yeah write #282 weekly writing challenge is open for popular voting

Popular voting for the yeah write #282 weekly writing challenge is now open! Vote by 10pm ET on Thursday for your favorite nonfiction and fiction|poetry entries! NOTE: This week, you get three votes on fiction and one vote on nonfiction. We adjust the number of votes depending on the number of entries. 

Before you vote

The feedback from the vote is great to have, but without your personal touch, we won’t know what we’re doing right and what areas we can focus on to do better next week. Please take a moment to make a thoughtful comment on each post you read. This is about community. We want to encourage applause as well as constructive criticism. We all want to improve our writing and you can help!

Editor’s note

Boy, you guys, it’s been a while since we did microstories. I needed a refresher from Christine, our original and only microstories editor, on how to do them right. So I thought you might like a sneak peek into the editors’ corner. See, back when our grids were moderated the microstories grid was one of the hardest to do. There are a whole lot of moving parts in a microstory, even though it’s not even fifty words. Here’s what I look for when I’m looking at a microstory, on an editorial level:

1. Title. Does the title just restate the prompt or question? That used to be an automatic disqualification. Now it’s just a waste of words. Using your title to restate something you’re about to say, or that the reader knows, instead of providing context and flavor for your story is a shame, because it’s basically free extra words that you could be using. Your story still has to stand on its own, but why let the opportunity go? If you’ve ever titled a poem, a lot of the same thought process goes into a good microstory title.
2. Word count. This one is easy and objective… except when it’s not. Check your hyphens. Hand-count your words. I used to hate tossing out a good story because it had 41 or 43 words instead of 42. A huge part of microstory writing is the incredibly restrictive rules and word count. Count. Your. Words.
3. The prompt. If there’s a sentence prompt that has to be included in the story, is it word-for-word correct, exactly as given? If not, that story wouldn’t make it to the vote. Yes, it could be put into quotes and used as dialogue or a period could be removed and the sentence continued, but the words we gave had to be there, word for word, in the right order with the right tenses and declensions.
4. Verb tense. I almost rolled this one into “prompt” because the two mistakes get combined a lot: writers will try to jam a prompt into their preferred tense rather than write the story in the tense the prompt is in. If the prompt was “where were your socks” then the answer had better be in past tense. Similarly, if the prompt is “the sky is so far away”  then either that needs to be put in quotes as “‘The sky is so far away,’ Anna complained,” or you’d best be writing in present tense.
5. Spelling. Why is this even a thing? It’s totally a thing. So is misuse of idiomatic phrases (honed in on, intensive purposes, wreck havoc, reign in). I don’t think I ever disqualified a micro on a single spelling error, but often many small errors added up to a story that was grammatical swiss cheese. You have like 40 words, guys. If 4 of them are wrong, that’s 10% of your story. If a whole sentence is screwed up, that’s probably a quarter of what you wrote. Think about how big that looks in context.
6. Innovation. Did the prompt go exactly where we expected it or did the writer take us somewhere new? Alternately, was the writer trying so hard to find a new place to go that they stretched the prompt almost out of recognition to get there? The best microstories are a balance of the two: the writer takes us somewhere personal, even if that’s a spin on the expected place, and does it while staying true to the prompt.

How do I vote?

Both nonfiction and fiction|poetry challenges are open below for your voting pleasure. The rules are simple:

1. Everyone gets three votes on each grid. Usually. This week, you get three on fiction and only one on nonfiction. We adjust the number of votes depending on the number of entries. 
2. Self-voting is not allowed. That’s cheating. You want an honest win, right?
3. Targeted votes (social media contacts coming in and voting just for you) are not allowed. That’s also cheating. Voters must read all the entries on a grid before voting for their top three.
4. Votes must be based on the quality of writing, not your friendship with the author. If you’re torn between two posts, vote for the one that has better writing. That means grammar, punctuation and spelling as well as sentence structure and concept. The hard work of becoming a better writer structurally is important, and we want you all to feel like you earned every vote!

To vote for a post, scroll down to each grid and click on the heart within the thumbnail. Once you’ve voted for your three favorites, you will be able to view the vote tallies after refreshing the page.

Have fun!