By opening up a social media account,
did you possibly ask yourself if how you are going to be perceived by those who read your contents, will make them wanting to do business with you?
To become a business partner for strangers, is it true you must be considered a skilled as well as credible human being?
This happens less so, rather than it happens more so in so called social media.
Since blogging is not a business but writing in the open,
and being available for votes and comments alike. What I do, when I 'post', is making myself votable only.
Since none of my readers (silent or visible) is being offered a concrete service or product from my side, they won't ask me: "Hey, how much do you charge me for an hour of consulting"?
In fact, the one and only product that there is, is me. And since that 'me' cannot be sold, what is being sold is what character my readers attribute to me and how this character is being judged by them. So, we are judgers more than readers, I guess.
Since character observation is all there is, what comes under assassination or glorification, is 'character'. I am making my character available for that. If neither, nor happens, it means you have either no readers or only silent readers.
I just partook in a writing contest on hive.
I don't do it regularly, since storytelling is a great art and I don't shake ideas down my sleeve 'just so'.
The contest-running-team put itself into a dilemma.
Scanning submitted stories week by week, and judging them in terms of grammar, style and semantics, tells the team members that the majority of incoming stories are for the trash bin. Which, in real life, happens all the time. People are not only not good authors, but they are also bad writers. The average submitter is a regular movie-watcher, not even a book reader.
So what the scanning team gets to read, are stories which tell something most of us already know. Through the thousands of movies we all watch, and the many books we may have all read.
The stories tell what is expected. They more often than not, show a clear connection to what motion pictures the writer had consumed in his 'career' as a film watcher.
What this habitually movie watching submitter does, is to deliver a copy of what he already knows and what everyone else already knows, but worse. The copy of the copy of the copy.
Would it be story business what the contest-running-team does,
they would have educated assistants who do the first scans of the submitted texts and have them distinguish the weed from the chaff.
Once a submission is considered worthwhile for publication, a story agent would get in touch with the writer, and tell him that his submission has potential. That already is a big compliment.
The agent then would consequently shred
those parts of the content to pieces, which are ordinary, lame, unconvincing, incoherent, semantically meaningless, flat, badly expressed etc.
He will reveal which part of the story has good potential, can even be improved, and that the author needs to deepen or alter his characters, and so on and so forth. Some call this a "fruitful" co-working. It aims at the best possible outcome of a work of literature.
The thing with blogging content first, and having it judged later, is that this whole before process does not happen. But if you want to become excellent, and if you want to receive instructive and constructive input, that is exactly what you would want in order to become an extraordinary writer.
Running a writing-contest on a blockchain is not writing business.
Submitting is also not writing business.
It maybe is some weird form of marketing.
It's putting up with whatever comes in, and lowering ones expectations to a degree where I, as a scanning team member, will make my reaction so that I'll find something nice in whatever is submitted.
Because the gems come in in such rare numbers, that the not so rare must be the ones lifted up to be ranked as winners.
Because, if the extraordinary story tellers are always to be the winners, the other participants may stop taking part.
Now, THAT is the most reasonable consequence of doing
writing business. You get rid of untalented writers and be left with the talented ones.
But we are not in business, so ...
... when the chaff stops submitting, the running contest risks to come to an end. That's why the chaff is being 'rewarded' with votes and wins, so that the contest can continue to run. The question is, for what? LoL
But then, since it is not business, it may be a form of homework in the open. To practice grammar and punctuation. Who knows? Social media is a pot of confusion anyways.
I am an ordinary story teller of fiction,
I too rarely meet anything out of the ordinary. Since I frequently come across stories whose course I can predict, it's what I expect; and the leftover fun is being the one who can predict faster than the other. I play this game with my husband all the time.
In order to become a super-extraordinary writer, I'd have to have a real life experience which is so disturbing that this would fit into a story, never heard off. Or, I retreat into what my fantasy is capable of as a result of it.
The very essence of fiction is a fiction story teller who does ...
- construct a gripping tense (mixing past, present and future tense to a form that is perceived as 'rare' or 'new')
- construct a fantasy figure not already invented
- depict unpredictable and multi dimensioned characters
- depict/ construct a coherent environment
- use fiction and life experience in a good mix
I couldn't run such contest (I did for a short time),
since I'd be interested in story business and to be in touch with the rarest artist, for dealing with excellency is something where what is excellent about an author, teaches me as an agent a great deal more than to put up with less than that. And vice versa.
That is probably why my stories do not meet all criteria but maybe one or two.
"Kruzmaka" is an invented character of mine. I've postet his adventures once in a while and find him myself quite amusing. If you like to read about Kruzmaka, here you go:
Title: created by me.