I have to admit that I was surprised when I read the shortlist for the winners of the Firewords short story competition, 2016. Not a single name that I recognised from this web-site. No Lorraine Swoboda, no Helen Jones, no Jimmy Hollis i Dickson, no Emilie van Damm, no Clare Williams, no Victoria Fielding, no Penny Gadd, no Paul Garside... well, NOBODY that I recognised.
The rules state that
"No purchase necessary, but entrants must be registered on www.writersandartists.co.uk"
Now, I realise that this might have been a tactic by W&As to attract new, quality membership. And it seems to have worked! Except for ONE little detail...
Let's look at that shortlist:
The Visit by Toni Allen
Last Man Standing by Jen Falkner
After The Dark by James Hatton
Stars by Liam Hogan
Homeland by Katherine Mezzacappa
A Mother Whale Lifts Her Head by Jeanne Panfley
A Good Thing by Megan Parker
Mountain Ash by Nicole Pearson
The Man With No Shadow by Stephanie Percival
The Seventh Sense by Dee Takemoto
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I have taken the trouble of carrying out a search on this site of those members. In order not to bore you, I will not name them one by one and recite their statistics. It's a LOT easier than that. Of those ten members, 8 share the following traits:
a) They are all Level 0.
b) None of them has uploaded an avatar.
c) None of them has bothered to give ANY information on their profiles.
d) None of them has "shared works" on this site.
e) I would guess - though I have no proof - that none of them has ever taken an active part on this web-site, aside from registering in order to submit to this competition.
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Furthermore, I have googled some of the names. Some searches have resulted in typical generic "find out about Bloofah Hambroughlingham on LinkIn". some are already published writers. One name is that of a character on a television series.
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Now to the 2 exceptions to the above list:
Jeanne Panfley (first runner-up) is not a member of this site.
Jen Falkner (tied for first prize) is not a member of this site.
Now, since you HAD to be registered on this site in order to submit to this competition, and since the winners were to be notified by e-mail, I can only conclude that J&J did sign up, but as soon as they'd won their prizes, they buggered off, leaving all bona fide, active members of this site empty-handed.
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Something is rotten, I think, in Denmark.
I admit that I have done some SLIGHT editing after the pasting of the following: removing one word (left behind after a sentence had been restructured and grammatically incorrect - and confusing - in the middle of the new structure).
Quote: "Jeanne Panfely with 'A Mother Whale Lifts Her Head.'
"[...]
"Jeanne pulled off something really challenging in this story [...] Writing from the perspective of a young protagonist and making it feel authentic but also engaging to a reader of any age is no easy feat."
Agreed that "Writing from the perspective of a young protagonist and making it feel authentic but also engaging to a reader of any age is no easy feat."
Frankly, I disagree that "Jeanne pulled [it] off." This story sounds like an adult TRYING to sound like a child... and not quite achieving it.
a) She tries for an innocence of describing things... but uses vocabulary that a child would never use.
b) At the time of writing this, the child is at least 8 years old. The father is a biologist. No child of eight whose father is a biologist would EVER call a whale a fish. My father was only a layman interested in natural history, but by the age of six I knew damned well that the whale is a mammal... and would correct anybody - adult or child - who made that blunder. I also knew the difference between monkeys and apes.
c) "He has a dusting of light brown hair and it's receding, like two tides up the side of his forehead." What kind of child talks like this??? Answer: a 20+ year old child PRETENDING to be younger and not paying attention to slips like this.
This is a nice-enough story. But to claim that "Jeanne pulled off something really challenging" is just balderdash. ALMOST pulled it off, maybe. It sounded contrived to me.
@ Charlie: Points well made! If W&As are only interested in expanding their mailing list, I can certainly believe that they may feel that they've won with the whole campaign.
But considering that most of theior e-mails deal with offers of workshops, conferences, and meeting-with-agents, and that participation in these activities (Purchase an online service; Purchase an event) gain you 100 points (each halfway to level 1 on their own), I found it remarkable (in the sense of "worthy of remarking upon") that not a single one out of TEN short-listed authors had reached 200 points.
