In the end
I’ve put off writing this until the last minute. I know. It turns out nobody, including me, writes better like that. But in a way, as long as I put off writing this post, the last grid didn’t close for me. And for more than half a decade, that’s been my job: every post, every grid, every week. I know: I haven’t always been the best commenter, but I’ve read them all. Whether I was sorting through the best of the best for an editorial staff pick or looking up a grammatical rule to make sure I was describing it accurately (and linking to more thorough information) for someone receiving a love letter, I read every word each one of you wrote. Including the comments. And in one sense, I’m very much looking forward to having more time to do that, to comment and interact and share work that I didn’t pull together at the last minute to fill out a thin grid. Time to teach the classes I’ve been looking forward to sharing. Time to work on a few of my own projects as well as everyone else’s (I think there might be a novel in that 2020 Hindsight story that was supposed to be a one-off). But in another sense, I’m going to miss it (although the idea of lying in bed to a reasonable hour on Friday mornings is exciting, NGL). I’m going to miss feeling that connection to everyone’s writing, to the hopes and aspirations and the little dreams and memories that you found important enough to memorialize here. So my challenge to you as we move into this next phase of YeahWrite is to join me in cementing those connections and forging new ones. Let’s sit together in the Coffeehouse and talk about our WIPs and woes, as well as our triumphs. I’ll see you there! In the meantime, let’s check out who won YeahWrite’s final popular vote.
For 500 weeks, YeahWrite has been about more than just the popular vote, though. Maybe it sounds elitist, but we’ve always wanted to have something to hand to folks who have really gone above and beyond. There have been weeks where the best writing on the grid was so-so (we all have so-so weeks, don’t get salty, and sometimes we all have them at the same time) and weeks when the top five, seven, or even ten posts could easily have been published as-is. To make sure these posts–not just the best writing on our grid this week, but what we think is pretty darn great writing anywhere anytime–get the recognition they deserve, YeahWrite has had a second award. First it was called the Kiwi (after Kevin the Kiwi, a relative of the Random Penguins who would drop in to bless posts the submissions editor thought were really great) and later the editorial staff pick, given out by any member of our team who thought a post was superlative. But regardless of what they were called or who handed them out, those picks were based on writing quality, how successful the author was in conveying information, and just plain style.
This week, we’re choosing all of you. Because for this final grid our community showed up for us, and we want to show up for you. Instead of a staff pick, though, you all get love letters. Not in the sense of rejections, but in the original meaning of the words. They’re in alphabetical order by URL (not title) because they had to be in some order. Scroll down, find your post, and find out what we loved about it. (But don’t skip the comments and concrit on your post-nobody’s perfect!) And don’t just skip reading the blurb if it’s not about your post; you’ll pick up some handy pointers about what makes good writing great that you can apply to your own work.
But we don’t limit kudos to posts: our commentariat commendation goes to a writer who has gone above and beyond to offer help and community to authors with work on the grids. You can check out our Critic’s Guide for examples of what we mean, but we don’t limit the commentariat commendation to posts with the concrit badge on. There are definitely still ways to help and support authors who don’t feel confident asking for robust criticism, and we trust our community to find them.
Once you’re done reading through the picks, keep scrolling down to check out who won the popular vote on the #500 megagrid. If you earned the highest number of votes, you are our final Crowd Favorite! If you came in second or third, you get “Top Three” honors. Grab your badge from our sidebar!
YeahWrite #500 Weekly Writing Challenge Love Letters
Something that stands out in this essay is the contrast between the precise tiny details it gives and the long span of time it covers. The writing moves readily between summary and description, dipping lightly into each as needed and forming a sort of sympathetic structure to the flashbacks and creeping exhaustion of PTSD. Using the structure of the essay as a teaching tool as well as the words within it is a remarkably effective literary device, and one that many readers won’t realize has been used, until they find the essay resurfacing in their head at odd moments.
Microprose is a chance to really have a love affair with language. To use the precise words that mean exactly what you need them to say, and to use them well and sparingly, because at only 50 words there’s little chance of overwhelming the reader. This story takes full advantage of that chance, from tendril to vigour to loamy to torpid. Even the mouthfeel of the words matches their place in the story.
One way to make a lush subject dry (and a dry one even dryer) is by making each sentence and paragraph structured similarly. Northie neatly avoided that trap in this richly sourced rant about the apparent (but not actual) lack of diversity in Western classical music. From the punchy opener through each distinctively voiced paragraph, the reader feels in conversation with the author, not lectured to. That makes the lesson of the piece sink in more subtly, and the author’s passion stand out.
