First the great news...here's my brand-spanking new granddaughter Mia Grace. Isn't she beautiful?
Finally, I get to buy some cute pink things!
Saturday I went to our RWA chapter meeting and they were doing training on how to judge contest entries as opposed to critiquing a scene or chapter of a manuscript. I was very impressed with the fairness and the strictness of the guidelines. I can see that the judges will have to be on their toes all the time to keep their personal bias out of the judging.
Take for example, the heroine. The score sheet asks whether she is a clearly drawn, three-dimensional character with a unique voice...not if you like her. The trainer seemed to be having a little trouble impressing upon a couple of people the importance of remembering not to score according to whether they like the hero/heroine. A bit frightening for me to hear as a contest entrant.
The good news is I know for a fact that at least one of the judges is an inspirational/historical/western writer so maybe she will know where I'm coming from when she reads my entry. This is all new to me but so much fun!
I hope I still think it's fun after I've read my feedback. Eeek!
2 comments:
Lovely baby and I'm with you, buying pink things is so much fun!!
Great info on the judges. Having gone through two RWA contests last year, I found the feedback good and scary. Got some great ideas to change my ms. but some people scored low because they didn't like the things that happened in the plot.
Hope you do well!
I'm not so sure that telling judges they can't take into account whether they like a heroine or a hero or not...is the best advice. Especially not in a romance contest, where reader identification is one of the keys to success in the genre.
Makes you wonder.
Yes, you do have to try to keep your personal biases out of judging. But if a heroine comes across on the page as unlikeable to me, chances are, she'll come across as unlikeable to at least a few other people. And that could certainly hurt her chances of being published...once again, at least in romance.
It does depend on the aim of the contest as well. If it's simply to judge whether you can tell a story well or not, the criteria of "likeability" on the page may not matter so much. But when you want reader identification as much as romance writers want it...it strikes me that if your main character turns people off, you need to rethink at least how you draw that character on the page, so people will at least be able to latch onto her as a protagonist. Otherwise, some of your readers will root AGAINST her. And that's definitely not what you want!
My two cents,
Janny
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