Drumroll....

The 2012 Royal Ascot is Complete
Please look for the 2013 Royal Ascot early next year.

Monday, February 23, 2009

Observations of a Contest Judge

Following are some observations I have made over the number of contests I have judge, consistent errors that detract from otherwise excellent entries. These are also factors I take into consideration when editing my own work and critiquing the work of others.

1: Dangling participles. (Walking to the store, the car nearly ran me down. Walking is the Participle. With this structure, the car is the subject, so we have a walking car.)

2: A shocking misuse of commas.

3: Too much telling.

4: Not enough use of the five senses.

5: No sense of time or place through dialogue, description, or tone.

6: No sense of the main characters' goals or conflicts.

7: Forced conflicts—anger and distrust with no logical reason for either.

8: Heroine being physically attracted to the hero regardless of how nasty he is to her. (This may be realistic, unfortunately, and it's not emotionally healthy.)

9: Huge chunks of detailed descriptions without any purpose.

10: Too many point of view shifts in a single scene. (Even if you put in the space or ***, going back and forth every other paragraph is still head-hopping.)

11: Reaction occurring before action. (He jumped when she covered his eyes with her hands.)

12: A lack of hooks at the end of the scene.


13: This is especially important in The Royal Ascot: easily verifiable historical errors--British titles used incorrectly, hero or heroine the brother or sister of the other's dead spouse, anachronistic behavior.

2 comments:

  1. Thanks, Laurie Alice, for giving us your thoughts. All of these would make great subjects for discussion. I think I'll start off a discussion tomorrow on how to find the hero and heroine's goal and conflict.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I find my biggest problem as a contest judge is in finding entries that are correct, score very well, but don't move or excite me. Another topic for a post?

    ReplyDelete

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