Well, I judged a couple more stories today for the writing battle. I can’t say I particularly enjoyed this round. I couldn’t connect with either story, partly because of the content, and partly because both of them were felt roughly edited. They had lots of repeated phrasing, choppy sentences, and a couple of weird non-sequiturs that made it hard to follow along. The plots were fuzzy, and worst of all, the characters weren’t unrelatable at best, and off-putting at worst. I ended up choosing based on which one had the more coherent plot, although I still wasn’t a huge fan. I hate to give a lot of negative feedback all at once. It feels bad, especially knowing I’ve written some real stinkers too. If I hadn’t been able to find anything good in those stories I wrote, I might not have continued writing. I’d hate to discourage someone just because they wrote a poorly formed story one time. Then again, they were pretty bad. I’m not sure I’m cut out for this judging thing.

Hopefully I get some better stories, either from the next round of writing battle, or from twisted tournament. It’s still exciting to see what comes next!

Thank you for reading,

Benjamin Hawley