Re-reading the article on the short story contest that nobody won, it’s become a statement of the times, and yet a reminder of the writer’s life in every era. I think the difference is in the sheer number of people who believe themselves to be writers, and this may likely have been encouraged by for one thing, weblogging.
Today more than ever we are writers. Where once the telephone became the easy way to keep in touch, we have gone back to the written word via e-mail, weblogs, twitter, facebook, etc. and now phones are used more for text messaging than for actual voice communication. In truth, even as we keep more in touch, we’ve built barriers that serve as filters to avoid actually touching each other. Maybe even that loss of personality and emotion in communication is what is missing from our stories.
I can also well believe that receiving 850 stories, a good percentage of which are just awful, discourages even the most enthusiastic judge (or reader–just look through the current crop of literary journals). It’d have to be a real standout to win, and writers of such stories have either grown past the contest stages, or become jaded and turned off by the obvious selection of same old, same old that litter the literary and so don’t bother submitting.
So what’s a writer to do? Write. But only if you love it, or if you have to; here too, be honest with yourself. It might sound like a dramatic artsy thing to say "I simply must write," but it’s a little bit like getting married to wear the white gown and long veil and in other words, fall in love with the drama rather than the reality. That reality being marriage and fifty years of grunts and farts and accidentally dyeing his underwear pink.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology