competitions to give an unavoidable deadline
It’s not an accident that the two places I want to submit to this month are both competitions.
With writing competitions there’s a hard deadline. Get your submission in by the date, or you’ve missed your chance completely.
It’s different when sending stuff to magazines or pitching to agents. You can always make an excuse to do it next week, or next month. Perhaps you’ve got a lot on, or you’re ill, or tired, or work is extra demanding, or you’ve fallen into a wormhole.
Which is not to say that being too tired or ill or busy is a poor excuse for not submitting. Life is full of legitimate interruptions, but sometimes you just have to push a little harder.
And that’s much easier if you’ve only got one shot.
2. Make hitting submit the only goal
There are lots of avenues of worry your brain can wander down when thinking about entering a competition or submitting to a magazine.
What if yours is one of the worst submissions the judges or editors reads that year? What if they laugh at it – or, if it’s supposed to be funny, what if they don’t laugh at it? What if you’ve left a typo in? What if you actually do win but you miss the email and so they give the prize to someone else?
You can lessen the impact of all of that by aiming for something much simpler: to hit that submission button. It’s easier to overcome something that scares you if you can break it down into smaller chunks.
Kick the worry can down the road – you can fret about whether your story is good enough to even make the long list once you’ve gotten used to sending it out in the first place.
For now it doesn’t matter if your submission is rejected the moment it’s opened by a reader. You could submit a blank piece of paper or a recipe for dog biscuits and it wouldn’t matter. You’ve still achieved your goal.
3. Encapsulate the post-submission high
After you do submit, whether for the first time or the hundredth, have a little celebration, pat yourself on the back, and then record how you feel.
That could be in a letter, a voice message, or a video. It doesn’t really matter, the important thing is to capture how happy, proud, euphoric, competent or powerful you feel.
That feeling will naturally wane over time, and if you try and recall it from memory while overwhelmed with nerves its power will be limited.
Having an accurate record of what it feels like to hit that submit button will help to reawaken the memory more accurately and give you something to counter those nerves.
4. Force yourself to acknowledge that you need to do this
While I’m very much trying to be nicer to myself, sometimes I find it helps to be blunt. I want to be a successful, published writer. How can I achieve that if I never finish stuff and send it out into the world?
It may help to outline the choice you have in the starkest terms. Which is the worst outcome for you: having to deal with critique and rejections, or never meeting with any success or recognition for your writing?
There’s no wrong answer. Why would it be wrong to just want to write for yourself, purely for your own enjoyment? It wouldn’t be. The point of the above isn’t to work out if you’ve ‘got what it takes’, it’s to work out if you actually really want this.
Don’t waste your time and energy trying to push yourself to achieve something if it’s not actually essential to your wellbeing and sense of fulfilment in life.
But if it is really important that you achieve something extrinsic for your writing, this submission changes you from a hobbyist into a writer actively seeking publication or success. And that’s not only a pretty great change in circumstance, but absolutely essential to achieving your goal.
5. Remember that this game is unpredictable at the best of times
It’s probably the hardest thing for any writer to accept, but ultimately there are so many variables that have to align in order for our writing to meet with success, even if we’ve just written the next literary masterpiece.
It’s like in films where the ritual to summon an ancient evil can only be performed once every 9,000 years.
There are plenty of examples of famous writers who’s smash hits were rejected dozens of times before finally landing a deal. Ultimately it’s all down to personal taste, whether we’re talking about magazine editors, competition judges or literary agents.
Ultimately you have to focus on what you can control. Worrying about things you can’t control won’t achieve anything – which isn’t to say stop doing it, because if only it were that easy.
But at the end of the day, what you personally can do is to Hit. That. Button.
Hopefully in a couple of weeks’ time I’ll be able to say I followed my own advice.
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Header photo by Mikhail Vasilyev on Unsplash
