The Speccie, The Oldie, and Me
 

At the end of last year, I set the goal of being one of the top ten money winners in Spectator and Oldie comps during 2018. (I realize that for some of you here that is an unspeakably modest goal.) I've been looking forward to posting about it at the end of the year, but it's occurred to me that there's something cowardly about waiting, that I ought to share the goal before I know whether I'll meet it or not. Here's what I've learned so far:

* When a goal compares my performance to that of others, figuring out how I'm doing can require a lot of dreary bookkeeping. (Duh! This should have been obvious to me ahead of time.)

* The prose comps are better worth my time than I had thought. I've inked more often with prose than I expected to.

* Being immediately struck by a variety of ways to approach a comp isn't necessarily a good thing. Several of my favorite successful entries have been for comps that intially felt undoable.

* Money won is a particularly bad way for me to measure my comp success. The bonus fiver (which Lucy seems to be awarding less frequently) and the Chambers doorstop are nice bonus recognition, but being among a group of winners doesn't mean more to me when the prize is larger. (And the prize amount in the Speccie varies more than I had realized.) Counting wins or mentions would make more sense.

* I have an easier time meeting a weekly deadline than a monthly one. The Speccie deadline is regular enough that I've gotten into a pattern that helps me meet it. The Oldie's can sneak up on me and get missed.

So, how'm I doing so far (through Speccie 3049 and Oldie 228)? 6 wins (and 3 honorable menshes, which also please me--especially the one in which Lucy said my poem made her wince) for 145 pounds in winnings.

Am I on track to meet my goal? I don't know enough about other competitors' psuedonyms to be sure. If I credit all 2018 winnings to the names they're credited to in the Speccie and Oldie, and if I haven't made important errors in my spreadsheet, I'm number 9. (Yay!) But I know that our Brian competes also under a psuedonym, and when he's credited with those winnings, too, he knocks me down a spot. How many other pairs of names should have their winnings combined like that I don't know.

I'm having fun with this.

Will I be alone in thinking that all that is more Drill than Amusement?

For a start, I can't regard the comps. as compulsory. If the subject isn't fun in itself the Amusement's gone. Secondly, the Speccie is usually politically pointless territory - no anti-Tory/contra-May etc jests survive - unless its target happens to coincide with one's own political bette noir of the moment. Lastly, what, cash aside, is the point of writing to please comp. setters, if that is not what amuses the writer.

I grin when I win (only 3 times including my first ever entry) and am mildly chuffed by the odd hon. mensh. - but I get much more Amusement by reading the many splendid efforts of which we are lucky to be readers ahead of time.

But, hey, Max whatever's fun for you!

The Washington Post Style Invitational compiles statistics on all the winners. Actually, it's not official but is done voluntarily by one of the people who has entered for the last twenty years. You can look up literally thousands of people who have entered and find out how they did. Here. They also have yearly statistics and award titles. I was "Loser of the Year" and "Rookie of the Year" a few years back, though overall I am not near the top of the standings with my 204 inks (compared with the champion, Chris Doyle, who has over 2000 inks and back in the days of the New York magazine competition had a similarly ridiculous record of success).

I've never approached the British contests the same way, however. I just enter when I like the prompt the contest provides. Over the last decade or so, I think I've won around 25 times, placing me way outside the top ten.

Thanks for chiming in, guys. I may return to more sporadic competition myself come January, but I'll almost certainly be slower than I used to be to decide a given comp doesn't interest me.

Doyle is very talented, and a nice guy, too. I've interacted with him online elsewhere, and he gave me permission to use one of his limericks in an article I wrote for Light (though, looking now, I'm surprised to see that his poem got cut when the article was shortened).

And I think the New Statesman used to print an annual ranking. I didn't invent this lunacy.

Oh dear. Is making competitions ultra-competitive an American thing? (hence the Washington Post list.) I like to think that us competitors in Old Blighty do the comps for fun. I haven't done one for weeks, because I didn't like the subjects, so I'm with Nigel on this one.

Ann, the Washington Post doesn't give monetary prizes like the British contests do. You get either a cheap and generally tasteless gag gift (I once won a toilet paper dispenser that emits Donald Trump quotes when the spindle rotates) or, in most cases, a refrigerator magnet (my refrigerator is non-magnetic, alas). That leaves only the "glory" of winning, and for some reason the winners are called "Losers." I don't think the star players are motivated by a spirit of competition. They keep entering because they find it fun. And quite a few people who enter the contest also hang out in a jovial private group on Facebook wherein they make bad puns and argue about grammar and punctuation, all in a friendly and supportive way.

