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Rob Stannard is a long-serving member of the Little Snoring Scribblers. He specialises in writing poetry, but has been known to pen the occasional short story. This tale, though, concerns his exasperation with not seeming to achieve any success with his ditties.

He'd been trying, on his own initiative, to find a market for his work but, as I've said, nobody wanted to know. His poems were sent back to him with monotonous regularity; the rejection slips bearing the words 'chance', 'thanks', 'fear', but always preceded by the word 'No'. So, he turned to Peter Gulliver, the group's sage, for some advice.

"Rob," said Peter, "your problem is that you're adopting the scatter-gun approach. You send your work to all and sundry, hoping that someone will take pity on you one day." Peter wasn't known for a soft-soap approach. He told you what he thought - and what you probably didn't want to hear.

"What should I be doing, then?" replied Rob, in an injured tone of voice.

"Look, the Scribblers subscribe to 'New Writing' magazine and, by definition, every member of the group can get preferential treatment with their submissions. It doesn't mean much, but if you mark your envelope 'subscriber' it'll at least be opened by the editor, rather than being passed on to a minion for the inevitable 'return procedure'."

"Well,I suppose it's worth a try," said Rob, gloomily. "I can't do much worse than I've been doing lately."

"Too true," Peter agreed. "But seriously, although the poetry editir of 'New Writing', Anthea Hamilton-Ellis, is a harsh critic, you might just catch her when she's in a sympathetic frame of mind."

Rob looked at Peter suspiciously, unsure as to whether he was joking or not. Nevertheless, he acted on Peter's suggestion. At the next meeting, during coffee break, he told Peter of the result. A H-E had sent him a nice, handwritten note thanking him for his poem. She'd gone on to say that although it was quite good, 'it wasn't quite good enough to be accepted for publication'.

"Oh well," said Peter. "At least you can report some progress. Why not now try another tack? 'Ostrich', the booksellers in Camford (the nearby town) are holding a competition in conjunction with National Poetry Day. Get yourself an entry form and give that a whirl.

This time Rob could see that Peter wasn't having him on. In fact, having now read the poem, Peter was quite enthusiastic about it. Rob, therefore, entered the competition.

And guess what? At their next encounter, Rob, overwhelmed with emotion, informed Peter (and all the other members present) that he'd won first prize, a selection of poetry books! What he didn't say, though, was that he'd been tempted to enter one of the children's categories, but chickened out at the last moment, when he realised his vocabulary was perhaps just a little too mature for an 8-to-10 year old. So it was the adult category or bust, with resultant success.

And the moral of this tale? If you send a poem to 'New Writing' and it comes back as 'quite good', enter it in the first available competition. Moreover, if A H-E actually accepts it, you should decline with thanks. Why? 'New Writing' will only send you a £3 voucher as payment. Poetry competitions like that of 'Ostrich' give prizes of books up a value of ten times that. Poetic justice?

Copyright © 6 Oct 2001 Paul Grainger
("Paul, I've just told everyone your name is being withheld under the Official Secrets Act so isn't this a breach of national security? Oh, maybe not, I don't suppose many people look at this site ...)