Board Thread:Administration/@comment-4832646-20140401205802/@comment-10950063-20140401230554

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 Carver's 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.