Writer Alison Wearing emailed today to share what she loves and loathes about writing contests.

But before I get into that, allow me to tell you a little about Alison. In addition to being a writer, playwright and performer, Alison is a memoir writing coach and the creator of the International Amy MacRae Award for Memoir (the Amy Award, for short). Alison created this contest, which chooses an exceptional work of memoir writing each year, to celebrate the life of Amy MacRae and to support her legacy to improve the outcomes of women with ovarian cancer.

I subscribed to Alison's emails about four years ago at the suggestion of a friend—a fellow ovarian cancer thriver and writer. Today's email from Alison read like a pep talk to her writers.

Alison shares what she loves about the Amy Award: inspiring people to craft and polish their writing and get it out to the world, celebrating excellence in memoir writing, raising the profile of deserving writers, and honouring Amy's life and legacy, while raising awareness of and money for an important cause.

But she also shares what she loathes about such contests. In four days, she will announce the 24 people who will make the longlist of contenders for the Amy Award. Twenty-four individuals will be delighted, but several hundred (311 to be precise) will be disappointed.

Alison confides that, every year, she receives emails from disenchanted contestants, expressing how discouraged they feel and how hard they had worked. She says that she tries to console them by reminding them that every writer faces rejection at some point. Indeed, two past Amy Award winners had had their stories rejected by other contests and magazines, she says. "In both cases, the writers took their rejected stories and kept working on them, revising and tightening and seeking feedback, before revising and tightening some more." She calls the process of honing writing and taking a risk to share it with others the work of a writer.

The most powerful paragraph in Alison's email is this one:

As we all know, writing is not a matter of sitting down and crafting brilliant prose day after glorious day. The task, most often, is to craft horrible prose, to take a hunk of an awkward idea and patiently, devotedly, attempt to give it shape. To sculpt it and stand back from it and chew on the proverbial pencil and then sculpt some more and stand back some more and think wow it's great only to stand back again and see that actually it's crap and what were we thinking and tinkering some more and realising that now we've tinkered it to death and it's so banal it hurts to read and what is it even trying to say and hang on this bit's quite good and a surge of enthusiasm and yet more fiddling and sculpting sculpting sculpting and standing back to see that no it really is shit (and so are we) and we might as well just give up on the whole thing because who cares if this story ever gets written anyway.

Oh how I could relate to this, especially the bit about "who cares if this story ever gets written anyway." I've said that to myself dozens of times in the past four years. Somehow, I've persevered, and will soon surpass 1,500 consecutive days of writing Jenesis posts. Most posts wouldn't win any writing contests, but with few exceptions, at least one reader is moved enough by what I've written to send a note in return. Often, my correspondents share stories from their own lives, which I feel privileged to receive.

In concluding her email, Alison invites all entrants to celebrate now, before the longlist is revealed. She is convinced they are better writers for having polished their stories before submitting them to the contest and they are braver people for having taken the risk to share their stories in the first place. Alison also encourages her readers to celebrate "another day in this fleeting, precious life."

In some ways, writing is my attempt to leave a legacy that will live beyond my own "fleeting, precious life." But it's also one of the best ways I know to connect with other people in the here and now.

I didn't enter the Amy Award contest, but may do so in the future. In the meantime, I'll keep writing and sculpting and organizing my content. And I'll keep living my fleeting, precious life.