I go to a lot of prompt sites to inspire my writing. Velvet Verbosity, Chuck Wendig, The Parking Lot Confessional, and today, Friday Fictioneers. Some of these are vibrant communities, and at least one is a ghost town, but all have one thing in common: they provide me with weekly inspiration. In fact, this blog started out as an attempt at founding a prompt site of my own.
Part of the bargain is that you read the pieces other people post in response to the prompt, in the hope that they will return the favor and read yours. (Which I do, except when it's poetry: I don't know enough about poetry to offer any intelligent criticism.) Frequently, when reading some of the entries, I come up against a problem that I really don't know how to address.
They can be mind-numbingly prosaic.
I don't mean in the sense that they lack 'poetry' in the sense of color and tone and metaphor; I mean that their subjects are commonplace to the point of being banal. And while style is important, any artistry devoted to such a dull subject serves not to elevate it so much as bring it into the realm of the absurd: to wax poetic about something so pedestrian is to tilt at windmills. Maybe it's a trap inherent in the maxim 'Write What You Know'.
Though many of the worst offenders come from the category, I certainly don't want to criticize 'Mommy Blogs' in general: they can be fascinating and hilarious and profound. Certainly such subjects can be leveraged to say something bigger, something important, something about life (much like, as I am constantly reminding people: good zombie stories are not about the zombies. They're about something else, usually humanity and what it means and implies). These particular offerings are just not, in my opinion, getting there. They're not about something bigger, something magical.
I need magical. I've read too much Ray Bradbury to accept anything else.
What do you think? Am I off the rails here?
I just read your Five Sentence Fiction (innocence) and I could tell right away that you were not the run-of-the-mill mommy writer - you didn't have run-on sentences, you spelled correctly and used punctuation properly. Yes, the bar is often that low.
ReplyDeleteI don't know if you typically submit FSF but, if so, I can finally read one and leave honest feedback. I get discouraged when I read most of them.
FYI I got here because I clicked your Blogger profile, which went to your G+ page, which had this article posted.
By the way, you're doing what I used to do - post a ton of fiction for free online. It's fine if you like to do it, but some of my stories would have been good enough for sites like Daily Science Fiction, which pay you $50, but you can't have previously published it (including on your own website).
Thanks very much for the kind words :-) I haven't posted a rant over here in a while... maybe it's time for a new one!
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