Board Thread:Administration/@comment-4832646-20140401205802/@comment-4832646-20140401234150

ImGonnaBeThatGuy wrote: Honestly, I think we should just stop accepting poetry. How many good poems do we actually have? How many get deleted? It's enough trouble getting people to write stories correctly, much less poems.

The story guidelines are. . .iffy. Like Sado said, there's needs to be allowance for style and voice. But at the same time, we can't let people write like trash and claim that's how the character would write.

Again, on Sado's point, the sense thing is ill-defined. Does Dogscape really make sense? Or Ashley, Kansas? I get the general spirit.The new killer is the bad kind of nonsensical. It's hard to follow, characters do things that people wouldn't do. I think this needs fleshed out and specified.

Description, hooks. . .again, these are things that are hard to gauge. Why Don't You Dance by Raymond Carver has no hook. It's an amazing story, though. Granted, we don't have a lot of Raymond Carvers around here, but it's still not good to put a story on the chopping block just because it's not a pulse-pounder.

And description. Hills Like White Elephants by Hemmingway is almost all dialogue. It still works.

The micropasta thing. What counts as a plot point? One of my favorites pastas is Bad Dream. How many plot points does that have? It could be argued that is has one or two. Same with Ability.

A way has to be figured out so that the quality standards deal mostly in concretes. Which is very difficult, but it's necessary so that people understand and so that good pastas don't get cleared out for misguided reasons.

I was actually hesitant to post this at first for these particular reasons. I'm actually thinking a couple of different ideas.

The one I'm leaning towards is an faq, and also perhaps a certain form of exemption policy. I would have to write it to see if it would work.

I actually did mean this as just a starting position, and I get where you're coming from.

@Dubi What Cleric said. Not to mention whereas there are many good AABB poems, there's a hundred times more bad ones that make it look like someone tried to write a lost Dr.Seuss story.

Back to Guy's point, the point of the plot line in Micropastas is that they're a lot like poems. Generally, I don't care for delving into them because I tend to pick at them more than needed. What I'm getting at is people like to throw a paragraph of description of something together and proclaim it as a micropasta.

But again, I'll be revising it after seeing a few more things. I'll be sure to try to more concretely define the things I'm getting at in the final revision. I remember Hills of White Elephants. It was an assignment for my college class once. I was trying more towards the stories such as "Hunters in the Snow", "A Good Man is Hard to Find", "The Lottery", etc. (Those are all amazing to me as well.)

@Skelly. I actually wasn't trying to omit the Grammar and Spelling as much as I thought that it would be obvious for them to stay, so didn't include them in the first draft.