Have you discovered the bronze lounge community? The coffeehouse? The summer supergrid?

We’ve got a lot going on at the same time this summer at yeah write weekly writing challenge, a little something for anyone who may stop by. The bronze lounge is our free space for introducing yourself to a smaller yeah write audience than usual. You can upload a piece you’d like to offer for peer-to-peer critique and you can critique a few pieces yourself. It’s all about getting involved. Register here, then dive in.

The coffeehouse is a place to just hang out and get to know who’s there a little better. Here’s the link if you care to stop by.

And, lastly, we’ve got the summer supergrid, an amalgam of all our regular challenge grids—the gargleblaster, the challenge grid and the speakeasy. Scroll to the end of this post to add your submission after reading the guidelines posted directly above it.

Reprinting yeah write #68 weekly writing challenge: writing for your target audience [July 2012]

Blame some of this on yeah write contributing editor @kdwald and a little on yeah write contributing editor @floodg, and maybe mostly on those who forced the yeah write challenge grid into summer hiatus, but I loved this 25 Bad Writer Behaviors (or, how not to act like a rabid penmonkey in public) by Chuck Wendig at terribleminds.

Can we all agree that writing a post for the yeah write grid is a little different than writing a post for your general audience unless, of course, your general audience is made up of all kinds of awesome? We’ve made it a point to highlight two separate pages for writing the yeah write way: the FAQ page and the guide for writing a winning yeah write post and, bringing to mind the 20/80 principle (20% of the people do 80% of the work), I’m loving on the 20% of you who’ve read them thoroughly.

 Submission guidelines — be they for a literary magazine, a blog, an agent or a publisher — exist for a reason. They’re not arbitrary…It’s making somebody’s difficult job just a wee bit easier. Guidelines aren’t suggestions. Follow them. —Chuck Wendig

We’re not trying to change the way you write. When you’re not writing for the grid, you are free to do whatever you want. I entered a writing contest a few months ago and the prize was something I really wanted: a ticket to the sold-out Erma Bombeck Writer’s Workshop in Ohio. The main submission guideline was to write a humor piece in the voice of Erma Bombeck. Well, I loves me some Erma Bombeck. I read all of her books when I was a kid and I can still recite some of my favorite stories of hers by heart. But I don’t write anything like Erma Bombeck. My humor is darker, it’s not for everyone, it centers around the underbelly of life, a place Erma never took her readers. So I decided I would enter the contest on my own terms, and the judges were gonna like it. My plan was to wow them by not following a single one of the given instructions and, long disappointing story short, my entry was rejected.

The thing is: I’ll never know if it was rejected on merit—were there that many entries better than mine—or if it was rejected because I took the rules and threw them back in their faces. A kind of “Take this, panel. You don’t own me.”

And that’s how the yeah write readers and judges felt sometimes when the grid was open submissions. Please, we would say, keep your entries to 1,000 words at the maximum because we have 50 entries to read in a compressed amount of time. And we’d get 3,500-word novellas. Please tell us a story with a beginning, middle and end, and we’d get some sort of dream sequence with flying monkeys because flying monkeys are cool and awesomely nonsensical. Please have a reason for telling the story or sharing the essay/fiction/creative non-fiction/photos, and we’d get flying monkeys on acid with no coherent sentence in sight.

When you’re not writing for the yeah write grid, you are free to do whatever you want.

Flying monkeys are cool when your target audience is demanding them. Flying monkeys are not so cool when your audience is specifically asking you to do away with them one post a week. I even wrote a post called something like: flying monkeys need not apply, and people were all like who are you to turn away my flying monkeys and you suck and I’ll fly monkeys onto the grid anytime I goshdarn please. They did not, in fact, use the word goshdarn, and I shall spare you the venom.

Like Wendig, I’m talking lit mag, blog, agent or publisher: if the guidelines are too specific or just not your style, then it’s important for you to reconsider submitting in the very first place. If you do submit and it’s not a good fit, so your piece is rejected? I can almost guarantee if your flying monkeys are as awesome as you say they are, you will find a place for them somewhere. If you can’t fit your target audience, find an audience that’s a good fit for you.

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