After you read this, this post will self-destruct.
No, just kidding, but the site might. Keep your fingers crossed. As part of our sixth birthday celebration (YW #312 is coming up fast!) we’re doing a little maintenance today. Hopefully it will be seamless. Realistically? Murphy’s Law still applies. Bear with us, because we’ve got good stuff in store for you. [Ed’s note: oh my gosh y’all I am so in love with our new site. I’m almost as excited about some of our new features as I am that the migration worked. Take a few minutes to click around and refamiliarize yourself. There’s new material lurking around every corner for YeahWriters new and old! /RBG]
In the meantime, we have this week’s popular vote winners. But it’s not all about the popular vote at yeah write, folks. We also have our editorial staff picks to hand out. See, while there’s a popular vote winner every week, we don’t always give out a staff pick. Picks are based on writing quality, how successful the author is in conveying information, and just plain style. If you got a staff pick this week, grab your badge from the sidebar and wear it with pride! The great part is that we don’t have a finite number of picks to hand out. That means that if two, three, five, or even all the works on one grid are fantastic, we can give them all kudos.
Speaking of reading the grids, keep an eye on our roundup for a quick rundown of trends we see each week. We try to highlight the good stuff and point out problems that more than one writer is struggling with. There’s probably a handy tip in there for you right now, so check it out!
Once you’re done reading through the staff picks and roundup (and congratulating the winners in the comments), keep scrolling down to check out who won the popular vote on both grids. If you earned the highest number of votes in any challenge, you are this week’s crowd favorite! If you came in first, second or third, you get “top three” honors. Grab your badge from our sidebar!
Looking for your badge? Both grids have the same winner, staff pick, and top three badges. It doesn’t clutter up our sidebar, and they’ll still look pretty on yours!
Yeah write #309 weekly writing challenge staff picks: fiction|poetry
the donor by j edward benoit
J. Edward wrote one of the best hooks I’ve seen in a short story. It’s hard not to engage with a character who is about to crash his car. His neighbor’s intrusion, the lack of visitors in the hospital, and the plant-less and pet-less apartment paint a vivid picture of the narrator’s life. And, although the sister is a surprise at the end, the fact that this ungrounded person was spiritually tethered to another so tightly gives us readers an intriguing clue into the reasons for his isolation.
Rowan’s roundup: yeah write weekly writing challenge #309
nonfiction
As long as the subject’s open, let’s talk for a minute about bias in your writing. Nothing is quite so disorienting – or feels, as a reader, quite so much like being gaslit – as reading an essay where the objective accounting of the facts and the writer’s take on those facts are in direct conflict. When a writer describes an innocuous interaction and then demands that the reader sympathize with the way the writer was “attacked,” claims to have been terrified by an objectively harmless person, or insists that a catalogue of ways their significant other controls them adds up to love, the reader is likely to be (in order) suspicious, unsympathetic, and kinda horrified. It can be hard to spot, but if as a reader you’re having a response that doesn’t seem to be the one the writer is anticipating, ask yourself: do the facts presented lead you to the conclusion drawn, or is the writer’s bias showing? How does this appear in your own work?
fiction|poetry
“That’s a lot of words but they don’t say much.” It’s one of the cruelest pieces of feedback, isn’t it? Without giving too much away, now is a great time to start practicing the opposite. See how many ideas you can pack into a minimum of words. Trust me: it’ll pay off in the next couple weeks.
That’s it for this week! Remember, we don’t always give out a pick on both grids; if we were impressed by several posts on one grid we’ll give them all picks, and if nothing really stood out for us we’ll hold off. If you didn’t get a pick this week, read back through the roundup to see if you can use some of this week’s tips and tricks.
If you’re lost in the middle of the grid and wondering how you can get a little more feedback on your posts, check out our membership perks!
Everybody: before you go, please take some time to leave your favorites a little love in the comments, and don’t forget, our weekend grid opens tonight at 6pm Eastern US Time!
Congratulations to the crowd favorites at yeah write #309
The thumbnails are now sorted in order of most votes to fewest. Ties in the overall number of votes are broken by number of editor votes.
Congratulations if you’re at or near the top! Writing well is hard work, and we’re honored you’ve chosen us this week to showcase your entry.
If you’re at or near the bottom, don’t be discouraged. You’re in the right community for learning and growing as a writer, and we are always available with resources for those who ask nicely.
To our readers and voters: thank you! See you next week.
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Rowan, I’ve reread your comments three times and I think I get where you’re going with this. But how do you tell the personal story where you felt a certain way accurately if you have to discount the perspective you had at the time? Couldn’t how we felt in that situation be the ‘so what’? Or just don’t tell those stories?
Using an unreliable narrator or showing an irrational response is definitely a thing you can do, just make sure you’re doing it on purpose. It’s the difference between showing how you had a panic attack in the cookie aisle when the muzak changed as a way of getting the reader into the story and presenting how irrational panic attacks can be, and trying to convince people you were rationally afraid of a child in a hoodie running away from you because it’s such an objectively frightening thing to see. In one of those cases you’re telling a story; in the other, you’re just lying. See the difference? Readers can tell when they’re being lied to, and it makes them think less of the writer as a writer, a storyteller, and often as a person.
Thanks, that actually helps a lot.
Rowan, maybe I’m being obtuse, but I don’t understand what you mean in your nonfiction feedback. Could you elaborate, or give an example? Thanks.
Lemme see if I can think of a good example without calling anybody specific out or giving clicks to bad writing online…
Oh ok. So you know how at some point someone probably handed you a CD, mixtape, or online mix of “the most romantic songs of the 20th century” and “Baby It’s Cold Outside” was on there, packaged as a romantic song? But then when you listened to the actual lyrics you realized that it’s really about pressuring someone to have sex, which isn’t romantic at all?
It’s like that. The tension between what the author thinks their post is about (usually in a summary paragraph or something like “I was terrified” or “I’m super fat”) and what the words in the post tell you it’s about (summary directly contradicts the conclusion that you draw; or the actions they describe are aggressive, not intimidated; or they’re describing their “horrifying and humiliating” experience of having to ask for a size 4 instead of their usual 2).
Ooh, or when, as an abuse survivor, someone reads a list of ways in which a spouse “shows love” by controlling who they can see and where they can go, and alllll the warning lights come on.