The obsession short story competition

He handed me the disc with a smile. “Should keep you busy, over four thousand stories to read.” He checked a piece of paper; “Four thousand, one hundred and twenty-six to be precise.”

“Wow, that’s fantastic,” I said, genuinely pleased, as I was being paid per submission, so the more stories there were the more money I made. It meant I could put off starting my next novel for a few months, I wasn‘t quite ready to face the novel just yet.

“You must’ve done a fantastic job promoting the contest,” I said. “Most of the ones I’ve judged have only had a hundred or so entrants.” This was a lie, I’d never judged a competition before, but had entered plenty (and won a few).

I could see by the look on Eric’s face that something was amiss. “Ah, well, you see, there is one little thing I should tell you,” he said. There weren’t four thousand entrants. We didn’t set a restriction on the number of times you could enter and because it was free some people entered more than once.”

“Well that’s fair enough, it’s not always easy to choose between your two best stories. I‘ve entered two stories in a competition before now.”

“Yes, well, that’s what we thought. The trouble is we didn’t put a limit of two or three, we put no limit at all.”

“So?”

“So, erm, only four people entered.”

“.” I didn’t get a chance to interrupt.

“One person submitted exactly four thousand one hundred and twenty-three stories. The rest kept to one each though. In fact we pretty much failed to advertise it, if it wasn‘t for, shall we say Contestant X, then we‘d have had to call the whole thing off.”

There was a silence, as I contemplated my potential fate. Little did I realise then how horrific the consequence would be, I merely imagined having to read four thousand stories of a low quality.

“There are a few of them about unfortunately,” Eric continued. “What we call ‘compulsive competitors’. They can’t stop sending in story after story into competitions. I can’t tell you which stories are which,” he added hastily, “that would compromise the unbiased selection process.”

He didn’t have to tell me though, it was painfully obvious. The three stories that weren’t written by the person I had soon christened ‘The Crazyman‘, shone out like beacons of sanity in a mad, mad world. They had character, plot, some even had dialogue, humour and rhythm. There was a clear winner, and obvious choices for second and third place.

However, these stories were randomly hidden amidst eight million words of pure drivel, an insane gush of obsessive observation, nonsensical abstraction and meaningless use of words for words’ sake, forming less of a story than the words on a scrabble board. One five thousand word epic described making a cup of coffee in every conceivable detail. Who even knew there were three different words for the steam emitting from coffee?

The project took up two months of my life; two arduous, painful and unfortunately unforgettable months. Every day I would wake up and read painful prose, words forced together unwillingly, like a random group of kidnap victims forced to play a game they didn’t understand for the amusement of their kidnappers.

When I agreed to judge the competition my career had been starting to take off. I’d had my third novel accepted, by a reputable publisher this time, and was starting to get odd jobs relating to my literary career, including running a series of workshops on ‘How to write the perfect novel’. The offer of judging a writing competition seemed too good to turn down, there’s always plenty of this type of work available and it makes up the gaps between novels. Plus, it’s just reading, how easy that sounds, how wrong I was.

I just hadn’t realised how all-consuming it would be. The sheer tedium of the experience left me mentally drained and unable to write. When you’ve spent three hours reading a vivid description of paint drying, or a fourteen page ode to the blank page, you have no energy left to write your page-turning sci-fi romp. Or anything else for that matter.

It didn’t help that I was recently divorced and had to make an effort to go out, if I wanted to see another human being. After a day’s reading I simply wanted to put my head in the gas oven. However, I persevered, this was my first judging job. I should have just skipped the stories after the first few paragraphs if they seemed appalling, which of course all bar three did, but I was somehow drawn into the experience, I had some bizarre compulsion to finish every story. I had to suffer every single word, every single paragraph, all four thousand one hundred and twenty-six tales.

After a week of Hell I was cheered by the first story from a proper writer, one of the ‘humans’ as I referred to them. I knew I had only two more to look forward to, but none the less it helped me carry on. I even answered the phone a few times the next day, got back into something of a social world.

However, that bliss was short-lived, a month passed before the next proper story, during which time my sleep patterns became irregular, due mainly to the nightmares, and I ate less and less, every mouthful tasting like unwanted wordage. I saw no-one, I had no desire to see anyone. I was trapped in a prison of prose.

Finally though, after hours, days, weeks, in fact two whole months, the exercise was over, I had reached the last story. I would love to have enjoyed it, to have savoured the farewell words, but the story was a meaningless confession about times the author had said ‘hello’ to people he didn’t know and didn’t want to speak to, including once when he stuck his head out of the passenger window of his father’s car and shouted ‘hello’ to everyone they passed. This passage took up seven thousand words.

I phoned the competition organiser and sent details of the winners. Shortly afterwards, I had a mini-breakdown and spent two weeks in bed, running a fever and losing yet more weight.

No sooner had I recovered than it was time for the results to be officially announced. Unsurprisingly the loser was livid and posted angry messages on the website notice board, almost unceasingly. He accused the judges (i.e. me) of taking bribes and made all sorts of threats against them (i.e. me). In the end the police were called and he was banned from the site.

I found out his name from these postings: Mondale Anersal. Intrigued, I googled him and followed the link to his own website, which contained his complete collection of short stories. 431,923 stories altogether. I was stunned, even at his low quality of writing such output is simply phenomenal.

I looked through a few to see if they were the same style as the ones he had submitted to the competition, or if he had deliberately made them boring through some misunderstanding of the competition theme. They were. Totally, utterly, pointless, boring, tedious, monotonous. A waste of time and words.

I read a few more. Just to check. Surely he couldn’t maintain this low quality over his entire oeuvre. The next I tried was totally turgid, a six-part, 73,000 word epic that did no more than describe a paper cup, followed by an experimental story that only used the words: ‘Havoc’, “merge’ and ‘forager’, then an attempt at writing a story backwards, only because the spell-check didn’t recognise the form it became in many places a random collection of letters. And still I read on, I couldn’t stop.

It’s been two years now. I haven’t written anything in all that time, haven’t done any paid work, I’ve been living off delayed royalty cheques and sending off old stories, all of which have run out nopw. In spite of that, in spite of all sense and reason, all I can do is read the stories. I have to read every one, all the way through. I read morning, noon and night, eating at my computer, sleeping in short bursts.

The collection’s grown to over half a million now, 502,103 to be precise, he’s writing faster than I can read, even if I spend every waking second of every day reading, which I do. I‘m slow because I try to make sense of the stories, of the words, whereas he just clearly writes with no thought, no meaning. I may never catch up. I may never do anything else. It is my curse. It is my fate. It is my doom.