Need Advice

I've decided I don't enter the competitions to get the judges feedback or the score.  I agree with all previous comments re the contradictory opinions offered by judges.  I enter them because this forum is priceless.  Thank you for making it worthwhile regardless of outcome! 

In my reading of others stories, specific to genre, it is plain that the judges do not follow the rules listed for the judging.  I have read stories that really did not qualify as the genre score well, stories that did not have much meat, as far as a story, score well.  I believe that the judges think they are cats.  That said, if they told us how a story scored using the percentages they list in the rules, and included that with our feedback, it would make for a clearer understanding of what we needed to improve, instead of the useless feedback they give us now.


Edited by Suave - 14 Sep 2017 at 9:03pm

couple things:
- i have gone through to r3 with a r1 of 4 points before, it's definitely possible.

- beyond the feedback comments it can be helpful to look at the specific marking criteria and ask yourself how you would score yourself on each. When I realised I was making good plots but not putting enough into character development, my success rate went up.

-As long as you tick the boxes of of the prompt, you can forget about it and really work on the marking criteria. A story with really good writing that technically is in genre, has a secondary prompt character and passing reference to the object will do better than an average written story with obsessive adherence to genre, prompt character as the main focus and a deeply integrated object

I maybe had to check to see if you were in my group. My use of the location was a little loose this time. Mentioned several times, story moved around, but it was never REALLY at a location that wasn't a mansion...per se.  >.>

I'm not sure the length of the stories in the SSC (I imagine they're longer), but I imagine they're more lose with Flash Fiction requirements in terms of content due to the story length, whereas with a short story writers have more room to move within stricter confines.