Reply To: Number of New Stories Displayed

[Ginger Herten]

While I share Insatiable’s frustration about barely readable poorly written stories, it’s still nearly impossible to put a firm definition that everyone can agree on what exactly constitutes a poorly written story. Never mind avoiding personal taste bias from clouding one’s judgment on it.

Like, what is a good story length? For me, it will vary by my mood. Sometimes I want short and sweet, sometimes I want long and passionate. So putting parameters around that is hard.

Obviously the giant block of text stories that have no paragraph breaks are a problem. But sometimes if you struggle through, there is a good story in there, that just needs a good editing. I’ve occasionally also seen the other extreme where the author started a new paragraph after every single sentence and the story was insanely stilted as a result.

The ease and enjoyability of reading something is also very dependent on the readers’ literacy level. Reader A might really want what amounts to “Cat in The Hat” with a haircut and adult content. While Reader B wants “Canterbury Tales” with a haircut and adult content (yes, I am aware actual Chaucer isn’t G rated.) Which is better is very subjective. However, I think most of us fall somewhere in between, the spectrum of in between Seuss and Chaucer is huge. There is no way every single one of us could agree on where on the spectrum counts as good vs counts as bad.

Then you get into regional issues. English is written differently following different rules in different parts of the world, heck in the larger predominately english countries there are regional variations. (Saying “on accident” instead of “by accident” sounds very wrong to my ears, yet is considered correct in some regions of the US.) And that doesn’t even get into that not all the stories submitted here are written in english.

Then you get into the issue of personal preference. And lets face it, many of us have certain very specific likes an dislikes. Sometimes one of my favorite authors will throw in elements I hate, it doesn’t mean they are bad, just that I personally don’t like it. It can be hard to keep my feelings about an authors preferences separate from my assessment of their writing skills.

This whole subject has given me an idea though, that I will start a new thread about.

Basically long story short. I don’t think there is a simple rubric we could use to determine if a story is worthy.