Annie Mydla, managing editor of Winning Writers, recently interviewed Mina Manchester about her approach as a contest judge, what makes a great short prose entry, and how judging the contest has influenced her own writing. You can watch the 29-minute YouTube video and read the transcript. Here are some highlights:
In your eyes as the judge, the head judge of Tom Howard/John H. Reid, what makes a great story or essay?
That's my favorite question, because that's why I sit down at my desk every day: to discover that. A story that resonates with me emotionally is always going to rise to the top, whether I laugh or cry, and I love stories that have a real concise tightness to them—some of the basics, like I can see a beginning, middle, and end.
But I also love stories that are like life—stories that have dimension, conflict, and contrast. A story that just hits the same piano key over and over is not going to be as interesting to a reader as one that has highs and lows. So I think that's really important for people submitting to take into consideration with the work that they're submitting: we are looking for that texture and dimensionality, and that tightness of the overall story. Nothing extraneous. I also love stories where it really feels like the author knows what this story is about, and I'm just ready to go on that journey...
Something that I think it's also important to mention as a judge, reading so many of these submissions year after year, is that a lot of it is about the author's worst day, or something really traumatic that happened to them. And that makes sense. That's why we're writing—we're trying to understand human suffering and these experiences. That's just also a lot to absorb as a judge, and I have to protect my mental health.
I'd like to see more stories that are about the happiest day of someone's life, or just about a normal day of someone's life, and have that sort of dimensionality. Bad things happen too, and I'm not saying write light or fluffy material, but I'm just saying, maybe get into it from a different lens that is a bit more like life...
I think the more specificity about your particular experiences that are in the story, the better...
I want to say, especially for submitters, one thing that really warms my heart is when a piece I've seen has been submitted or even longlisted in the past, and then the author has gone back for the last year and revised it and reworked it, and maybe worked with other editors or writing groups, and workshopped it, and made it better, and then resubmitted it. There's a great example from a piece that did win in the past, a nonfiction piece, "Manny" by Elizabeth Becker. I had seen that piece before, liked it, and longlisted it. Then she went back and worked on it, and it won. To me, that is the work of a writer. This is a long game.
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