Whether you are writing poetry, fiction or nonfiction, our first contest of 2018 is for you. The theme is: “A New Season.” And that can mean season of the year, turning over a new leaf, of one’s time in life, of one’s health and fitness, or of one’s way of thinking, It can mean taking on a new role in life or a new attitude toward work or people or spirituality. I look forward to receiving your contest entries and to responding to them with my best ideas for revision and tweaking. For the contest fee of $15 (our submission button will be ready on January 1), you will receive those responses and the ability to re-enter with a revision by the reading period deadline of March 1 if you’d like to.

I will be announcing a guest contest judge soon and the winners (three of them) will receive a free one-hour consult or editing service or a free admission to a Writing It Real online workshop. And, of course, publication in Writing It Real with your permission. Our guest judge will write notes about the choices, which will be published along with the winning work.

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Before the contest reading period starts on January 1, I want to post what I’ve written and shared in other contest seasons about how I read your entries. Here’s what happens in each step:

I Read as a Friend
To the interested reader, being let in on all manner of human experience is not only mentally pleasurable, it also elicits gratitude and friendship.

“At the core of the personal,” Philip Lopate writes, “is the supposition that there is a certain unity to human experience.” As poets and fiction writers and ists, in talking about ourselves and characters we have invented, we are in some way talking about everyone. It is our experience that matters and our interest in sharing it that moves others. Orhan Pamuk, 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature, put it this way in his acceptance speech, “All true literature rises from this childish, hopeful certainty that we resemble one another.”

Creative writing always has an air of intimacy about it, not only of one person’s insides speaking to another’s, but of one person’s process for delving deeply into his or her own experience using honest inner reflections to find insight and truth, something that comes in experiencing things twice–once in life and once in reflection.

When someone is willing to make me, as reader, a confidant, a witness to his or her striving for authenticity, my response is appreciation, thanks, and emotional indebtedness for doing this work and for being trusted with it. The work then seems to be on my behalf as well as well as on behalf of the author. Holding the information and being open to it, I feel more human, more a part of a whole, more recognized and less lonely. By learning someone else’s center, I feel my own grounding.

Brain research is now showing us that when we understand what someone else is doing, we do so because our own brains are activated as if we are doing what the other is doing. Reading someone’s experience, even when the writing is not yet fully manifest as literature, awakens experience and reflection and has an emotional impact that is very valuable to me.

I Read as a Fellow Writer
After I read as a friend and enjoy the sense of gratitude that washes over me, I must, if I am to help writers revise and expand, put on the writer’s hat and re-read. Now I must look at how the writing is working to keep me involved by expanding my knowledge of the speaker’s experience, by settling me down to enter the speaker’s world, and by fully informing me. As I read this way, the shaper in me is activated. I see the ways in which the draft, if it isn’t yet fully realized, needs a little more to  lift me up from where I was when I started the piece to where it has put me back down on the ground again at the end, completely clear about where I am and where I was and how wholly aware I am of what has changed.

I look for the same things as when I am redrafting my own work.

I Want to Know Why the Speaker is Speaking to Me Now.
If writing were to be published in American Heritage magazine, for instance, in a special section on writings by individuals who were growing up in the American 20th Century, I would already know why the authors are speaking to me–the magazine editors would have told the readers why they had collected the writing. I would sit down to read, certain that I knew the speaker was speaking to me because the magazine had decided to focus on growing up experiences. If a newspaper asked for descriptions of fathers and mothers for special sections on Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, I would read the selected writings knowing I was reading what the editors had asked for and knowing the writers were writing because they were asked. I would settle in to experience many mothers and fathers.

However, in the absence of such an editorial focus, the writing must reveal why the writer is speaking on a particular subject now without the help of an editor’s note. It must allow the reader to find out what has urged the writer to speech. The speaker in the work must create, inside of it, a compelling occasion for the writer’s particular inquiry into experience. Understanding the reason the writer is writing at a particular moment is part of what keeps the reader reading and wanting to absorb experience. The reader experiences a need to know what the writer’s particular exposing of the soul will deliver. When the reason or urgency for the inquiry is successfully communicated, the feeling of needing to know the ending is as strong in the reader as the feeling of enjoying the experience presented for experience’s sake.

I Want to Have a Sense of a Promise and It’s Fulfillment
This is a cousin to knowing why the speaker is speaking now. Every piece of successful writing makes a promise and fulfills it. That the speaker is speaking upon some occasion, with some need and is sitting down to write from this urgency creates a promise that something will be discovered. It isn’t always clear to the writer in first drafts what that promise or discovery is, but the elements become more clear as the drafting process continues. To quote Orhan Pamuk again, “As we hold words in our hands, like stones, sensing the ways in which each is connected to the others, looking at them sometimes from afar, sometimes from very close, caressing them with our fingers and the tips of our pens, weighing them, moving them around, year in and year out, patiently and hopefully, we create new worlds.”

It is the creation of the new world that fulfills the promise — writing is a way toward this new world, as the writer looks for something and promises to continue looking until that something or another something he or she didn’t even know was there turns up and satisfies, making the search worth it.

I Want to Know That I Am Entrusted to Know the Real Story
“A writer talks of things that we all know but do not know that we know. To explore this knowledge, and to watch it grow, is a pleasurable thing; the reader visits a world that is at once familiar and miraculous.” That’s from Orhan Pamuk’s speech again. When a piece of writing builds that familiar, but now-miraculous-because-it-was-evoked-so-well world, I feel trusted and known. Not only am I a friend to listen, I am now also a person for whom what is being said will matter. The writer is reaching out toward me because what the writer has to say will fill a “not knowing what I know” in me.

