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NYC Midnight Black Belt Joined: 17 Nov 2017 Location: C. of Letters Status: Offline Points: 5401 |
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Totally with you. It looks on the surface to be somewhat *cough* random, but I also noticed in my heat, at least, nobody had the same genre in the first round.
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justmel
NYC Midnight Black Belt Joined: 25 Jan 2015 Location: Wisconsin, USA Status: Offline Points: 2114 |
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I've finished in the top five in R1 in four of the five years I've been doing the Short Story comp, including two firsts and a second, but I've never yet made it into R3. Just saying.
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Lisa_Who
NYC Midnight Addict Joined: 23 Jan 2019 Location: Washington DC Status: Offline Points: 702 |
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You all finally made me curious enough to put in the 5 mins required to assess this...so, my group is majority 2s and 3s. :) I fit right in!
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Edgelords are a bore.
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td333777
NYC Midnight Black Belt Joined: 29 Jan 2017 Location: MO Status: Offline Points: 2856 |
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For the last three years, I've done this exact exercise, mostly as a way of trying to apply math/statistics to something that is inherently difficult to quantify. Also, as a supreme distraction. In the end, these minor differences in rank (1st, 3rd, 5th, 2nd...) just don't mean anything. Sure, if given the choice, I'd rather be in a group of 24 other "5" scores, as opposed to a murderer's row of 24 1st placers, but since your score in one round of random people bears very little relevance to your score in a different round of random people, it just shouldn't worry anyone. Particularly when you consider the big genre shifts. Think about it: a very accomplished, skillful writer of thrillers gets stuck with political satire. Tears his/her hair out, comes up with something reasonably entertaining, takes 5th place and squeaks into round two. But in round two, if this writer gets ANY of the genres that resemble thriller (suspense, action-adventure, drama) he/she is a TOTALLY different animal than the writer who got 5th in political satire. Likewise with an experienced comedic writer--they destroy round one in their romcom heat and then get horror. True story--back in 2017 I won the flash fiction competition. When I entered the next contest, 2018's short story competition, I felt pretty good about my first round chances. Then I sorted out the names in my first round heat to see who I was up against. The 2017 short story champion was in the same heat--what are the odds that two overall winners would be paired together so early? What do you think the other 29 people in the heat would have thought had they noticed our names as well? Neither of us won the heat. I took second, she took fourth. Yes, good writers do well in competitions. But the difference between 1st and 5th is less meaningful than you'd think. Trey PS I still look the numbers up, though. ;p
Edited by td333777 - 09 Apr 2019 at 4:07pm |
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FF '17 - 1st, SSC '18 - 2nd, FF '20 - 7th
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Tricksie
NYC Midnight Addict Joined: 20 Jan 2016 Status: Offline Points: 1157 |
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I think it's kind of an "any given Friday" thing, you know?
Everyone who placed in the top 5 is going to be a good writer. Judging writing has a huge subjective element, so the difference between 1 and 5 could literally be one judge's personal feeling about some small thing. Comfort with the genre is also going to make a difference. Someone could have a head cold and a fuzzy brain and write worse one weekend than another.
So...the numbers are interesting and all, but I don't think they are predictive. |
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R1 G109 PolSat Not Much Will Actually Change
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MsVickie
NYC Midnight Newbie Joined: 01 Feb 2017 Location: Canada, eh Status: Offline Points: 95 |
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Hey fellow heat member! If it makes you feel better, I got #1 in my heat for the first round but it was for a genre I'm very comfortable with (historical fiction). This fairy tale stuff though, I had no idea what I was doing and I'm feeling a significant amount of doubt I'll make it past round two. My husband read it and told me it was "okay" so now I'm getting a divorce. Hahahah. But he's right. It's not nearly as strong as my first entry. I think all of us are good writers and no matter where we placed last time, a new prompt/genre really shakes things up.
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2021 100-word Microfiction: Surviving Sally
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MsVickie
NYC Midnight Newbie Joined: 01 Feb 2017 Location: Canada, eh Status: Offline Points: 95 |
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Oh actually, I'm in heat 2, not heat 3. Sorry! Clearly I'm having trouble reading this morning. But I mean what I said about the prompts/genres shaking things up. I think we all have a good chance.
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2021 100-word Microfiction: Surviving Sally
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td333777
NYC Midnight Black Belt Joined: 29 Jan 2017 Location: MO Status: Offline Points: 2856 |
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Oh, and one thing I forgot to mention in my previous post, but further lends credence to the idea that 1st/5th isn't truly meaningful when the prompts and the heats are drastically different between rounds-- The rounds themselves are vastly different. Eight days vs. three vs. one. I know a LOT of writers who, if you give them more than a week to research, workshop, and edit a story, will produce brilliance in almost any genre. But some of them, if only given a weekend, or 16 waking hours, will produce absolute dreck. The time crunch is a MASSIVE equalizer in these contests. TD
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FF '17 - 1st, SSC '18 - 2nd, FF '20 - 7th
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northernwriter
NYC Midnight Black Belt Joined: 15 Sep 2018 Location: Alaska Status: Offline Points: 3096 |
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I don’t know how I will do, but I did the same thing and looked at numbers and noticed that several people in my heat (25, action adventure) had action adventure in round 1 also. I wrote a first draft that I hated - it was fine on a technical level but really had no heart. I knew that since there were several people who had mastered action adventure, i couldn’t compete with them on a technical level for this genre anyway (meaning hitting all the elements of the genre.) So with the encouragement of some amazing beta readers, I scrapped the first draft and wrote the story I wanted to write instead. I don’t necessarily expect to proceed with it, but I had a lot of fun writing “Miss Zelda’s ballet school for bitches and badasses.”
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Microfiction 2021: 4th place overall
Flash Fiction 2020: 8th place overall |
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patsy
NYC Midnight Black Belt Joined: 28 Aug 2011 Location: Ohio, USA Status: Offline Points: 4709 |
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I'm in there with you, but it's a whole new ballgame with different genres and time circumstance!
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