It Is Easier To Give Than Receive
Yesterday, I went to an Australian Rules Football game. Bear with me, I’ll talk about writing. I really will.
Without going into the details of scoring, which can be obtuse if you’ve never encountered an AFL game before, my team lost by three points. Losing is never an easy thing, and it’s made all the more difficult when it happens on home ground. Despite the loss, the players were gracious, and shook hands with the other team, coaches, and umpires. No doubt the coaches will have much to say about team play, strategies, and improving performance in future games. But the loss wasn’t a disaster. We’re not even half way through the season, and we lost to the second ranked team on the ladder (we’re ranked sixth). There’s plenty of potential for a turnaround, and the coaches will have to pitch their talk so it’s just negative enough to point out failings, but just positive enough to encourage improvement. Which got me thinking about YeahWrite’s feedback opportunities.
Getting negative feedback on work can be so tricky. It can feel terrible, but that can either paralyse us or make us more determined to improve.
YeahWrite’s concrit badge encourages feedback that prompts improvement. The guidelines help those critiquing your work not to stray into meanness or debilitating comments, but to provide constructive commentary that allows the writer to build a better story. It’s a great way to improve both your critiquing skills and your ability to receive critique. This week, I encourage everyone to make use of the concrit badge.
May Poetry Slam: Poetry Criticism
All right, poets, it’s your turn. April was National Poetry Month, so this month instead of a slam we’re going to talk about how to read and critique all that work you generated for your #poemaday before you unleash it on an unsuspecting Internet. Or, if you’ve been reading everyone’s poetry but not feeling sure how to discuss it, it’s a great time to build some vocabulary around poetry critique! Learn more from Rowan here.
Prompt Up!
Prompt Up is our optional weekly writing prompt for the fiction|poetry challenge! Here’s how it works: we choose a sentence prompt from last week’s winning nonfiction post and announce it in the kickoff. It’s your job to use that prompt in your poem or story and then run with it. The prompt is just a springboard, though: feel free to use it as your first sentence, move it, change it, or float it down to other territories.
Erin5cents introduced us to a loathsome coworker in her essay, False Advertising. This week’s prompt taken from her essay is: Had I sipped from a bottle marked “Drink Me?”
How to submit and fully participate in the challenge:
Basic YeahWrite guidelines: 750 word limit; your entry can be dated no earlier than this past Sunday; fiction or poetry only.
1. In the sidebar of this week’s post, please grab the code beneath the fiction|poetry badge and paste it into the HTML view of your entry;
2. Follow the Inlinkz instructions after clicking “add your link” to upload your entry to this week’s challenge grid;
3. Your entry should appear immediately on the grid if you don’t receive an error message;
4. Please make the rounds to read all the entries in this week’s challenge; and
5. Consider turning off moderated comments and CAPTCHA on your own blog.
Submissions for this week’s challenges will close on Wednesday at 10pm ET. Voting will then open immediately thereafter and close on Thursday at 10pm ET. The winners, as always, will be celebrated on Friday.
Thank you for sharing with us your hard work! Good luck in the challenge…
Loading InLinkz ...About the author:
Asha keeps moving from one side of the world to the other. Her most recent move has taken her back to Perth, Western Australia where she grew up. She lives near the beach but hates sand between her toes. It’s a real conundrum. Asha began blogging at YeahWrite in October 2014 with this post, and YeahWrite was lucky to pull her on board as a Contributing Editor in December 2016. She is currently working on a novelette that grew from a series of flash fiction pieces. Asha is published in a variety of places including Modern Loss, PANK, Dead Housekeeping, and SheKnows. You can find her inconsistent blogging at Parenting In The Wilderness, or at her fiction blog, FlAsha Tales.
