When I ask our community what they love about yeah write, the first thing that everyone says is – can you guess?
It’s not “the challenge” or “the competition” or “the bump in my blog stats.” No. It’s “the feedback.” So here I am again to give you the feedback on round one of our brand new super challenge.
If you haven’t been hanging around our little corner of the internet long, let me introduce myself. I’m Rowan. When our main challenge grids are moderated, I’m the submissions editor – in charge of telling you whether or not your post met our standards for admission to the grid. That’s a really neat job, even though it’s rough on everyone when I have to tell someone they didn’t make the cut. One of the things that drew me to yeah write in the first place was that we never just send a “sorry, not good enough” rejection. We have always been careful to explain exactly what needs improvement in an essay, poem or story, and to provide resources that will help writers make that improvement. We believe everyone benefits from reading good writing.
While we’re not moderating, and for purposes of the super challenge, I’m the managing editor. That’s only because the Boss Lady won’t let me call myself the Grid Ninja or something cool like that. While I don’t do individual “love letters” for unmoderated grids, I’m in charge of Rowan’s Roundup (the fantastic alliteration means they can’t get rid of me, right?), a quick overview of trends I saw on each grid that week with general tips and tricks that I think our writers could benefit from.
I’m going to take advantage of the platform and do a little of that for this roundup, as well as letting you in on a few behind-the-scenes surprises we ran into. So with that, let’s jump in!
behind the curtain
Well, it’s not surprising that we ran into a few… let’s call them unexpected features, ok? That sounds so much better than bugs.
One thing that mattered a lot to us was getting multiple judges to read and give feedback on each piece. The more scores you have per piece, the closer you get to an objective score. It reduces the chance of one judge’s negative emotional reaction to a topic or style influencing the overall placement of an essay. Yes, we get the best and most impartial judges we can, but at the end of the day everyone has subtle style preferences, right? On the other hand, have you ever tried writing a form letter that was going to seamlessly incorporate sentences from several different people, without knowing what those sentences would be? Hooooooboy was that harder than we thought it would be. Also, it turns out everyone has a different idea what “brief” feedback looks like!
Then, of course, the mail program decided that it had its own idea what “brief feedback” should look like, and it was a good deal briefer than even our tersest judge. Fortunately, our marvelous admin staff was able to work out a workaround.
If you add in my inability to deliver my deliverables until the latest possible second, you’ve got a recipe for a disaster that didn’t actually happen. Still, we’re working on improving our game all the time. If you’ve got a question, idea or suggestion, drop us a line!
yeah but what about my essay?
Personal essays can be broken down, for the most part, into two categories: stories about things that exist and stories about things that happen. Each of these categories has its own special challenges, so let’s talk about a few things that came up for more than one writer over the course of the first competition round.
well, that’s a thing.
One of the biggest challenges folks faced when talking about things that exist is finding what the staff here at yeah write calls the “so what.” Simply stating that a thing is, is not enough to make the reader care about the person or object. It’s important to make your essay more than a list of facts about the subject; you have to include a hook, a way to help the reader connect with the reason that it’s important to you to write about it.
At the same time, it’s important to try to resist the urge to tack on a moral that doesn’t really fit the person or object. If you’ve spent a thousand words describing someone who has chosen not to have children and who has built a life around other pursuits that they find significant, sticking a snide “but my life is much fuller because I have kids” at the end isn’t going to add anything to your essay; all it does is make you look like you’re searching desperately for a way to re-center yourself and feel superior.
yup. that happened.
In contrast, one of the biggest challenges in describing an event is finding the narrative arc of the story and editing out everything else. That’s right: it’s important to edit your life. That’s why we call them “mostly true stories.”
A personal essay is more than a diary entry. You don’t have to start in the morning and finish in the evening to tell a story about what happened at 2:00. If you’re telling the story of a car crash, it’s not important to transcribe every word of the conversation that was taking place at the time, unless it’s important to the reader’s understanding of the event.
When you write fiction, you’re building a story from scratch. The challenge is usually to put in enough detail to tell the reader what’s going on. In nonfiction, the challenge is to carve away everything but the story, leaving the story and all the details the reader needs to be engaged and to feel something, and not a single word more.
what’s significant?
Essayists get hung up more often than they should on the notion that their essays would be better if only more Significant Things had happened to them. If only they had a dead parent, or had lived in a war zone, or were a double-amputee. You get the picture.
What this idea misses is the fact that everyday stories are significant. Every person’s head is filled with memories and objects that make great personal essays. What’s that story you tell after dinner, that makes everyone laugh? That’s a personal essay. What’s the thing you’re saving at the back of your sock drawer that you take out sometimes because you’re not ready to get rid of it yet even though it doesn’t fit/is shabby/never belonged to you in the first place? That’s an essay.
Significance in an essay isn’t bestowed by some omniscient third party. It’s a gift that the writer brings to the subject, elevating it and showing it off to the reader. Significance is the connection between writer, reader, and writing. (Yes, that’s an Oxford comma and you can’t stop me.) Sure, all the things I mentioned in the first paragraph up above can be good essays – but they can also be terrible essays. Finding – no, making – the connection that grants your subject significance will make a good essay out of anything you choose to write about.
and a gentle scolding, which you probably saw coming
Whether you’re submitting to a competition or a litmag, it’s always worth taking the time to read back through the rules one more time before you hit “send.” Sometimes there are mechanical reasons for the rules: for example, subject line rules are often designed to sort your incoming email into the correct folder so it isn’t missed or overlooked. Font rules can give uniformity to documents so that your work is easy to read and consistent with all other submitted work – that makes it easier for the judge to read the work on its own merits. And title page requirements are a great way for judges and staff to spot a misplaced essay and get it into the right stack quickly and efficiently.
A quick look back at the rules shows that almost a third of your possible points are based on structure and formatting. That’s pretty normal for a competition of this sort, and there isn’t a lot of discretion possible on the judge’s part.
One of the hardest things to do as a judge is take ten points* off the top for formatting errors. That’s almost always enough to move a story down the list far enough to ensure it won’t make it to the next round. It might not seem important – after all, the judge can read your story whether there’s a title page and a filename or not, right? – but as I mentioned above, the rules aren’t just there to give you one more hoop to jump through. They’re an important part of the way you interface with the administrative side of the competition and they can help or hurt you. Take the time to make sure they help.
*not the actual number we allotted, but doesn’t it sound great in the sentence? That’s what we mean by mostly-true stories. It’s true enough for you as a reader to get the idea when the actual number deducted and total possible number aren’t actually relevant to the story.
