Master Jack

     This year's (Cafe Doom) contest judging experience has, once again, given me new perspective and things to think about.  I have entered contests often over the years and while they are run and judged differently, many of them return judges sheets to the entrant. These are usually broken down into aspects of the work and ranked on a scale of 1-5, with comments from the reader about why they gave each part the score it recieved. Maybe the next time I participate in contest judging I will use such a method. It would make the process much less overwhelming.

One of the things I saw in the nearly 60 stories I read over a week's time was how many stories were strong in one area and weak in others. We all have more ability in some aspects of our writing than others, but in many of these stories, the discrepancy was pronounced. And it's disappointing for the reader when a story with a great plot and characters is ruined by poor grammer or less than cohesive writing style. Or a story with amazing premise or imagery is overshadowed by flat characters or unrealistic dialogue.

There are few novels and stories that are awesome in all respects, but many writers are competent in most areas and stellar in others. A good writer rarely has a weakness bad enough in any aspect of their writing to negatively affect the entire work.

So, I've been wondering, in the context of "Jack of all trades and master of none", are certain writing skills more important than others? Which weaknesses are more likely to detract from a really good piece of writing? How strong does any one ability have to be to overcome flaws in other areas?


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Note: This post was partially inspired by a book I am reading, "The Name of the Wind", by Patrick Rothfuss, who as far as I can tell is skilled in many, possibly all, aspects of novel writing.

Once Again I'm Amazed...

...at how subjective writing critique can be. The judging I was participating in for the Cafe Doom 7th Annual Horror contest finished up today. I had all good intentions of critiquing and writing comments about each story as many of the readers/judges do. I'm less daunted by the work involved than by the overwhelming confusion.
     I guess I shouldn't read what others said about stories before submitting my own comments. Here's what I don't understand: several people wrote exactly what I thought about some stories. The same people wrote things like, "This story grabs your attention at the very beginning and the ending is an unexpected twist" about a story that I would have said, "Starts slow and the reader knows by the second sentence exactly how the story will go and how it will end."  How can two people have the same thoughts and feelings about some stories and completely opposite opinions of others?
     The whole experience makes me wonder how helpful the comments are to the writers. This is where we remind ourselves that the way to benefit from critique is to listen to everything, consider it carefully and choose to act on it or not, remembering that if several people say the same thing, there's probably some merit to what is said.

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