Luke Wildman--cool surname, no?--and I will share space in the upcoming Writers of the Future anthology. He has a lot of good advice here. He's also recorded a video summarizing and answering questions about the contest:
Put an asterisk on some of the meta-analysis as possibilities but not definites. I may have read few more anthologies, but I hadn't read the most recent in awhile. The "alien" perspective is difficult to achieve and impressive when done well.
The best explanation I've heard or read about entering the contest is this podcast with David Farland/Wolverton, Tim Powers, and Orson Scott Card. This is what I've pointed to when someone asks about the contest.
Part of it is going to be arbitrary. What did everyone else submit? If you and 400 others submit BEM stories, you're competing against all those stories for one slot. This happens in the magazines. I've had friends upset that they miss a market because a magazine published or will publish something like it within the past year or within the next year. You're competing against unknown forces.
The only thing you can do about that is to write what only you can write. Of course, it might be an oddball that stands no chance of publication, but maybe it's something that might catch someone's eye. A couple in the last anthology surprised me--not that I didn't like them but that they were experimental in some aspect.
That leads me to the next point: Traditionally, it has been a place for traditional stories--meat and potatoes. What's showcased is the speculation. Maybe the anthology is changing, though, so pay attention to what it's currently publishing.
If you're going to guess, you might map out the speculative subgenres. See what isn't getting published in the anthologies, and try one of the less traveled subgenres. I guessed in this post that maybe the editors are looking for more elaborate world-building tales (published early accidentally after experiencing a few surprises). In the podcast, Wolverton says he is looking across the breadth and depth of the field. There you go.
The contest is a great place to test out your stories. See what gets the editor's attention. He hands out different honorable mentions (in 2015 he started "Silver Honorable Mentions") and finalists. What are you doing that might have caught his attention this time that you didn't do before?
Finally, read the anthology, as Luke says. Read at least three or four of them. My personal favorite was L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future Volume XXIII although there have been several others that came close. Usually all are entertaining where two or three stand out, and a handful of those probably should have made it into the Year's Best anthologies.
The temptation for a writer is to sneer and say that you wrote something better than story X! I'm afraid that the first time I submitted I probably felt like that. That can be healthy if it spurs you into writing something else and submitting it. After all, that's what got Octavia Butler writing.
If it keeps you from submitting, though, then steer clear of it. The writers did something right, and your primary job is not to figure out what went wrong as if the story were still in the workshop, but to ask what made it catch the editor's eye. I hope that the analyses here on the blog all do that: something positive, something negative. A little bit yin and a little bit yang. A little bit country and a little bit rock and roll.
Feel free to send me your thoughts when the anthology comes out in November.
To all the writers, good luck! To the readers, have fun!
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