Kia Garriques

When you have a hobby you love – be it writing, painting or dancing – it can sometimes be hard to make the transition from working away on your own to sharing your work with the public. You may dream of being discovered and making it big, and your family and friends say your stuff is great, but how do you know you have what it takes to make money from your talent?

For me, it was entering writing competitions. As long as I can remember, I’ve loved stories – reading them and making them up. I wrote my first poem when I was four and started my first novel at eight. I knew I always wanted to get my stories published. I wanted others to read them, and hopefully enjoy them, but it seemed a big leap from the stories I toiled over in my bedroom to the printed books I saw in the bookshops.

Things changed when I was in secondary school and a couple of my teachers suggested I enter a writing competition. I’d never thought of doing it before, but their encouragement gave me the confidence to try, and once I’d entered one I started entering as many as I could find.

Writing competitions prepared me for submitting my work to professional writing markets, although I didn’t realise it at the time. I was no longer setting the rules for my writing. Now I had word limits to keep to, themes to write about and deadlines to meet. Other people were going to read my stories – not just my family and teachers – so I agonised over drafts, spelling and grammar to make sure everything was perfect.

Often I would start a story and abandon it before it was finished to start a new one, but entering competitions taught me the discipline to see a story through to the end. This was good practice, and I often wrote several stories before I decided on one that I deemed good enough to enter.

The icing on the cake was when I won a competition. The prize money was nice, but it was the feedback from the judges that really encouraged me to keep going and made me realise that I had a talent for writing and it wasn’t just stories in my head.  The words of one of the judges stayed with me particularly. He encouraged me to keep writing and told me that when I got rejections I should ‘remember you have won this’.

It was some years between him saying that to me and my first professional sale, but with every rejection I got I would remember his advice and keep going. So, if you are busy filling notebooks with stories and sketches, or singing and dancing in front of the mirror dreaming of what might be, why don’t you look to see if there are any competitions in your area that you could enter. You just might win, and then you’ll know you were right in putting yourself out there, because when it has happened once, it can happen again and again.