Pat at the Post tends to print a first-place winner, second-through-fourth(?)-place finishers, and a bunch of others. I think the joke is that since most of the inking entries weren't first placers, they lost, making their writers losers (and ensuring that, in most cases, even this week's winner is a regular loser).

I'd be surprised if the spirit of friendly competition wasn't among the motivating factors for many competitors. Some might consider it bad taste or uncollegial to admit it.

For me it's like whittling bits of wood. If I don't see potential in the sawn-off lump they hand me - Lucy, Tessa or whoever - I lay it quietly aside and wait for a better beginning.

I am ridiculously pleased when I am sitting here among the chippings holding as perfect a piece of treen as I can create. That's the high point. Winning, as I occasionally do, is a bonus and helps with the "street cred" no end.

Copies of the Chambers Biographical Dictionary dotted about the house, some still shrink-wrapped, remind me that this, too shall pass.

Now I know the word "treen," so I'm glad we had this conversation.

The current first place prize in the Style Invitational is partial treen. A wood base with a "Lose Cannon" on top.

Ann, Roger needs a quick tweak on
The Treens and the Mekon.

You're right about that, Max. Early in the year, the NS would publish a list of the previous year's top 20 winners. The editor once told me that it was fine to submit pseudonymous entries, but my ranking for the year would be based only on wins under my own name. Weeks when I sent in more than one winning entry and thus appeared under more than one name were relatively rare, so I doubt that rule did me much harm. Basil Ransome-Davies, I believe, has been doing double entries every week (or every month) for a long time, so his one nom (well, the only one I'm aware of) has seen a lot more action than any of my half dozen or so. He might be the only frequent flyer seriously skewing your stats. I've had only one pseudonymous win so far this year (in comp #3037, I was also Francis Harry), I'm pretty sure Brian Allgar has had at least one, and without even looking up the exact numbers I say with confidence that Bazza has outstripped both of us. It was not unusual for him to appear twice on the Top 20 list, so he might well account for two of your Top 10 names.

Best of luck for your continuing success in the second half of 2018.

Max,

If you're only entering one entry per comp then I'd say generate a ranking on names, not pseudonyms. The playing field isn't level if you're sending in one entry and someone else is sending in three or four.

Matt

But if Max sends in two entries of which one wins, and someone else (let's call him Bazza) sends in two, both of which win, one of them pseudonymously, then Max won't really know how he's doing if he only counts the first one.

This, however, is only relevant if Max is competing against named individuals. I think my Quaker worldview is skewing my interpretation of this thread. I shall return to my solitary chip carving.

Thanks for the good wishes, Chris. I remember your welcome after my first Speccie win. Your friendliness and that of others has gone a long way toward helping me feel like a part of this club whose members I admire. I suppose wanting to feel my membership more firmly was a large reason for resolving to compete more regularly, at least for a year, and to measure my success against that of others. How much of my gentlemanly reserve about the comps was a cover for fear of failure? How regularly could I catch Lucy's and Tessa's fancies if I really tried?

Thanks also for sharing your pseudonym, and congratulations on that double win!

I occasionally send in multiple entries. I'm the rarely successful competitor Noam D. Plum (a pseudonym I used to use in Light Quarterly and elsewhere). Recently, I've avoided sending multiple entries, not searching for a second approach once I find one I like. Among the things I've noticed as I pay more attention to stats is that, in 2018 at least, I'm more successful in weeks when I send only one entry. Do I not polish entries as well as I think I'm polishing them when there is more than one to polish? Is Lucy annoyed with me for sending more than one? On the other hand, my one 2018 win in a comp for which I sent in more than one was for an entry I wouldn't have sent if I'd restricted myself to the one I thought the best, so...

Max, when I have sent in more than one entry it has often happened that the one that caught Lucy's eye was not the one that I thought the best. (This is also true of my entries in the Style Invitational.) This may be simply a difference of opinion, or sometimes may be because my own best wasn't quite as good as someone else's poem on a similar subject.

But now that your membership has been firmly established here, you can just have fun with it.

