Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Excitability (Tingle) and the "Wow!" Factor

I think everything we do on writing.com should be done with an eye towards getting published. I mean we can converse with friends and write whimsical stuff and participate in contests however, all these activities should bear directly on indirectly on getting published.

Sometimes I get the feeling that participants in contests don’t subscribe to this premise…they enter contests to win….the view the other contestants as competitors…they take seriously the ratings they get and take offensive too easily at critique….

What it takes to win a contest and what it takes to write publication quality material are not necessarily the same thing. The criteria for winning a contest and the criteria for writing a publication worth novel are not the same thing. As a consequence it is easy for me to understand why someone might write something exceptional and not win a contest….because exceptional writing might not be enough in itself…it must be exceptionsal writing that meets the criteria of the contest.

For example the “Excitibility criteria of the quickie….Now by excitability I interpret that to mean the “Tingle” a submission sends through a judge…It is a twinge of arousal. If it is a strong tingle the submission is rated high…as it tapers off the submission drops deeper into the que of the Order of Merit List (OML).

Now is "Tingle" that same as the ”Wow!” factor? Are these two words synomous? Can a person be “Wowed” and not “Tingled?”

To me "Tingle" is a subset of "Wow"…..Wow! is comprised of tingle, a good story line, sharp imagery and technical merit….In other words a judge reads something and using the wow sets the initial OML.

Then he/she takes a closer look to see why….tingle gets 40% story line 20% Imagery gets 20% and Technical Merit gets 20%. Thus after the OML is set each submission is scored and gets its relative share of percentage points….A comparison is then made to see how the overall wow and the component parts add up….It could be that some juggling is needed to reorder the OMl.