If it's a marketing strategy, it doesn't seem to be working.
And if it's a tactic to build up an active, mutually supportive community of fellow writers and artists... it has proved to be a complete fiasco.
Ditto if it was an attempt to build the confidence of struggling writers (struggling not because they have no talent, but simply because they are unknown) who ARE active on this site. AND write well.
Re: La Gr@not@'s "forc[ing] people to enter a flash fiction comp if they don't write flash fiction, no matter how well-intentioned the cause is", there is no forcing involved. [You don't wish to participate? Obviously, that's your decision. We DO want the book to come out, though (and do a little bit of good), so we'll continue raising its sorry head on this forum.] Neither does La Gr@not@ require participants to sign up with us in any way.
If the Firewords competition had been "open to all comers", this thread would never have been posted.
If I had been bowled over by the quality of the shortlisted submissions, ditto. Unfortunately, 7 out of 10 have not been opened to our scrutiny. I (personally) found one of the winners and the runner-up to be nothing special aka weak or predictable/unoriginal. Having read (here on shared works) some of the submissions that didn't even make the short list, if I were God (pardon me: one of the judges), they would never have made the top 3.
The judges praised the runner-up for "pull[ing] off something really challenging in this story": being able to write with the voice of a child. I added a comment, blasting this opinion. In my opinion, the author got the child's voice totally wrong ON SEVERAL COUNTS! (I will copy-and-paste my whole comment in the next reply box.)
If the Ts & Cs of the competition were to be a registered member of this site during the comp duration I really don't see what the problem is.
Nobody is obliged to participate in the forums here in order to enter comps and nobody is obliged to maintain that membership. This is not a dictatorship, though it would seem you believe it to be. You can't force people to use a website that they've tried out and decided it's not for them (just as you can't force people to enter a flash fiction comp if they don't write flash fiction, no matter how well-intentioned the cause is. Yes, referring to another, separate post there).
If W&A appealed as a social forum those members would have stuck around. Obviously it didn't but some kind of -- what? Punishment? Banishment? Revoking of competition wins? An obligation to hang around with beginner writers and help them out? I don't know what -- seems to be hovering in the background of this post purely because tastes and opinions differ on where busy writers should chose to spend their online social presence. At the end of the day, if they don't feel they are getting a substantial ROI of their time on W&A, then who is anyone to castigate them for not sticking around? Plus, many people 'lurk', read the articles, etc., and don't get involved in posting.
The rules do not state you must be an *active* member with xxx many posts in the forum.
Perhaps, therefore, the question should be directed elsewhere -- how can W&A make the site more appealing and keep these new users engaged in the forums?
I haven't been on this site in ages because I know of more useful sites where I can get my writing critiqued. That's not to say that people's opinion here hasn't been valuable because it most certainly has, but the interface of the website just isn't critique friendly, especially when I want in-line critiques and especially when I am member of another site that works better in that respect.
So sorry, I'm totally not in agreement with you parading the winners' and RUs' W&A membership credentials in such a negative light. The lady who won and posts useful information on Twitter obvious *is* giving back to the writing community as a whole, just not this particular one (and any wonder with attitudes like this). Also, if she hadn't won you'd never know all that useful competition info was even on Twitter (and now I know, I will go and look at her profile, so thank you for that). So, see? That is how 'giving back' works.There's only so many hours in the day so give her a break. For all you know she might have 6 kids and a cat sanctuary to manage and doesn't have time for YET ANOTHER online writing venue.
If the comps are open to all members regardless of activity then tough pants, get over it. The site has managed to build its email list, which I'm sure is what they wanted in the first place, anyway, and if they want members to be more active they will change the competition rules (they never do). Their motivations for these competitions are probably more in line with marketing than fairness.
@Paul -- yes! That short story that was not a short story but a poem. That certainly did feel like a cheat of the rules because it set out quite clearly that it was a short story comp and not poetry. But what can you do? Move on, just move on. At least it didn't cost anything to enter.