While you can’t use the title of a microstory to add more words, you can use it to set the tone, and this micro does that exceedingly well. The author never has to explain what the we are, who the savior is, or even the setting of the story; the title does all that for folks who get the reference – and only adds to the ominous vibe if they don’t.
There’s a school of thought in writing that says murder your darlings. And there’s another one that says salvage them and use them to scaffold your other writing. This essay does the latter, hanging its tender premise on phrases like “In my memory, my father’s hands are large.” and “Those hands that spanned continents,” and “In my memory, his hands are like his laugh” until it reaches the conclusion: All the giants of memory shrink in reality. The essay leaves the reader caught between dualities, poised in the liminal space between fact and remembered fact that is the heart of a mostly-true story. If we’d solicited a piece for our final grid, it would have been this one, the essay that reminds us there are two truths to every fact.
Irony is a solid literary device, and it’s at the heart of every essay about writer’s block. If this micro had been longer, it might have veered too far into the maudlin. As it is, the reader is left with the tension between “I can’t write anything” and “I just wrote something” that drives these pieces. It’s a wry and relatable feeling.
A good micro both leaves you wanting more and stymies you with where that more might fit in. This story invites curiosity – is the narrator a dragon? A harpy? Something else? – and delivers its load in cut-gem phrases like the imprecation that ends it.
[Ed. note: Rowan wouldn’t write her own love letter, so I wrote one for her. –Asha] This essay is a lesson in essay writing. If you look carefully, you will find multiple techniques to writing strong creative nonfiction essays inserted throughout. From the title, Rowan hooks the reader in by proposing what feels like a truism with just enough doubt to cause the reader to question its veracity. Do Americans really measure with anything? In the first paragraph, she goes on to provide a metaphor that feels familiar, and then she breaks the fourth wall by telling the reader that that’s what she’s doing and setting up the very connection she’s describing. Rowan tells us that she’s forging the world with words, and then proceeds to show us how that’s done. Through the use of unlikely, and often hilariously preposterous items to measure ubiquitous, familiar objects – a cat to measure the height of a woman, how many German Shepherds she can deadlift – she creates an emotional connection with the reader. She deftly puts us at our ease, makes us comfortable with the absurdity of measurement before delivering the gut-punch of loss and death. Her final line invites the reader to reflect on where we should be focusing our attention, without being judgmental or preachy. The sadness in the final question posed as a statement calls on the reader to divert our attention away from frivolous measurements to the ones that really matter.
As we’ve watched Danielle find her stride as a writer over the years, one thing has consistently stuck out: careful, precisely revealing essays. Between the lines of this one you’ll find more information than you bargained for, from the carefully chosen animals for each set of parents to the exacting details that draw the reader down into the industrial scent of green junior-high walls and the class-conscious accessories of the saltwater pool. This is the kind of essay you can read twice: once for its more obvious so-what, and once for the encoded information you missed the first time.
Bookending isn’t just a great way to keep stuff on your shelves. It’s a way to anchor a phrase in a reader’s mind. You’ve got the option of keeping its original meaning, or changing it up, but either way it’s a solid use of one of your darlings. The choice of second person cements this essay, keeps the reader in the moment and anchored to the descriptions of houses they’ve never seen and people they’ve never met. In first person, the essay might have been distant and preachy; in second person it lives.
If I were to try to explain to you that the sunk cost fallacy is what keeps people persevering at the same doomed endeavour long after it makes no sense to keep going, your eyes would glaze over before I got past the first sentence. But give that explanation a metaphor – frogging – and an anchor object – crochet – and your readers will be, well, hooked. This essay uses those literary devices carefully and relatably to unravel its meaning back to a sparse beginning: it’s ok to turn away, let go, and start over better.
Speaking of people who’ve been around a long time, it was delightful to see Michael back on the grid this week. He’s given us bunnies and sentient colors, angels and otters. But he’s at his best in the spot that lives under your solar plexus, the one between humor and grief. The place where the fantastic becomes everyday. Where being “an Igor” is just another job, and one that grinds you down while you pay off your student loans. The bop is a fantastic form choice for this poem, its humor and changing refrain holding up the structure of the story even as the Igor sinks deeper into debt and humor becomes tragedy, however lightly handled. Unrelated: I wonder if I still owe 20 cents to my undergrad library?
