I need to read. Reading fires my muse. It’s not about copying work, it’s about inspiration. I need to be well read in order to write. That surprised me. I thought everything I wrote popped up on its own, sort of like popcorn, but not. Except that popcorn needs a kernel and so apparently, do I.
I am getting damn hard to please now. Before I started writing I knew good writing, but I could not tell you why some writing was better than others. Then I sat down and educated myself. I still cannot always tell you why something works, only that it does or does not. Sure, I can pick out bad sentence structure and incoherent story lines, but other than that? Not really.
My bell-weather is simple, does the story make me lose my critical reader and transport me into it? That’s it. If I get so lost in a story that I don’t care about sentence structure and voice mistakes, it’s a good book.
Which is how I ended up judging the contest. I look for clever, interesting plot lines that held up all through the book, but mostly I looked for writing so wonderful I forgot I was supposed to rate the thing at the end. If I began to count, “was” sentences that could have been written another way, the author was destined to get a bad score.
I enjoyed judging much more than I thought I would and will look for opportunities in the future to do it again. That is if I am ever asked back. Those darn scores are all over the map.
