Fortnightly Writing Competition: FEEDBACK (2-part round: pre-round discussion)

[Mandle]

So, this is an idea that Stupot had and that we discussed a bit and refined. But, it is so unique in structure, that I thought it worth a little discussion in here before setting the rules in stone and starting the round:

The idea is that participants write a story, then there is a round of feedback from others, and then they go back to the story and revise with the feedback in mind. This does NOT mean that they must incorporate all feedback, but if they do not, they should provide notes after the second draft is published of why they did not think certain feedback worked for them and their story.

The winner should be the person who dealt with the feedback in the best way.

My initial idea is 7 days for the first draft, then 3 days for feedback, and 4 days for the second draft. A word limit might also be a good idea considering the shorter writing time?

What does everyone think?

[Sinitrena]

While an interesting idea, I'm not sure it'll work.

1. We tend to have very few entries and often even less comments, because people don't find the time to comment, even when they have the time to read, or don't want to comment (whch is fine, generally, but desruptive here.)

2. Just because people would need to write a second version, doesn't mean they need less time for a first version. For me, personally, ideas need to grow and develop, I hardly ever start writing in the first week of the competition.

3. 4 days is short, even for a second draft, depending on when people have time. I don't think I'm the only one who writes in large chuncks when I have time. Finding such longer periods to write in works in a 2-week period, but not in a 4-day one.

4. I recommend a word min and max (mostly max, but min is probably a good idea in this case as well), just to have more uniform entries that are easier to critique to some form of standard. Stories of different length can lead to very different feedback.

5. In the same vain, there should be a topic given, to make it easier and fairer to give feedback. As a matter of fact, I would go for a more stringent, narrower topic than we usually give.

6. It might be a good idea to have some minor guidlines as to how feedback looks. <It's a good story, I enjoyed it.> is nice to hear, but ultimately useless.

7. A few rounds ago (Sliding Doors) brushfe had as a voting category the story that would have been even better in a different genre. I pointed out that that might actually reward the worse writer. I see a similar problem here: If the story that used the feedback the best is supposed to win, a story with a perfect first draft would lose. That's probably not a good idea.


Overall, it might work, but I think you do need to work on some of the details.

[Baron]

I think it could work with a shorter wordcount like 500 words or something. Anything more and you run into the problem of differing work habits - some people's writing style/habits just require more time in order to process feedback, ideate, and physically find the time to work on a draft (one, let alone two). I suggest longer timelines: 10 days to draft the initial story (acceptable with limited word count), five-seven days for feedback (because we really need decent feedback for this one), and then another 10 days for revisions/rewrites/polishing, with the more traditional voting round at the end.

I think the feedback part in the middle should be mandatory for all entrants - give feedback to everyone if there are <4 entries, and to at least 3 entries if there are more. This is easily achievable with a firm wordcount cap well less than 1000. I think as the contest administrator it would be up to you to fill any gaps in feedback in order to keep the train moving. Sinitrena is right - we'll need guidelines to keep feedback relevant and useful (e.g. comment on reader hook, character, pacing...)

I think we should just vote on the final product - who can create the best story after working through the process. Otherwise we open ourselves to discussions of who didn't try hard enough the first time around in order to "game" the system. Or maybe we vote the first time around, and then vote again the second time around, with votes the second time weighted double? Just spitballing, but you need to incentivize best-effort submissions for both rounds, otherwise no one is going to want to read them.

I personally support experimentation with the contest to shake things up a bit and try to encourage more participation, so long as we have grounds to believe the changes might improve the competition. I personally keep coming back here for the challenge and the camaraderie, which this experiment might reasonably be expected to enhance. What I don't need in my life, however, are more tight deadlines.

[Sinitrena]

One more point:

and then they go back to the story and revise with the feedback in mind

I think revise needs a definition here. Is revise just removing a sentence here or there and adding other ones? I'd call this editing.

Or is it writing the story again? This would be a lot more work, obviously.

Or is it up to the writer? But that would lead to vastly different results that are not based on feedback but on understanding what is asked for. You can incorperate a lot of feedback without a complete re-write, or you can incorporate nearly none even in a complete re-write. (I feel like I'm not expressing myself very well here, I hope you get my point.)

[Stupot]

I wonder if it would work better if we didn't overthink the process.

I agree that word counts should be fairly short for this.

Perhaps instead of voting on how well people implemented the feedback we simply vote on the quality of the final product / second entry, but with the caveat that you can only receive votes if you also provided an agreed minimum amount of feedback on the other entries. We can always use 'you implemented the feedback well' as a factor in our voting decision, without it being official.

Voting on the first entry doesn't seem worthwhile to me if the intention is to rewrite/revise them.

[Mandle]

Cheers for the feedback on the feedback theme. I am a bit busy right now, but will go over it soon.