Dear Geist,

Have you got any tips for a first-timer applying for an arts council writing grant?

Dear Kendrich,

posted by the Canada Council for the Arts.

Then imagine your application in a stack of hundreds of others, being read by a peer assessment committee—an expert in the literary community but also a librarian, a filmmaker, an art gallery curator, a music teacher, or similar mix—people who read and who value writing but who don’t necessarily live and breathe writing. They soon find that most of the applications have “artistic merit,” a major criterion for arts funding, but there isn’t nearly enough money to support them all. What’s a committee member to do? Weed out any application that is less than excellent: it has typos and grammatical errors, or the budget figures don’t add up, or the project description is so vague or esoteric as to be opaque, or the applicant typed everything in 8-point condensed font rather than being succinct, and so on.

If you have any questions about the application or the process, phone or meet with the officer overseeing the grant. Arts officers are knowledgeable, helpful, interested people who expect to talk to applicants and offer guidance. They don’t make decisions, by the way; they keep the peer assessment committee informed on policy and process, and they keep the discussion on track. If your application doesn’t succeed, you can phone the officer and politely ask for any further comments from the committee, to guide you in the next round.

It’s darn hard work preparing an arts funding application, to present yourself and your embryonic work to people you’ve never met, to do it persuasively and to do it in agonizingly few words. But even if you aren’t chosen the first time, the process of preparing the application will strengthen your project, and your writing.