For the past month or so, Portico and Bad Idea Magazine have been running a writing competition. The prize, apart from various alcoholic inducements, is to be included in the first Bad Idea Anthology, which we are publishing later in the spring. The competition was to write a 1500 word piece on the subject of 'The Pen is Mightier than the Keyboard'. In front of me, I have a large stack of entries to read through by the end of the week -- on Friday, the editors of Bad Idea, hot literary agent Charlie Campbell and my good self, will retire to argue the toss about who deserves to win.
So far, the entries I have read have been the following: funny, touching, scary, terrible, wrong, right, unreadable and rewriteable. One entry came as a tracked document with all the changes and deleted sections. I'm guessing this was a mistake (either that, or an incredibly clever piece of postmodernism that was way too smart for me), though it was interesting to follow through the train of thought. Overall, though, I was touched at how many people were willing to enter and how much thought had been put in. Maybe it was the subject matter, but I found myself thinking about the process of writing a lot more than I was expecting. Which made for a very nice surprise.