There are things that happen, though, in unfinished drafts that get in the way of this magical transaction between the writing and its reader. Sometimes, unfinished drafts skip among aspects of an experience and among points of view, as if the writer is afraid that the reader won’t think the writer is being fair to everyone. This ends up confusing the reader. Or, the writer may forget to make even a nod to the idea that there is another side at all. Without a nod to others or one to the speaker’s being idiosyncratic in some way, the author can unwittingly distance the reader.

It is sometimes hard to make a connection with the reader, as a piece of writing can easily get to be so much about the speaker that the speaker’s subject is obscured or it can easily get to be so much about the subject that we don’t know why the writer is writing about the subject. Those kinds of drafts need more time to cook.

Keeping the reader from feeling entrusted also comes from relying on exposition (telling) when details and images from the scenes would build that familiar-but-now-miraculous world. For instance, in writing about the moment a person became a writer, or at least decided to be serious about it, saying, “I decided to take myself seriously because the writing was gnawing inside,” is not as informative and experiential as describing the way the curtains or drapes seemed to hang that day when the decision was made.

A third way of keeping the reader from feeling entrusted is to use jargon that says how the reader should feel about something rather than using words the writer has put together from the freshness of his or her experience. As I collected source material for my thoughts in this article, a scrap of newsprint fell out of one of my books, and I saw it was a corner of page 15 of a Seattle publication called Wordscape. I must have quickly ripped it off one day a few years ago to use as a bookmark, and I see it has an advertisement for a book. The words on the scarp are “Let’s be in the avant-garde rather than joining later as back up singers. Let’s eschew those who insist on laying down cliché like Formica between us and their souls. Let’s demand freshness, purity and bone-scraping honesty. ”

If an author is using the general culture’s words to describe his or her feelings and sensations and perceptions, that author must take a second look. Words put together from individual experience make the reader feel specifically entrusted; clichés operate something like an impersonal public invitation to a large group event.

I Want to Enjoy the Author’s Use of Craft 
Reading as a writer, after I feel I know why the speaker is speaking to me and what they are searching for and feel entrusted to receive the real story, I want to enjoy the writer’s use of craft. I want to see that what the writer describes reawakens my experience of such an environment, of such objects and people and conversation. I want to be charmed by the speaker’s way of categorizing objects and events, of comparing and contrasting experience, of defining. Applying craft, the author creates a sense of organization for the ’s description and narration that deepens the speaker’s experience, and thus adds layers of pleasure for the reader. “I have hot flashes and here’s what they are like” does not offer as pleasurable a read as a shape like “I have hot flashes and here’s how I categorize them.” The human mind is wired to enjoy the creation of “systems of thinking.”

I Want to Find Emotional Logic in Examples, Images and Storytelling
If a speaker sets up a framework–say she says she is going to make a quilt from the images of her past–the must stick to the challenge that the speaker set up. If the quilt turns into an afghan or the speaker forgets that the pieces need to be assembled and stitched together, the emotional logic of the metaphorical framework is going to be affected and the reader will become dissatisfied. If a speaker labels people and objects by ethnic group or facial expressions, there has to be a reason inside the for the speaker to be noting these differences, and, eventually, as reader I must learn what it is. It’s a little like the Chekov’s gun aphorism for writers — “One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it.”

On the other side of expectation is surprise. All surprises that come in the writing should be welcome ones to the reader. If a speaker spends two pages successfully evoking how irritating and out of touch someone is by showing how he doesn’t pay attention or listen and then later says that this is the person she loves, a reader is going to be uncomfortably surprised. If the speaker instead began an with, “This was the day I realized I still could love him,” she can then write about the irritations and not listening and the reader will be interested to learn more about both the writer’s disappointment and her strength in accepting it.

I Want to Find Endings That Are Satisfying and Earned
I think that very frequently, a piece of writing leads the writer to discovery but instead of exploring the discovery, the writer listens to a little voice of triumph that comes in and says, “It’s easy. Just say this,” and then a paragraph or a sentence with the sound of an affirming ending comes into being. It’s as if that something in the author’s being also says, enough, rest, you have it. They’ll certainly see it, too.

In my case, I know this voice is taking over when I end a piece of writing with an exclamation mark. An editor pointed that out to me. When he did, I realized that I the feeling that prompted the excited exclamation point was an I-think-I-have-it-now-so-I’m-happy feeling. But this feeling does not make for an earned ending. That I-think-I-have-it now thought or feeling merely tells you that you are in the vicinity of your ending. You must still put experience fully on the page so the reader can come along with you.

I think of it this way: If the last thing I have to do when leading others on a hike is cross a stream, seeing the stream is not the end of the hike. I have to ford that stream with the others and reach our destination. I can’t just leave the reader on one side of the stream and wave hello from the other side if we are both to finish the journey together.

When I move from listening as a friend to reading as a writer, I enjoy myself. There is nothing I come across that I haven’t also neglected to fix in my own work at times or often not known how to fix before I send my work to readers. I remember again how hard we must work on our drafts and revisions, but also how beneficial it is share work before it is done, to have the sense that what I am doing is important enough to me that I will share it with others and garner their responses which may help me in bringing the work further along.

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I am happiest helping people bring their writing to fruition. Contests can leave non-winners feeling hopeless, which is the opposite of what I want to do. So remember: We should never judge ourselves by the fact that we have not won a contest — judging winners is ultimately subjective. There are no fully objective literary standards — different judges, editors and publishers are going to select different winners from any one pool of entries. That’s why publishing is such a big field and accommodates so much writing.

In our contest, some entries are about the most painful and difficult of human losses and others are about very small moments in a daily life.  I enjoy reading them all and pointing the writers toward ways that another draft from now, the writing will certainly rock many worlds. And over the years many who have not won the original Writing It Real contest they entered have gone on to use the responses to continue drafting and ultimately found their writing accepted by other publications.