I think it's always been the case for Speccie/Staggers &c. that when I've sent more than one, it's the one I think is worse that gets chosen (if any).

Good luck with your challenge, Max. I find a degree of competition a spur to writing, and miss the Staggers' rankings. I share your thoughts on the encouragement of the more experienced compers here, I've found it very helpful.

I never liked the rankings as I like to think of each competition as separate rather than as individual points in a year long contest.

Dunno whether this conversation has run its course, but I want to thank everyone who's chimed in. I'm glad not everyone here thinks my goal is waste of time, and I'm glad that those who do have been willing to say so.

I intend to let you know in seven months whether I hit my target, because that intention may be helpful when I'm struggling with a comp--as I am this week.

Before this conversation closes, can someone explain the logistics of submitting under names other than one's own. Not that I submit much these days, and rarely had more than one entry to submit when I did.

I mean, I can easily set up an email address with another name, but setting up a bank account in that name is a challenge. I guess I could find a friend who doesn't mind their name and account details being used -- which is what I thought people were doing. But now I wonder if all that subterfuge would be necessary? I mean, if Max can get away with using "Noam D. Plume", presumably the comp setters aren't that bothered? On the other hand, I seem to recall someone once saying that they'd sent in fake name entry and saying it was such (or possibly sent the real and the fake in the same email?) and the Speccie being rather unhappy at the presumption of it.

thanks,

Matt

Hi, Matt,

When I send multiple entries, I do it in separate messages sent from the same email address and with the same postal address. In the past, I've also sent multiple entries in a single email with the pseudonym alongside my real name. That seems to work, too. Lucy doesn't seem to be much of a stickler about such things.

I haven't tried multiple entries with Tessa (except that when the toast comp got repeated I resubmitted the previous year's entry along with a new poem. Tessa apparently didn't care for either).

P.S.: It's Noam D. Plum. Plume would be silly.

Thanks Max, that's good to know.

Hey, Max, you've provided me with another opportunity to say that I've had a win in The Speccie and The Oldie competitions with the same poem, but about a year apart. It must be... oh, at least a year since I last mentioned it. ;)

I don't know the number of times I've won but as I subscribe to both magazines I do keep all the copies in which I get even the slightest mensh. Like others have said, though, quite often the topic doesn't float my boat at all, especially the prose comps or political ones. (I don't have a single poem about Corbyn, May, Cameron, Boris, even Trump... none of 'em!)

I'm not interested in winning for winning's sake - I generally strive to submit poems that might be useful additions to my repertoire, for readings, and if I win I read the poem to an audience from the actual magazine; it has more clout that way.

But I love seeing so many of ''us'' on the pages of The Speccie and The Oldie, and get a kick out of declaring "That one's written by my friend... and that one... and that one..." :)

Jayne

That often happens to me, which is why my sister "wins" rather more often than I do these days.

Yes, we need to revive the word treen -- I learned it from Elizabeth I's Bishop Jewel, who said "In the old days we had treen chalices and golden priests, but now we have treen priests and golden chalices."

Apparently there will be no more 2018 comp results, so my year's project is complete. I met my goal (finished 8th--7th if I include the pseudonyms I'm aware of: Brian and his pals breeze well past me while my one pseudonymous win inches me past two others) but I don't think it means as much as I thought when I set the goal.

When I was competing casually and sporadically, I imagined a large cadre of high-volume submitters. Having paid closer attention to the results for a year, I now think most of us compete casually and sporadically. By setting a goal for the year and deciding to compete regularly I gained an advantage over most (in a contest in which they didn't intend to compete). Among those who competed as regularly as I did (56 of the year's 63 comps), I likely finished in the bottom half, possibly even dead last.

The two main things I learned:

* Being paid is really validating! Though the amounts aren't large, getting a regular check for writing poems has gone farther toward making me feel my poems are valued than anything else I've yet managed to do with them. It's lead me to go back and track what I've been paid over my "career," and while my biggest paydays came elsewhere, nearly half of the poems I've been paid for (21 of the 46) appeared in The Speccie. Kudos to Lucy for so frequently recognizing that my poems are worth something.

* I cannot predict Lucy's taste. I've sent her things I think are great, and things I think are weaker; she's published both types and she's rejected both types. And she's occasionally proven me wrong when I thought entries were outside of the Speccie comps' style range.

