Ending Your Extract for the Emerging Author Dagger, by a Shortlisted Author
by Megan Toogood
If you’ve entered any kind of writing competition before you’ll know how easy it is to obsess over creating a killer first line. But I think it’s just as important to finish your submission on the right note. Despite writing about characters who love to trample all over the rules I can get quite obsessive about abiding by them. If the word limit for a competition is 3000, then the word count you’re looking for is 2999.
Ending a submission at the perfect moment is obviously more of a challenge than starting in the right place. Your story will always begin at the beginning, but who knows if something earth shattering will be happening at precisely 2999 words in. Maybe your main character will be innocently planting some tulip bulbs, unaware that five centimetres below their trowel lies the secret that will upend their life.
If only I had another 500 words! the writer curses. It would be obvious how exciting the rest of the story will be as soon as they find the… [insert your chosen victim/mysterious object here].
The last two hundred words of a submission can really be your friend when trying to get the competition judges to an exciting end point. In the opening chapters of your novel you’ll still be introducing characters, attitudes, themes and objects that will play a vital role later on. For competition purposes, however, you might want to skip introducing a new thread in favour of making room for an exciting scene in the main story.
Remember, when you submit for the Emerging Author Dagger you’re not signing a contract to publish those exact words in that exact order. In fact it would be extremely unlikely if you did. For instance, in the novel you might want your main character to delay their gardening in order to help out a neighbour. This might be laying the ground for a stunning scene later on in which the neighbour turns out to be none other than… [I’m sure you can fill that in].
But in a short competition submission you might be forced to choose between the neighbour and the mysterious object, rather than ending at a nondescript moment between the two.
At 2999 words into my 2024 submission, The Blond, the story originally introduced a cast of minor characters who will all have important, but small roles to play later on in the story. I took out this fun, yet complicated scene, only half of which would have made it under the word count. I then moved some of the next chapter up into my submission. This kept the focus on my main characters and their relationship, giving the competition readers a clear idea of who would carry the story forward.
When I was asked by agents for the whole piece after it was shortlisted I sent the original version, with its playful party scene. After all, they weren’t going to stop reading at precisely 2999 words.
So when you need a break from obsessing over the beginning of your submission, maybe switch to obsessing over the end instead.
Biography
Shortlisted for the 2024 Debut Dagger, The Blond is Meg’s fourth unpublished novel. Her theatre work has been staged at Southwark Playhouse and The King’s Head Theatre, while recent projects include writing and directing fiction podcast The Grove. She’s been a writing mentor with charity Freedom from Torture and now teaches literacy to young people who struggle to attend school.

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