Top Tips for Improving Your Chances in the Seven Hills Contest

1.  Be sure you submit in the right genre.

2.  Stay within the word limits.

3.  Read your own work aloud.  You will find a lot of problems this way:  sentences that don’t read smoothly, words left out, unintentional rhymes or repetitions. Reading your work aloud is especially important for dialogue. It helps avoid making your speakers sound like they're making a speech.

4.  Ensure that your submission is free of typographical, spelling, and grammatical errors.  Find fresh eyes; have someone else read it.

5.  Avoid passive voice. 

6.  Avoid cliché’s like the plague (cliché intended).

7.  Don’t overuse “had.”  If you find you wrote a lot of them, maybe you should restructure with fewer flashbacks and less backstory.

8.  Keep paragraphs at a comfortable length for readers.

9.  Be sure to provide descriptions of characters and setting with specific, revealing detail.

10. The first paragraph should entail a dramatic moment, or foreshadow that such a moment will come. Backstory details, which may be necessary but tedious, can be introduced gradually in subsequent scenes. 
11. If a story is broken up into separate scenes, consider ending scenes with a hook. This keeps the reader impatiently plunging ahead to find out what happened to the characters in the previous scene.

12.  Avoid weak, vague adjectives such as “pretty” and “cute.”  Particularly, do not combine them with other adjectives: “pretty presumptuous” or '”cute little.”

13.  Avoid “very” and the misuse of “like.”