The Vocal Creator Awards.

This morning, I sat here for hours nervously chewing my fingers. I wanted to enter The Vocal Creator Awards

My confident mind kept saying,

"Give it a go."

My unconfident mind kept saying,

"No Carol, it's a waste of time!"

Red alert! I managed to change my mind and enter!

I'm not confident with the idea of writing as a competition yet, but I realized that if I wanted to achieve, I had to keep an open mind.

That means taking risks.

I read the information several times before I realized what I had to do.

It wasn't the prize pool that made me enter the awards, it was the feeling that I might have possibly written something that may turn out to be better than I thought, and I wanted to get eyes on my work.

In return, the idea that I could nominate other writers to enter appealed to me in a big way because I know plenty of creators who write well and deserve the chance to get eyes on their own work.

In the meantime, I talked about the awards with friends who were not on Vocal, and they couldn't understand my logic behind paying the $20 fee and entering the awards.

I explained it like this:

In the world of writing, there is big competition. In order to be seen, you must put your fears aside and get eyes on your work. There are some big writers out there who may have been writing longer than you. As an amateur in the world of writing you are new, and being new means that it takes time to get eyes on your work.

The only way to get eyes on your work is to challenge yourself because the world of writing is a massive world of competition.

If you want to be a writer who wants to be seen, you have to get past the fear of competition, even if you think your work isn't good enough.

After this conversation, I started debating whether or not my own writing was truly good enough.

I was worried about failure and worried that failure would make me look stupid, even though I have a few top stories on Vocal.

My fear seemed irrational because not everybody can be a winner, but you'll never know whether you are a winner or not if you don't try.

So, I looked back through a selection of my work and decided which I could use. I only chose one, because if I entered them all, it would have cost me a fortune.

With competition like this, it is important to be responsible and only spend what you can afford.

Then came the nominations.

This was a bigger challenge for me than deciding which of my stories I should enter into the awards because I read a lot of creators' work, so I had to try and narrow down my choices; otherwise, I'd have spent all day trying to decide who to choose!

Entering this challenge was more exciting than the $20 I paid. It enabled me to recognize those writers who I thought were amazing and gave me a different way of thinking about my own work.

There will always be a bunch of writers better than you in this big world of writing, so if you have a story that you are unsure about entering into the awards; read through it, tweak it if you need to, and if you are still nervous,

enter it!

The idea of competition isn't always about winning and who is better than you.

The idea of competition is to push yourself out of your limits and appreciate your own work as well as those of others.

If you don't win, it doesn't mean that you are a bad writer. There will be many others entering the challenge, but at least you will know that it was worth the try and that your work has been seen.

Competition is confidence and good luck with your own entries!