Most of the editors have a perennial complaint about poetry: it must be more than just hitting enter in weird places. The line break is a form of punctuation. And it’s one that’s used to great effect in this poem, setting aside encapsulated phrases like “collapses, crushing” and “coughing in the rasping rubble.” Each line of this poem could stand alone as something to cry aloud; but they’re stronger together (Who will tend our hands/burnt on the ropes). The whole poem is structured like that: viewable as whole and as fragmented, like its subject matter.
One of the most critical errors a micro with a first-line prompt can make is changing tense (are you listening, Super Challengeers?). This one flows smoothly into the next line, never forgetting the gravity of the first. It makes time for detail like the star stickers, and doesn’t bother describing the narrator’s emotions, merely implying them in the caliper-tight last paragraph.
This story turns the breakup story on its ear, subverts tropes with unforgiving tenderness, and draws the reader into a world lived between the fleshed-out details. No “single tear” here to make tracks down the narrator’s cheek: instead we get “I’ll cry. / No regrets.” The writing is just lush enough to bring us into the moment, the smell of undescribed sex in the sheets, the note in the shoe, the final fuck you because my time is valuable. And it’s sparse enough to let the words breathe. The clipped sentences hang together into lyrical paragraphs, and in the end the story is neither too long nor too short to say what it needs to.
500 words can seem like forever, or like it’s too tight a space for the story you want to tell. When it’s the latter, do what Laura did: use details in the story to make your worldbuilding work. Use a Bentley as shorthand for wealth, a phone as shorthand for a tether but also for a time period. But it’s the unexplained shorthands that leave you wanting more: the purchased judge, the “I still had work to do to earn that.” This is, essentially, a very long microstory, written like one, with the whole world and story outside the explicit lines of the work, and that’s what draws you in: those tantalizing glimpses out into the larger world.
You have to make tough choices writing microstories: do you have room for detail? Worldbuilding? Literary devices? This micro takes the last route, its sparse, circular structure creating an armature for the reader to hang their own experiences and ideas on. The singular act of shutting the door falls neatly in the middle, an equilibrium for the narrative pendulum’s arc.
One common complaint about blog posts is that it’s so easy to just put up what’s essentially a diary entry: this happened, then this, then this. This post tries–and mostly succeeds–to dodge that trap by overlaying many journeys into one, describing a feeling rather than a specific trip. The lush details draw the reader back in time to the narrator’s childhood even as the bus slips forward through time into a new day, distance and time passing in sleepy gaps between glimpses into town and country life.
While the tornada was this month’s poetry technique, it’s also available for use in storytelling, as this micro demonstrates so aptly. While the first few lines are shaped by whatever experience the reader brings to the story, the last line clarifies the author’s intent, leaving more casual readers to re-examine the looser early phrasing with a new understanding.
There are topics that are always going to be well-trodden ground in the world of online essays: writing about writing, relationship woes, and what is an online friendship anyway? The way to keep them fresh is to make them indisputably yours, whether that’s through metaphor, a unique point of view, or just your own particular voice. By the time this essay is done, although no details are supplied about the online relationships, the reader knows the author’s struggle to find sincerity and honesty not only in these friendships but in her perception of them and of herself.
Writing essays with timeskips is an art, a fine art, and one which is better shown than told. The circlings-back of language and time throughout this tender but unromanticized look at motherhood, work, priorities, and writing mirror and amplify each other until the essay unspools itself at the end, tidally, to bring back pieces of the first paragraph like emotional driftwood on a shore. The reader blinks and finds themself again, collecting their own pieces from where they’ve wandered, a little dislocated in time.
Hotels are liminal spaces; held between worlds. Who are we when we’re not at home? this post asks, and who do we want to be? Instead of spending time on backstory or action, it dwells in speculation, in will-they-or-won’t-they, in the little noticed details of scents and illicit peeks into wardrobes and suitcases. In this piece what is forgotten–names, titles of books, nights–is as important as what is remembered, and as present.
Persuasive essays don’t have to be built like an eighth grade “answer this question in a topic sentence and five paragraphs” assignment. They can be as subtly built as this one, which leans into personal detail and experience to build a foundation for its description of kindness, and its theory about separating and describing people by how kindness was modeled for them growing up. Was it treated as a strength or an exploitable weakness, and how did that shape not only their view of the world but their path through it? The essay closes with a challenge to the reader–as good persuasive essays can–to take the essay’s theory and build on it with their own lives. It is from beginning to end very much a teacher’s essay, from the kind of teacher we need.
