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What I Learned from the Jericho Writers Friday Night Live Competition

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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is open to anyone who attends their Summer Festival of Writing, and to enter you submit the first 500 words of your unpublished novel.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.

This is the start of what I entered:

'A gust of wind whipped around Frank and Queenie’s legs as they waited outside for the congregation to settle itself into packed pews. It wasn’t the warmest April. Frank watched as Queenie tucked a stray auburn curl behind her ear and shivered. The calf-length dress she and her Auntie May had spent weeks sewing offered her no protection from the cool sea breeze. 

Frank rubbed his finger around his shirt collar and fiddled with the knot of his necktie, as if deciding which choked him more. He looked at his niece, his heart full of pride, and as he opened his mouth to speak, emotion grabbed onto his words, catching them like sawdust at the back of his throat.'


Listening to the long listees, I heard great openings that captured you straight away. The prose was tight, and the voice strong. Few words were used to hint at great detail, and the sense of a conflict emerged early on. I revisited my opening and asked myself if I ticked these boxes. No, nothing like it. 

I fully understood why I got nowhere near the long list - or even the longer list of great submissions that didn't get through. I'd missed the mark, and I needed to do something about it. I'll admit, at first I felt disheartened. Who was I to think I can write? Fool. I drowned my sorrows in a cup of camomile tea, and refocused. 

My first 500 words were jumping about all over the place with points of view from 3 different people. There was nothing to intrigue the reader because I filled in everything they needed to know. My opening line was very ... meh. My prose was a long way from tight. Oh, you get it. What I submitted was just writing, and it wasn't good enough.

It took me about 4 or 5 rewrites, but eventually I got there. My opening is now worthy of submitting - well, if it was back to June and I'd written this well back then. And so if I could live this summer over, this is what I'd submit now - the opening 150 words.

'Daisy Doyle was dead, or so her family thought. And yet here she was, standing on the wrong side of the church wall. Watching. Wishing.

Her auburn hair was hidden beneath an emerald green headscarf that she could ill-afford. What had she been thinking? Wasting precious housekeeping money on the damned thing. The colour was perfect for Queenie’s wedding. The wedding she wasn’t invited to. 

Nobody invites a dead mother to a wedding.

Standing at the church door, Daisy’s brother, Frank, rubbed his hands together and spoke to the young bride. How old he looked. But then, how many years was it?

A gust of wind scattered the last of the cherry blossom like confetti across the churchyard. The bride shivered, tucking a stray curl behind her ear. Her calf-length dress would offer little protection from the May sea breeze. A pretty dress. Who made it for you, Queenie? Not me.'


So what, then, did I learn from the Jericho Writers Friday Night Live Competition? I reckon I learned how to write. I'm sure I've much more to learn as I carry on working on my manuscript, but analysing the work of others is definitely helping me to hone my craft. 

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