Look, ducks!
My college roommate used to say “Look, ducks!” while pointing in the opposite direction as a distraction when she wanted to steal food from my plate. Distraction might be a useful strategy for culinary orgasms, but it’s not so good for writing. While not every diversion is a distraction, most stories hold together best without containing irrelevant sentences — or even paragraphs. Longer is not necessarily better. Edit! Trim! Keep that in mind as you read and vote this week. Also? The shorter the piece (hello micro!), the more every word counts. Vote for those who used their words best.
Popular voting for the yeah write #316 weekly writing challenge is now open! Vote by 10pm ET on Thursday for your favorite nonfiction and fiction|poetry 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 constructive criticism as well as applause. We all want to improve our writing and you can help! Don’t just say “I liked it” – get specific!
Tips for constructive criticism that doesn’t hurt:
- Do more than say you liked what the story or poem was about. The writer worked hard to deliver their message in a certain way and it’s useful to them to know if that technique worked for them or if they should try something else.
- Open with a positive comment or idea.
- Pick out a sentence or paragraph that really worked for you and explain why: instead of “I love ‘the sky turned the color of Pepto Bismol.’” say “Using an unconventional metaphor for the color of the sky helped bring out more of the narrator’s background and culture.”
- If there’s a spot that’s unclear, bear the burden of the misunderstanding: “I struggled a little in the middle when you used a lot of pronouns. For a minute there I couldn’t tell if Gwen was with Art or Lance.”
- Try to steer toward positive or neutral feedback unless you know the writer welcomes public criticism. You can convey a lot of useful information about what they did right rather than focusing on what didn’t work!
How do I vote?
All three off our grids – nonfiction, fiction|poetry and microprose – are open below for your voting pleasure. The rules are simple:
- You get two votes on nonfiction, and three each on fiction|poetry and microprose. Use those votes to pick out the best writing for the popular vote!
- Self-voting is not allowed. That’s cheating. You want an honest win, right?
- 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.
- 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!
- Special Microprose suggestions: As you read, try to think about not only which submissions you connect with, but how each submission connects with the prompts and fits within the word count. We encourage you to weigh your vote, when you’ve got a “tie,” in favor of the story that does a better job responding to the prompt while maintaining story structure. Dropped words, awkward structure, and nonresponsiveness are no-nos, as each writer should be seeking to do their best in this tight format!
To vote for a post, scroll down to each grid and click on the heart within the thumbnail. Once you’ve voted for your favorite, you will be able to view the vote tallies after refreshing the page.
Have fun!
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