How to be Loved by Contest Judges
Author: Jody Wallace
Original Publication Date in Love Notes: September 2001

Contest judges are a rarified breed. People willing to take a great deal of time out of their busy lives to read, ponder, critique and ultimately measure any number of random chapters for free are to be congratulated and thanked. I've both judged and entered contests and, I must say, it's a good deal easier to enter them than it is to judge them. To view each hopeful piece of writing with an unjaundiced eye. To summon up the enthusiasm to deal with each synopsis, each chapter, in a fair and honest manner, even after a tiring day. To weigh the merits of each author's technique, writing style and character development based on your experience in the romance market. One can logically argue, considering this, that the secret to winning romance contests is to simplify the task of the overworked, unpaid contest judge by presenting her with a clean, unpretentious, unconvoluted manuscript. 

Let everyone deny that there is any secret to winning contests besides hard work and a touch of spell check! I'm here to tell you something different. When I attended the National RWA Conference in New Orleans this summer, I heard many whispers about a mythical 'RWA-style' that will win you a contest any time. By analyzing my own contest experiences, the romance novels I've read, the knowledge in at least 10 "How To Write a Romance" books, countless articles in chapter newsletters, and various advice Web sites, I believe I've gotten a finger on this RWA contest style. 

First, and this I gather because every contest judge or romance critique partner who has ever responded to me has insisted upon it, you must be familiar with Debra Dixon's book Goal, Motivation and Conflict. Ms. Dixon did us all a favor when she let us in on her little writing secret: Make sure your characters all have goals, motivations and conflicts. Not sound earth shattering to you? It didn't to Ms. Dixon, either, when she first started spreading the word. Just as she says herself in the now-hallowed GMC, "I began to suspect I had discovered something. Not something new or different or incredibly brilliant, just something understandable" (3). 

So after you've internalized GMC, the other qualities to foster in your manuscript in order to make things easy on your judges are as follows: 

GMC and Plot Points:

(1) Your hero and heroine need to meet very close to the beginning of the book so the judge doesn't have to wonder when the good stuff is going to start. The first chapter is good. The first paragraph is better. 

(2) Your hero and heroine need to reveal their Goals, Motivations and Conflicts clearly by the end of your contest submission. Your judge doesn't have the luxury of pages 31-100 to figure out what makes your characters tick; she only has pages 1-30. And if she is stymied in her quest to figure out what's going on, she's going to start circling those low numbers, my friend. 

(3) Debra Dixon says, "Goals should not be subtle. Get out the two by four and start whacking your reader over the head. 'This is what my character wants'. Whack. Whack. Whack." (23) This includes both external and internal goals. If it seems unnatural to you to have the characters stating their internal, sometimes subconscious, goals in the short space of the contest submission, it might be wise to do it anyway unless you want the judge to assume they don't have any. Savvy GMC-oriented judges will create the GMC chart for you, and you don't want it to have any blank areas! 

(4) Both Goals and Motivations of the characters need to be tied to ticking bombs. As Ms. Dixon points out, "Without a sense of urgency, why should the editor [or judge] read your story now?" (14). This problem can be solved by writing a romantic suspense in which a killer is after the heroine. Conversely, in a comedy, your heroine can, one week away from her 25th birthday, decide she is under a family curse to get pregnant by age 25 or else abandon all hope, ye who enter. 

(5) Regarding the Conflict part of GMC: the main conflict needs to be romantic in nature, even when there are other conflicts going on, because this is a ROMANCE novel. In your contest submission, it should be obvious that the romantic crisis is unrivaled by other issues, even though your characters had families, friends, hobbies, dreams and quests before they met. Orphans and/or men and women who distrust the opposite sex and/or are too gorgeous to be friends with their own gender make good protagonists for this reason. They have fewer things going on in their lives to impede the progress of the relationship. 

(6) The hero and heroine's relationship and the sexual tension need to be crystalline by the end of your contest submission. If you can work a fondling and groping scene into the space of your 30 pages, that's pretty unambiguous. But please keep in mind that this petting session should grow from the internal conflicts of the characters. Having them despise each other usually provides sufficient internal conflict. 

Smaller Details: 

(1) Do not introduce many characters in the submission because each character, aside from bit parts, requires clear-cut GMCs to avoid the cardboard syndrome, and frankly, my dear, you just don't have time for that many, especially not in 30 pages. 

(2) If you do have multiple characters, they should all sound very different or your judge might suspect the aforementioned cardboard syndrome. If you write them with varying regional accents or language quirks, they will at least not be confused with each other. 

(3) You should not have too many narrative paragraphs because your judge will tell you that your proportion of narrative to dialogue is out of whack and recommend that you practice showing and not telling. 

(4) You should not have too many lengthy sections of dialogue or your judge will tell you that your dialogue is going nowhere and needs to get to the point. 

(5) Do not make any typos. Find a way of ensuring that you do not, not a single one, or the judge will assume you didn't look over your manuscript at all. 

(6) Do not write long sentences. They will inevitably be categorized as awkward. 

(7) Do not write too many short sentences. They will inevitably be categorized as choppy. 

The Most Important Rule of All: Always keep in mind something else Ms. Dixon wisely points out: "You can't 'paint by numbers' when you're trying to write a book" (109). There are (almost) as many styles of successful storytelling as there are novels. So do not take these, or any other, guidelines too seriously when entering contests, when writing or even when judging contests. If you do, the results will stink just as much as if you had performed your task free of devious outside influences.

References: Dixon, Debra, Goal, Motivation and Conflict, Memphis, TN, Gryphon Books for Writers, 1996.

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