Entering the Bridport Prize for Memoir
My first writing competition submission is complete.
Last week, I submitted the first chapter of my memoir, How to Make a Champion to the Bridport Prize.
*lets out breath I’ve been holding for a month*
It does feel really good to finally have it submitted. As Paper Places listeners will know, I took a writing break over the summer. It was wonderful. Relaxing. Restorative. No signs of ‘I-should-be-writing’ guilt.
Entering the Bridport Prize was the top of my list for when I got back. I spent September editing and polishing the first chapter, and putting together the 300-word overview. The end of September was a blur of last-minute tweaks.
As my tutor Midge said recently, “as you know, edits never end” and I had to remind myself of this when I did yet another revision on submission day.
After I did my sixth final read-through, I had to call it.
It was time to submit.
Being a writer is tricky in that respect. Knowing when to call it. To admit you’ve done all you can. To give up chasing the idea of perfect. If I spend too much time revising something, the edits can morph it into something else entirely. And yes, okay, that new iteration might be more grammatically correct, or better in some other prescriptive way, but that’s no good if I lose the voice of the piece in the process.
I think good writers, the ones I admire, the ones whose words stroll into my head and make a home, as if they lived there all along, are able to hold lots of things in their mind at once. Tone, structure, theme exploration, images, exposition… it’s a balancing act between them all. And when writers get it right, it reads effortlessly. It’s the experience I’ve had reading Intermezzo: Rooney’s style is assured and unfaltering, I have an unwavering feeling of trust.
It’s how I want my readers to feel.
But… do writers like Rooney really hold it all in their heads? Or is it all meticulously planned? Are writers using data to really nail their tone? Is anyone counting the metaphors per page? Comparing number of words between speakers to make sure it reflects the extraversion or introversion of each character? I want to know.
I’m a notorious under-planner when it comes to writing. In most areas of life, I’m very organised. I have travel packing lists. I label my kitchen plugs. But when I write, I just sit down. I hold it all in my head, and know when it hits the page what needs to be corrected.
It’s how I’ve been working on my memoir. It’s how I refined that first chapter and wrote my overview. I can only describe it as going by intuition. But now my Bridport submission is done, I have some time to think about tweaking my process moving forward.
It feels so good to write that down: my Bridport submission is done.
I don’t know if I’ll have a shot at making the long list, but it took a lot of work to get to this point, so for now I’m just going to be proud of that.
Good luck!!