It might be of interest that 130 different names got at least one mention in the comps this year, 98 in the Speccie and 61 in the Oldie (with, of course, a lot of overlap). I know of 8 of those that are pseudonyms for other people on the list, and here and there are names that might be duplicates (P.T. Brown and Paul Brown, for instance). These stats come from Speccie 3029-78 and Oldie 223-236 (yes, I know that's 14 months (!), but the results from 223 were posted in January, so that's where I started).

Moving forward, I'm likely to compete more frequently than I did before, but less frequently than I did this year.

I'm glad I gave this a try. I'm glad I hit my goal. I'm glad the year (of pressuring myself to enter and of tracking all the results) is over.

Well done Max - both on sticking at it and doing so well with your entries. Interesting to read your reflections on it.

Max, thanks for your reflections on your experience. You are very honest in admitting the motivating power of money; I would not do the comps if there were no prizes.

For me, it's still the "eager puppy" thing. The response to the prompt: "You want? I give". It's someone saying, "I like that". It's the vindication of my belief in something I've made.

Sickening, innit?

Congratulations, Max, on your successful Year of Living Competitively. I look forward to seeing more winning entries from you in 2019. And I'll do my best to remain civil in weeks when you win and I don't.

I agree with Ann, since the money part for me is a nuisance given the clumsy way payment is handled for Americans. It's all about the glory, since I rarely see any of the money even when I win.

I'm adjusting my post above to reflect the new Oldie results that came out before the new year. (How did we get 14 Oldie results between January and December?)

Let's not forget that having poems published in the Speccie or the Oldie means that tens of thousands of people actually read them (assuming they don't just skip that bit of the magazine.) I was very tickled to get on a train a few years ago and see that the chap next to me was reading a poem of mine in the Spectator. I think he may even have chuckled at one point. That was far more thrilling than the thirty quid.

Rob, do you happen to know the circulation or readership claims of the Speccie or the Oldie? Whatever the number is, my baseless guess would be that about 10-20% read the contest results in any given week. Of all the contests, though, you'll probably reach the most eyes with the Washington Post Style invitational, since their print edition is around 700K these days, and they have a vibrant online readership in addition.

Bob,

This needs updating... but it was around 45K for The Oldie two years ago

This also needs updating for The Spectator

It provides a bit of a guide to readership...

Jayne

Can you do that without subscribing, Rogerbob?

Me, stepping in again....
Yes, you can, Annie. The Style Invitational is a fantastic comp. I enter it sometimes, and even won a prize once.
Lots of Sphereans, including Bob, are multiple winners.

Jayne

Ann, you don't need to subscribe to The Washington Post to enter the invitational. In fact, the newest contest is one that may interest you and others here, since it calls for obit poems about anyone who died during 2018 (up to eight lines).

The WaPo does have a pay wall, however, so you might be cut off after a certain number of page views. One of the ways you can get around that is to cut and paste the URL of the page into an "incognito" window (or whatever your browser calls the sort of window/tab that purges all cookies and trackers). Another way is to join the Facebook group of "Devotees" because the editor, Pat Myers, always posts non-paywall links there. And you can also join the highly-educated Devotees as they make horribly juvenile puns and make fun of other people's poor grasp of grammar and spelling.

The bad news: the only prizes they offer are gag prizes, mostly refrigerator magnets with bad puns on them. But the chance to have your name printed so many times that the required ink could fill a swimming pool makes it all worthwhile.

Thanks Rogerbob. I have to do the private window thingy sometimes when I've overstayed my welcome on Lucy's page (Firefox has a "burglar" icon), but would you be able to invite me to the Devotees group, please?

That's the heart of the matter, Rob, and, better, *The Spectator* appears to believe that our work is among the reasons some of those readers pay for *The Spectator*. It would be considerably less validating if *The Spectator* followed the more common modern business model and asked us to write content for free in exchange for the privilege of having it read by that audience.

Of course, I don't mean to knock lit journals that don't pay contributors. Most are in very different financial situations from *The Spectator*.

(I wrote this post before seeing that the Style Invitational had been mentioned in this thread, so I should add that it was not meant as a knock to the Invitational either, though the situation there is rather complicated, since the *Post*, a wonderful newspaper I'm pleased to support, is owned by the guy who owns Amazon.)