Thirty years ago, I entered the L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future Contest—and won first place!
At the time I was a student in college, studying hard for a triple major in editing, modern literature, and creative writing. My plan at the time was to learn to write well enough so that I could make my living as a novelist, but I suspected that it would take a decade of struggling, and so I would need to support myself with a more sensible job—such as editing—until I could make a living as a writer.
A year earlier I had won third place in a small short story contest, and I’d decided to make it a goal to try to win first place in that same college writing contest the next year.
So over the year, I wrote a short story and then another, and another, and so on, thinking that if I didn’t win one contest, I might win some other one. It was sort of the shotgun approach to winning contests: write a whole bunch of short stories and then enter each one in a different contest.
But I had my sights set on one in particular: the L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future. It was the big kahuna. You see, it had the best prize money of any of them. It paid $1,000 for the first-place winner in any quarter, and the word on the street was that from among the first-place winners, the panel of celebrity judges would choose a grand prize winner who would receive another $5,000.
I was with my writing group in Utah one Saturday evening, and found that I felt sweaty and feverish. I went home to bed that night, and had a vivid dream about a woman walking toward me in a dusty bazaar in Latin America. I awoke with a sensation that I desperately wanted to help her.
But who was she? What did she need?
Instantly, I was into a story!
Unfortunately for me (or maybe fortunately), the fever stayed with me for months. I had to drop out of college for a couple of semesters, and I couldn’t hold down a job, so I merely wrote.
It took a month for me to finish my story “On My Way to Paradise,” a tale about a doctor in the far future, and send it in to the Contest. To my delight I won first place in the Contest for that quarter. Coincidentally, I won first place in several other contests within a few weeks of that.
Word soon reached me that one of the judges, the legendary Robert Silverberg, had liked the story so much that he’d shown it to an editor, and there was a rumor that when I went to the awards ceremony, I might be offered a novel contract.
Well, that sounded great. I wanted to be a writer, but I’d imagined that I would have to work and claw my way up that mountain for years, and suddenly it seemed that I had a possible shortcut.
That year, the Writers of the Future held its annual workshop for the winning writers at Sag Harbor, on Long Island, a town where Ernest Hemingway sometimes would hang out as he wrote.
For my instructors, I had the Contest Coordinating Judge Algis Budrys, along with a couple of hotshot young writers named Orson Scott Card and Tim Powers. We were put up in a hotel for a week and treated to a writing workshop taught by these and other legendary pros.
At the end of the week, we had the annual awards ceremony in New York. I was a bundle of nerves, as we prepared for it.
You see, the editor who had said that he wanted to approach me at the awards ceremony suddenly passed away from a heart attack just a couple of weeks before the occasion, and it felt as if a rug had been pulled out from under me.
At the awards ceremony, we had some real celebrities—folks like Mark Hamill (Luke Skywalker), along with many of my favorite authors. Robert Silverberg was there of course, but I remember being too tongue-tied to even speak to Gene Wolfe and Ray Bradbury. Then there were folks like Anne McCaffrey, Isaac Asimov, Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, Frederik Pohl, and others.
Three of the first-place winners that year were men, and one of those winners was my dear friend Shayne Bell. Part of me worried that I would beat my friend, and another part worried that he’d beat me, and then of course there was that disastrous possibility that we’d both lose. The one woman in our group got pulled aside and had her picture taken with Mark Hamill in case she won, so that she might be featured for an article in Women’s Day magazine. When that happened, I felt pretty sure that she was going to win.
The ceremony took several hours with the grand prize announced at the very last. To my surprise, I won the L. Ron Hubbard Golden Pen Award, and my life has never been quite the same since.
After the awards ceremony, I had several editors—not just one—approach me and ask to see my first novel. I had prepared a novel outline, but I’d only brought a couple of copies, so I didn’t know which of the eight editors to give them to. I took their cards and then contacted a literary agent a few days later.
By the end of the week, my agent had contacted several of those editors, and I was given my first three-novel contract.
Well, that’s how the Contest goes. It has grown a lot in the past three decades. Now it is one of the largest writing contests in the world, and each quarter it seems to get even bigger. Thousands of new writers send in entries, and the Contest still provides the large prizes and the annual workshop taught by some of the most respected names in the field.
Only two years after I won, the companion Illustrators of the Future Contest was also added, using a very similar format, with three winners added per quarter, and a grand prize winner selected each year.
In the past thirty years the Contests have helped launch dozens of writers and illustrators to stardom, and I suspect that the Contests will continue to launch many more careers. At one time, I was one of the bedazzled entrants. Now I’m the lead judge for the writing Contest.
Yet each time that I open a story to read it, I still feel hopeful. I’m hoping to find some young man or woman who is struggling to live their dreams, and help pull them into the spotlight where they can be discovered by thousands of others.
That’s what this Contest is all about.
So read on. There are some authors and illustrators in this book that I want you to meet. I guarantee that some of them will be around for many, many years. This is your chance to discover them along with me.