As Any She Belied With False Compare

I have a confession to make. I don’t really like writing competitions. You know, where they give everyone one hour to write about a certain prompt and then judge the results. Or where people get up and perform their poetry in front of a live crowd, and the winner is whoever gets the most applause. That kind of thing. I think it creates a flawed — and often slightly ridiculous — construct of supposed worth. In the case of poetry, for example, the victors of the night tend to be angry and aggressive, and often overtly sexual, or sometimes overwrought with pathos. I'm not saying that's bad, but if you put those poems side by side on paper next to pieces by William Carlos Williams or Jorge Luis Borges, they might not necessarily stand out in the same way.

Conversely, if William Carlos Williams or Jorge Luis Borges themselves stood up in front of that same half-drunk crowd and delivered their work quietly and with nuance, it probably wouldn’t hit.

And the idea that being able to write creatively but fast is somehow important strikes me as especially weird the more I think about it. Extemporaneous writing may often be a useful exercise, but some of the greatest works of English literature were rendered over a span of decades. In general, I think it’s safe to say at the very least that books written in a very short amount of time are not always of higher quality than those written on more typical schedules.

The fundamental problem with the premise of writing competitions is that you aren’t comparing apples to apples. You aren’t even comparing apples to oranges. You’re comparing apples to hamsters, or apples to the moons of Saturn, or apples to the concept of free-market capitalism. You’re attempting to artificially rank intrinsically dissimilar things on an equivalent scale. It’s like asking, “what’s better: a pair of shoes, or Robert’s Rules of Order?”

Different people like different things. Moreover, there is a place for everything in this world, whether anyone likes it or not. Some things are important; some things are funny. Some things are entertaining; some things are bracingly disturbing. Some things are sad; some things are insightful. Some things are beautifully crafted; some things are delightfully frivolous. Some things serve a purpose; some things defy definition. None of these characteristics is exclusive to any other. None of these traits is necessarily dependent upon another. Most importantly of all, none of these things is superior to another. It makes no sense to say that Douglas Adams is “better” than Ernest Hemingway (or vice versa). Likewise Kurt Vonnegut and Anne Rice, or William Shakespeare and Chuck Palahniuk or F. Scott Fitzgerald and Homer. These authors strive in their work to achieve very different objectives, and succeed in different ways. If you tell me that Shirley Jackson is “better” than Alan Moore, I am going to roll my eyes. You may as well be saying, “hooba blurfle quomby flerf.”

Contests only really measure anything meaningful when the participants are all attempting to accomplish exactly the same thing in exactly the same way, under otherwise identical conditions – such as a marathon or a poker match. As soon as you introduce a variable, you render the results absurd. When one participant is running and another is swimming or flying a hang glider, you no longer have a real tournament, no matter how hard you pretend. This is particularly true when the runner is going in one direction, the swimmer in a different direction entirely and the hang glider pilot climbing in a slow vertical spiral. And if one person is running and another is painting a landscape mural, it’s not even remotely a race. Someone on the Internet will probably assert that landscape mural painting is better than running and someone else will immediately counter that assertion with the powerful counter-argument that no it isn’t, but these two philosophers of the Web are not advancing human knowledge with this debate.

I love writing workshops and seminars, I love book club meetings and author appearances with question and answer sessions. I love writing courses and open-mic nights. All of these things are inherently non-competitive. Ultimately, even professional writers are not really competing against each other, even if it seems that way. The real opponent is not the other author writing in the same genre and going after the same market segment. The real opponent is far more dangerous: a world that doesn’t value books and reading. Our foremost priority should be to promote and encourage a deep love and respect for these things, not just to ensure healthy sales of novels and biographies, but for the sake of civilization itself. It’s not hyperbolic to draw a direct parallel between an enthusiasm for reading and the greatness of a society. When twelve million authors are going after twenty-four million readers, it’s like African wild animals gathered uncomfortably close around a shrinking water hole. But if you increase the number of readers to two billion, four hundred million, it’s more like gorillas wandering the mountain jungles, in no hurry to collect and hoard food or to put on weight for the harsh winter, because there is always plenty to eat all around them. Visualize that – a world so full of avid readers that no matter how numerous and prolific the authors are, there will always be someone to discover and appreciate your work.

Don't get me wrong; writing contests can be enjoyable social diversions when they are held in the proper spirit of silly, pointless fun. But treating them as serious measurements of authorial ability sends a message most composition instructors would probably disagree with.

From a commercial standpoint, success as a writer means correctly identifying your audience, reaching out to them, and consistently producing work that speaks to them. From an artistic perspective, success is a matter of creating pieces that endure and resonate through the ages, appreciated by critics, academics and peers, consumed by a certain segment of the public for decades or centuries. And as a matter of personal expression, success is simply writing what you want to write. None of these things can be accurately gauged by a game.

No one questions that Finnegan's Wake is a significant achievement and a lasting monument. But it stretches the imagination to try to conceive of a competition that James Joyce could have won with it.

Although the larger-than-life, hard-charging, Type-A personalities out there strenuously differ, not everything needs to be turned into a horse race.

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My author page:
www.AustinScottCollins.com

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