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Tayari's Blog: How I Picked The Winner

Posted by TayariJones on December 6, 2008 10:45 AM
Filed under The Writing Life

I am delighted to announce that I chose talented writers, Shelly Oria and Tara Cottrell, winner and runner-up of the Indiana Review short-fiction contest. Contests are a really good way for younger writers to A) get thier names out there, B) get published, and C) score some extra cash. In 2000, an excerpt from Leaving Atlanta won the Hurston/Wright Award for college writers, marking the start of my career and ending a good-news drought that I had lasted about seven years.

Here's how I went about chosing the winner for the Indiana Review contest. Maybe this will be helpful you as you enter competitions like this.

The first thing to know is that as final judge, I only get to see about twenty entries. So, your first challenge is to get past the screeners. These folks are usually younger people who work for the magazine who pretty quickly separate the wheat from the chaff. What does this mean to you? It means that you story needs to be really engaging on the first page. What else does it mean? It means that you could have written a story that you just KNOW the judge will love, but she may never see it. This can be sort of tricky when the judge has a different aesthetic or agenda than the screeners. (Case in point: I entered my story "Best Cousin" to a contest judged by legendary editor Shannon Ravenel. I had a feeling that the story would be right up her alley, but alas, I never made it past the screeners. The next year, Ms. Ravenel discovered the story on her own and published it in New Stories From The South.)

Once the stories get to me as a judge, I go out of my way to make it fair. I only read about three stories in a day. After that, I'm tired and the plots start running together. I don't think it's right for some writers to have thier work considered when I am fresh and stoked with coffee and some others to have their work considered when I am exhausted and hating life in general. (Keep in mind, though, that all judges don't do this, so my best advice is to make your story POP on the first page.)

I start sort of ranking the stories in a loose way. The ones I like, I put in a stack. By "like" I mean the ones that I wanted to keep reading. Stories that aren't all that great craft-wise sometimes end up in this stack. Beautifully written bores go in "like" stack, but at the bottom. By the time I have finished making the "like" stack, I run the rest of the contest like a NBA tournament. I read two stories together, pick which is the best and put it aside. Then I read another pair, pick a winner. Then pit those against each other.

When I get to the final two, I weigh the story's vision-- what is this story, and why does it matter? Is it complicated? Did it encourage me to think about something I've never thought about? Did I care? Was there emotional truth? Did anything impossible happen in tihs story? (This is a pet peeve of mine.)

Next, I consider craft-- Did I fall in love with phrases? Was the structure interesting? How about pacing? Does the title make sense? I look at the first and last lines in particular. I read a few lines of dialogue aloud. You get the idea.

Then, I pick my winner.