It’s been a long week
Freelancers I know have had their work hours and assignments dialed back. A friend was doxxed. Two friends won’t be having their leases renewed and are scrambling to find places to live. In all this, writing seems like it might as well take a back burner. How do you keep your momentum when you keep running up against real life? It showed on the grids this week, too; I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a ghost town. Whatever’s going on in your life, I hear ya.
But November is coming. NaNoWriMo, NaBloPoMo, and a bunch of other challenges are headed your way. Let’s pick up a little steam. Whatever project you’re about to launch, it’s welcome here at YeahWrite! I’ve found our fiction|poetry grid to be an invaluable place to workshop ideas and characters.
It’s also a micro week next week – you know you wanna, even if you’re a little burned out from the Super Challenge. We’ve got Christine trapped in a hotel in Colorado, The Shining-style, churning out micro ideas for us, so you might as well try it!
Also it’s my birthday month, and all I want to see is full grids.
Did I say birthday? That’s right. And as my present to YOU, we’re bringing moderation back, one week a month. What’s moderation? Well, back in the good old days, we used to not only review your work for word count and basic structure, we’d look at it like proper lit mag submission editors. If we struggled with your “so what” or your grammar wasn’t up to scratch, you’d get a love letter from yours truly explaining what you’d need to work on to make the grade. Posts that met our submission standard moved on to the vote on Thursday. It was a great way for struggling or beginning writers to get a true and honest assessment of their work. It’s funny- a lot of folks who thought they’d get a love letter didn’t. Their writing was just fine. Others would get a note (it’s always private unless you share) explaining where the story, poem or essay fell apart.
Nervous? Don’t be. Ask around in the coffeehouse – I think you’ll find that the love letters had love on both ends. And where else can you get a real, honest review of your work by a pro editor for… well, for the time it takes to write the darn thing and submit it? Love letters aren’t just rejections: plenty of folks have taken and reworked their pieces and returned to top the popular vote.
Besides the popular vote, we also have the option of handing out an editorial staff pick to any post on our grids. Our editors comb the grids to find, not just the best writing on this grid this week, but what we think is pretty darn great writing anywhere anytime. Picks are based on writing quality, how successful the author is in conveying information, and just plain style. 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- and we’d love to, so keep that great work coming! (Besides, next week is the last week for our cool Halloween avatars, so let’s give them a workout.)
On weeks when we don’t award a staff pick, keep an extra close eye on the Roundup. That’s our rundown of trends we see from week to 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 Roundup, 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, Editorial Staff Pick, and Top Three badges. It doesn’t clutter up our sidebar, and they’ll still look pretty on yours!
Rowan’s Roundup: YeahWrite Weekly Writing Challenge #341
In the absence of a trend on the grid (besides absenteeism, geez, y’all) I want to take a few minutes to talk about some of the things that the lone post on our grid did right. As a couple commenters noted, it was almost two posts, so I’m going to treat it that way, as a discrete first and second half.
The first half of the post started strong and clean. If you don’t have your reader within the first five sentences, you probably don’t have them at all. “There is no reason for social justice to be a pejorative concept” encapsulates the first half of the essay in only a few words, signaling what’s to come. Not only does it lay out the ideas you’re about to encounter, the vocabulary signals clearly that the essay expects you as a reader to keep up. This is what I talk about when I say trust your reader and use your natural vocabulary. This essay contains quite a few terms that would sound like the writer was reaching for fancy vocabulary except that they are used cleanly and with appropriate nuance. In keeping with the pithy opening, the first half of the essay is declarative, organized, unpacked.
The second half is where we hit the slippery slope. Now we’re elucidating, drawing out the concepts unpacked in the first half and teasing them into connection with reality. To do this, the reader is anchored with a repeating phrase. One angle that I might have taken on this essay as an editor is suggesting that the repeating phrase be part of the “unpacking” of the first half, rather than introducing it as a new concept for the second half. That would create an echo effect that keeps the reader nodding along. Breaking those expansive paragraphs down into four, rather than two, would have helped as well; the reader is a little disoriented after the signalling in the first half. But. I want to specifically note that this doesn’t mean the second half is weak, or even weak compared to the first half. Instead, it’s suffering because the first half signalled that the writer was going one direction and then the second half went the other way. On its own, or with an opening paragraph in a similar style, none of these questions would have arisen.
If you’ve ever gotten a love letter from me, it’s likely that at some point I raised a question about whether all the parts of your essay were playing nicely together, or if you’d written two essays. Use this one as an example when you look at your own work; it’s conceptually one essay, but the stylistic gearshift in the middle made commenters skid a little!
Fictioneers, you get a little bit of love from the Super Challenge this week. We’ve got some fantastic writers churning through our prompts, finding inspiration and ideas and pulling it all together in a very short time and tight word count. Sound familiar? It should. One of the hazards of prompts is not that you get too few ideas, but too many. 1,000 words (or 750!) isn’t enough space to put in all the bells and whistles. If you add too many artful devices, no matter how well-executed they are you are going to squeeze out things like plot and character development. One writer had so many great things going on in their story that they didn’t have room to do things like keep their pronoun use clean and explain the central device their plot hinged on! “If only this story had about 4,000 more words to happen in,” one judge lamented. So this week’s roundup lesson is, to paraphrase Coco Chanel, before you submit your story, look back at it and take one thing out.
That’s it for this week! 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! If you’re more the self-help type, remember to scroll through our writing help section for tips and tricks. Even if a post isn’t directed at your favorite grid, there’s probably a handy hint for you in there anyway!
Everybody: before you go, please take some time to leave your favorites a little love in the comments, and don’t forget, the Weekend Writing Showcase opens tonight at 6pm Eastern US Time!
Congratulations to the Crowd Favorites at YeahWrite #300
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.
Nonfiction Challenge
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Loading InLinkz ...About the author:
Rowan submitted exactly one piece of microfiction to YeahWrite before being consumed by the editorial darkside. She spent some time working hard as our Submissions Editor before becoming YeahWrite’s Managing Editor in 2016. She was a BlogHer Voice of the Year in 2017 for her work on intersectional feminism, but she suggests you find and follow WOC instead. In real life she’s been at various times an attorney, aerialist, professional knitter, artist, graphic designer (yes, they’re different things), editor, secretary, tailor, and martial artist. It bothers her vaguely that the preceding list isn’t alphabetized, but the Oxford comma makes up for it. She lives in Portlandia with a menagerie which includes at least one other human. She tells lies at textwall and uncomfortable truths at CrossKnit.
