"No Return: Some Thoughts on the Writing Contest" by Chris Leslie-Hynan
Before I gambled professionally, I gambled at writing contests. I never won any prizes, but I remember being dazzled by the allure. Even the announcement of the competition is designed to get you wide-eyed. A substantial sum of money (often exactly one thousand dollars) for first place. The idea of a celebrated guest judge sitting at a desk somewhere very far away, reading your work—not frowning, maybe even faintly smiling. And, in the end, the potential to have an art object you made appear in the pages of a prestigious magazine, because you won the spot in an open and public competition. And, even if you don’t win, well, maybe they’ll be kind enough to publish a healthy list of honorable mentions? Maybe some agencies are even attached to the contest, promising in nonspecific language to consider extending offers of representation to the finalists? Didn’t Tommy Orange get discovered that way?
These contests are not really about the money, of course—or not for the writer. Sure, a thousand dollars is a lot for a poem or a short story, like a book deal in miniature. But it spends as quickly as your other money. The validation of telling people you won a four-figure prize for your dubious venture into a career in literary meaning-making, though, that lasts a little longer. And the real prize of the winners page is that you get to dream the dream of a truly life-changing publication, a little contest you (or somebody) won that proved to be, if not a spiral staircase to the stars exactly, then at least a little window of time in which a writer might potentially join a wider artistic community, and grasp a fleeting chance at a more meaningful intellectual life.
A writing contest is a lottery for dreamers. It only stands to reason that some cynical practices flourish there.
I’m still a dreamer, but I am also a professional gambler. I’ve been making money at poker for thirteen years, sometimes playing the Main Event of the World Series of Poker or trading $10k cash game pots with overconfident millionaires, but far more often in a humble, part-time way—just trying to make some rent money and keep the writing dream alive. A poker player thinks in Expected Value, and when I look at writing contests through that cold lens, at the amount of money moving from the writers to the magazine, in fees, and then at the amount of money moving back to the writers at the end, in prizes, it is suddenly very hard not to conclude that these contests are sometimes all about the money—for the magazine. Like big-ticket summer writing workshops and unfunded MFAs, these contests can be cash cows in an industry of scrawny pastures.
I admit I have a particular contest in mind here. There’s nothing to gain by naming it, but when we go hunting for bad practices that have become systemic it’s best to work with specific examples. This is a highly prestigious annual contest, with all of the kinds of allure I talked about earlier. Short of promising a champagne gala with Lana Del Rey at the Chateau Marmont, they couldn’t make it any glitzier. As such, this contest is extremely popular. Last year they got “nearly” 2,000 entries. Each writer paid $30 for their lottery ticket. The contest, then, earned “nearly” $60,000 in entry fees. It paid out $1,750 in prizes. For every dollar a writer earned, the magazine kept thirty. The writers, as a whole, took home about 3% of the money they invested. The magazine kept the rest.
Hold on here. Three percent!?! Even the worst bet in the casino, the slot machine, returns 91%. What would proponents of this excellent magazine say in its defense, to justify these ludicrous underlying mathematics?
You’re forgetting about the fees, they might say. It costs a lot to run a contest! They have to hire Malie Meloy! The magazine isn’t really pocketing $50,000 here. But they very well might be. According to the Census Bureau, the admin fees of the government-funded state lottery are about 5%, with two-thirds of the remaining money going to prizes and one-third to profit. In such a system, one of the darkest and most exploitative you will ever find, first prize for this contest would be $20,000.
But of course, it’s not about the money. It’s about the publication, about appearing in these excellent pages, between Jim Shephard and Yiyun Li. Except the winner of the contest I am thinking of, the best story out of nearly two thousand, is not guaranteed a place in any print issue. The magazine promises only to publish the prize-winner as an online supplement. In the past four years, only one winner has appeared in print.
Even so, it still works out well enough for that one person, and the other two who win prizes, and even the honorable mentions. All their names are passed along to participating literary agencies, for consideration for representation. You could be discovered. What matters more than that?
Tommy Orange finished second in the contest. They didn’t publish his entry. They went on to publish something else of his, yes, but isn’t there something slippery in the idea that magazines discover great writers at all? It isn’t discovery unless the magazine helps the writer have a moment, and once a magazine comes across great work, that moment has already begun to happen, and has probably happened elsewhere several times already.
The most insidious argument against mine is that it is naive. Many contests are just fundraisers disguised as other things, and without the funds there is no magazine, and even CNN knows literary magazines are dying—we want them to live, don’t we? And it has always been this way, and everyone understands this, and so the game goes, and goes on. But not everyone understands this, and there is surely no reason why we should accept it.
Now, I’m not here to shade magazines for charging five dollars for a submission or twenty dollars for a contest entry. Many lit mags are penniless. Many writers have pennies. Magazines get to charge what they want, if we will pay. The cynical practice arises when writers are given no return on their investment but an empty narrative twist on the same far-off dreams they came in with. We do not have to choose between an exploitative system and none at all.
Chris Leslie-Hynan is Epiphany’s prose editor. His debut novel, Ride Around Shining, was published by Harper and nominated for the 2015 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction. This is the first piece in a series about money in the world of literature. Next time, we’ll set out to find some fairer models for the writing contest.
