How to prepare your submission to Discoveries 2022
BY Discoveries
30th Sep 2021
We are so excited to announce that Discoveries 2022 is now open for entries! We and the Curtis Brown Literary Agency and proud to be partnered with the Women’s Prize Trust and Audible to run this unique writing development initiative for a second year. Discoveries invites all unpublished women writers aged 18 and up, currently residing in the UK or Ireland and writing in English, to submit their works of adult fiction to the Discoveries Prize. The prize doesn’t require writers to have finished a novel – only to have started one – and it is free to enter. We're looking for writing that shows real potential, not necessarily polished drafts.
To enter, all you need to do is send us the opening (up to) 10,000 words of your novel (including any prologue) and a synopsis of up to 1,000 words. Find out more about Discoveries, the prizes on offer and how to enter here.
Here’s our advice on how to perfect your submission to Discoveries…
OPENING
The openings of books are incredibly important, a good opening will hook your reader and compel them to keep turning pages.
Make your opening really strong by:
Getting quickly into your story. Writers often make the mistake of spending a lot of time on scene-setting or introducing characters one by one with lots of information about their personal histories before they actually start the real action of the story. Move straight into the action to engage the reader fully.
Don’t open with clichés. We’d love to see something fresh, new and intriguing. At all costs avoid openings with people waking up in the morning, characters staggering around with hangovers or long passages about the weather or rather generic landscape. Give us something to hook us in immediately – something which makes the reader curious or establishes a mystery which must be solved.
But … Openings don’t need to be explosive. An unusual exchange between characters can be as dramatic as a man bursting into a room with a gun. Your opening should set the tone for the novel which follows it.
Establish the necessary context quickly. We need to know, rapidly, where we are as readers. If your novel is set in the past, drop some clues very early as to when the action takes place. If your story is told by a child, let us know fast how old your narrator is. Help us to settle quickly into your story so that we can lose ourselves in it…
Read over your material on the page before you send it in. Yes, we do think it’s a good idea to print out your material on the page – old-style – and sit with a pen in your hand to make edits before you enter the competition. It’s also a good idea to read your work out loud to yourself to see how it sounds – particularly when you have lots of dialogue.
SYNOPSIS
We do know, of course, that it’s hard to write a great synopsis before you’ve finished writing your novel. But give it your best shot. We’d like to see one good page (up to 1,000 words but do keep it a bit shorter than that if you can – around 500 words should be adequate) to show us where your story is headed. Here are our tips:
One-line pitch. Start with a sentence which tells us what’s really at the heart of your story – this is, essentially, your one-line pitch. If that’s impossible for the kind of book you’re writing, head your synopsis up with a line from your novel which carries some of its flavour.
Give us the broad strokes of your story. we want to know the through-line of your plot. Try to be clear and concise, and don’t drop in lots and lots of character names, settings and minor events. If you have a twist in the tale, it’s up to you as to whether you want to include that in the synopsis, but we should certainly get the arc of your story.
If possible (and without being too corny about it) try to get some of the tone of your novel into your synopsis so that it reads entertainingly and not like a characterless business document.
Remember – this is an overview of your novel, not a detailed plan. We don’t need full chapter-breakdowns – just the key points of your story.
Avoid putting in any value judgements about your own work. This isn’t a blurb on a published novel. Don’t tell us it’s going to be the next bestseller or that it’s gripping and moving etc. Frankly, we’ll be the judge of that!
TITLE
Finally, make sure that you give your novel a title. It doesn’t matter if you change it later – it’s still better to have a working title than none at all. A title gives your book an identity. It will also make it much easier for the readers and judges to talk about it. Otherwise we end up having conversations like this:
“I really like the one where the girl goes missing.”
“You mean the one where the girl goes missing on her way to school?”
“No, not that one. The one where …”
See what we mean?
FORMAT
We’d love it if you could format your work so that it looks professional and is pleasant for us to read. This is how we’d like you to do it:
Remember to proofread. Check your spelling, grammar and punctuation.
Make sure you include paragraph breaks and set your dialogue out correctly with a new line for each new speaker – all of this makes your material easier to read by our judges.
Check that your word count does not exceed 10,000 words.
Best of luck preparing your submission to Discoveries. We’re so excited to read your work!
If you want to learn more about what we’re looking for from submissions to Discoveries 2022. Please join us for our How to Get Started Discoveries Webinar, to take place on 4 November, 7.00pm-8.30pm, featuring a panel of Curtis Brown agents, authors and Discoveries judges – find out more and sign up here.