A few lessons from our short-story contest

This week The Writer staff is finishing its selection of the 25 finalists in our current short-story competition. We’ll be sending them along shortly to our “finals” judge, novelist Michelle Wildgen, who is also executive editor at the literary magazine Tin House. She’ll choose the top three stories.

Doing the first reads on 150 or so of these contest entries (that’s just my share) has been an instructive experience. Look at that kind of quantity and you eventually reach some conclusions about what separates the good short stories from the bad ones. Here are a few observations:

• The best stories I read had, well, a real sense of story. There was something at stake, some kind of fuse burning under the surface, a through line of some sort that mattered and that made the stories more engaging. The lesser stories often did not rise above mere description.

• The best ones typically made skillful use of characterization, scenes and dialogue. The weak stories were too full of narration.

• Some of the weak stories were too contrived and sentimental and word choice was lackluster. I got the sense their writers had read very few high-quality short stories.

 We’re all looking forward with interest to Michelle’s picks. Look for the winning story (which pays $1,000) in a future issue of the magazine.

 --- Ron Kovach, senior editor, The Writer

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