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
Dangerous Day Job 