Every summer, Jericho Writers runs the Friday Night Live competition #FNL. The competition is open to anyone who attends their Summer Festival of Writing, and to enter you submit the first 500 words of your unpublished novel. This year I entered. I felt proud of where my writing has got in the last year and saw the competition as a way to focus my mind on improving it even further so that I could submit something worthy of being long listed. As the date got closer for the announcement of the long listees, I got excited. Would my submission get through? It didn't. But I still attended the webinars where the long listees read out their submissions for us all to vote on, and I listened intently. I wanted to know what was so much better about their writing than mine that they got through. What was it about these pieces that made them special? Was there anything I could learn? To help you follow where I'm going with this, I've included below the first 120 words of my submission....

When mum was my age she refused to look after my daughter. A toddler of 3 who needed collecting from private nursery 2 days a week, and taking to the nursery at the school she'd be attending. Mum said no, that was too much to ask. She'd seen how tired grandparents got looking after their grandchildren and 'knew what it was like' for these people she observed in cafes or walking around the park. ‘It isn’t fair to ask someone of 59 to do that,’ she'd say. It's a lot to ask of old people that they look after their grandchildren. I’m 59. I’m all my mum has left. I look after her, working full time, and she's right. I’m tired looking after her. But the big difference is that as I look after her, she's only going to get older and needs more and more 'looking after'. Had my mum looked after my daughter, she would only have got older and needed less 'looking after'. For the last 5 years we've WhatsApp'd every morning, so that I know she’s...