Love Games

I am a member of the Writer’s Digest website, so I receive emails with writing opportunity updates and information for budding writers.  I also has the option to participate in competitions they have on their forum.  The competitions are pretty simple: you’re given a prompt of some sort and specific instructions as to what they want you to write.  The winner is chosen by a community vote of other members and prizes are awarded.  I have entered a few of these, but never won.  I don’t mind, though.  My purpose in becoming a member and entering these competitions was to flex my writing muscles, make me think, and allow me to further practice and improve my abilities.  Anyways, this was a story I wrote for my latest submission in which a story no more than 800 words (I think) had to be written beginning with the sentence: “Heads, we get married; tails, we break up.”

Freshly Pressed/Stale and Wrinkled/None of the above

I keep coming across blog posts giving the how-to’s for getting a post be “Freshly Pressed.”  It’s great, really.  These writers who are talented, creative, and witty enough to be awarded a Freshly Pressed entry sharing their ones and twos on how they got to where they are.  But I see it as less a calculated formula to blog success and more just good-fortune and luck.

Write about something interesting.  Of course, that would be helpful to have a successful blog.  However, the things that interest me probably don’t interest even a fraction of other bloggers on this site.  So are you then supposed to write about something that the masses find interesting, rather that something you find interesting?  Well, that just wouldn’t work either.  I don’t care how good of a writer a person is, if they are writing about something they aren’t interested in or don’t care for, that comes across in their writing no matter how hard they try to camouflage it.  I imagine that a dull, drab, borderline anti-“whatever the subject matter is” blog post will be even further from being Freshly Pressed than an intriguing, excitable post about a topic with a smaller fan base.

Make sure you make clear and concise statements, using good grammar, yada yada yada.  Is this supposed to be a surprise?  A writer should, at all times, ensure that their writings are full of real sentences with proper grammar unless is serves the writing to be done otherwise.  For example: I am well aware that “yada yada yada” is gibberish.  However, it was useful to the point I was attempting to make in that sentence, which was that I felt that finishing that sentence was pointless because the information it would have provided should be common sense for any writer.