Tips and Tricks for Winning Poetry Competitions

Before going any deeper into this article, let no one ever lie to you that there are tricks that you can use to cheat the system and win poetry competitions. Any poetry competition that is worth its salt will have clear evaluation criteria and priority focus will be on skill. However, there are many tips that you can leverage on to become a better poet and inch yourself closer to winning competitions. The tips highlighted in this article are by no means the finality of them all. There are many other things that you may already be doing that are not listed here. 

Getting yourself started 

Long before you even think of submitting work into a competition, you will have probably started writing the poems. Poetry competitions provide rules and regulations whose objective is not to stifle your work and creativity but rather to standardize the output for different entrants. This makes it easier to compare work regardless of factors external to the poem such age of poet, gender, and other things that do not add to the quality of the poem. Therefore, before submitting your work to a contest, ensure that you have read and understood the instructions. This will bring you closer to meeting the evaluation criteria. 

Practice a lot 

Again, you are probably already doing a lot of writing. Do not stop! Keep practicing. Always have a pen and paper with you. Ideas are strange things; they may come to you when you least expect them. Never put them off and convince yourself that you will write them down when you get home. By the time you do, you will have totally forgotten what the idea was about. Build on those ideas. Make some time in your daily schedule to write a few lines. 

Vocabulary is king 

Poets are very choosy about the vocabulary that they use and that is the way to go. It is in vocabulary that you will find the syllabic requirements of some poetry contests and the rhyming requirement of a certain project you got from your client. Good vocabulary will only come through reading. Take time to read as much as you can. 

Avoid common topics 

Love is a beautiful thing but it has been misused and abused as a topic in movies, books, songs and even poems. Avoid topics that are predictable. One characteristic of most poetry contests is that they are always out for originality. One way to make your work more memorable is to write on a topic/theme that has not been written about repeatedly.

Learn the different types 

Always teach yourself something new in the world of poetry. Learn how to write in a different style. Explore that type of poetry that you have always wanted to try out but never got around to doing so. This is going to be superb for you in terms of your growth and will also expand the number of poetry contests (or categories) that you can enrol your work into.