Rowan’s Roundup: YeahWrite Weekly Writing Challenge #500
I’ve been writing roundups for literally years now, and it’s bitter and sweet that this is the last one. Instead of addressing this week’s grid, I’m going to take the chance to give you my favorite, best, and kind of uncensored, parting advice. I mean, I’m also leaving you with a huge library of writing help. But this is the good stuff.
If your reader doesn’t care in the first couple sentences, they’re never going to. I promise. So whatever backstory you think they need to know, put it in later so you can focus on your hook.
Two things should be saved for your personal journal: your feelings about writing, and lists of events. You can turn either one of those into a decent personal essay, but they’re practically never a personal essay on their own. Get those words out–you need to–and then leave that one in draft so you can write the essay that was behind it.
Your essays will tell readers as much about you as a person as they do the stories you tell. Make sure the person they see is the person you want to be known as.
By the time you take yourself seriously as a writer–and you should take yourself seriously as a writer–you should be beyond “one single tear” slipping artfully down a cheek as a device for anything. Nobody cries like that–write how you, personally, actually cry, and you’ll connect to a lot more readers.
You’re not shocking. It turns out that “edgy” writing can be the most boring writing in the world, simply because it’s so predictable and lazy. There’s a place for horror, and gore, and all kinds of darkness in writing, but it takes skill to handle its complexity and the way that it should affect your characters. That’s the part that most people leave out – if you can find it, you can write good horror.
Seriously, Google whatever you don’t know. Whether it’s the parts of a bird’s foot or the landscape of the Idaho panhandle, if you get it wrong you will undermine the credibility of every part of your story.
Onomatopoeia is the single biggest word-waster. Creak creak said the floor as my feet tip tapped over the old grey boards. The grey floorboards groaned beneath my feet. One of these leaves more room for story than the other.
Don’t edit your story out just to leave your good words in.
Please don’t Shatner your work. You’re a lyrical writer normally? Bring that to your micro. Don’t start talking in stilted sentences and dropping articles just to make wordcount. If you have to do that, change something else.
Find the comment on:
It’s so cheesy to do this, but seriously everywhere.
It’s not a big secret to anyone that I’m active in SFF fandom. When we talk about the history of SFF, certain names keep coming up over and over again. And that’s fine: they were good writers. The thing that doesn’t get mentioned, though, is how many of these powerhouse writers shared a writing circle. That’s right. If you’re a Gen X’er, most of the SFF writers you grew up with probably lived within miles of each other, and shared a crit group. Despite the myth of the writer in the garret banging out words long past dark, writing has always thrived in community, with feedback. Frankenstein was written on what was essentially a group writers’ retreat and crit session (although if anyone throws me in a crit group with Lord Byron I’m not responsible for the fallout). In the 21st century, our little groups don’t have to have the extraordinary luck to live a few blocks from each other. Instead, we can find those crit groups and communities online. Learning to read and comment well will always score a place for you in crit groups- and you, in turn, will become a better writer by making others better. If it worked for Asimov, it can work for you! Let’s keep up the energy I saw on this grid. YeahWrite has been, and will continue to be (if we have anything to say about it), a great place to find your writers’ circle, to cross-pollinate with folks who are writing wildly different things and learn from them, and to just be in community with folks who know what you’re talking about when you say “Ugh. My character did that thing again.”
That’s it for this week- and for the YeahWrite grids! But that’s not it for YeahWrite. We’ll be here every week with tips, tricks, and prompts. And remember to scroll through our writing help section for even more good stuff. Stay tuned tonight for Week 501, which will explain our new schedule. And best of luck to the Super Challenge writers tonight!
Congratulations to the Crowd Favorites at YeahWrite #500
The thumbnails are now sorted in order of most votes to fewest. Writing well is hard work, and we’re honored you’ve chosen us, whether you’re brand new or you’ve been here for years, to showcase your efforts. 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 in the Coffeehouse!
Megagrid Challenge
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.
Thank you for taking the time to do all these writeups! <3
Thanks, Rowan for your ‘love letters’, and thanks to everyone else who commented on my efforts this week. You guys are great.
If anything gets me to join the hated FB, it’ll be YeahWrite. See you in the Coffee House most likely, once I’ve forced myself to sign up. 😉😄