Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Judging Varient Forms

Judging variant forms.

In an earlier blog I wrote about wearing different hats when you write…I.e. a strategic, operational or tactical hat particularly with regard to outlines which are hugely important in developing a complex literary work.

Today I want to talk about wearing different hats when reviewing.

It doesn’t take much sophistication to see the difference between a novice and veteran writer. A reviewer needs to have a beginner, and advanced writer reviewing hat when doing a review on a stand alone piece. This is so self evident that I won’t even go into it. There is a social aspect of this site and people come here for encouragement and there is no sense beating a dead horse…the protocols call for being positive and the reviewer needs to make a distinction between the good the bad and the ugly and review accordingly.

However this type of hat wearing isn’t what I want to talk about today. Today I want to suggest that in judging contests the reviewer consider wearing different hats. In Contests the basic criteria will always be the Wow! Factor. The judge will read the entries and mentally arrange them in a queue from best to worst. Now if a single judge is male or female there will be some bias from the beginning. It is my view that at conception we were sexless and that squiggly male sperm decided what sex we differentiated into. However there is no doubt that in that differentiation process some radically different perspectives developed between genders (I.e. the mars Venus thing)

So how does a writer deal with that? One way is to pander to the gender of the judge….that is find out how girly or macho they tend to write and give them what they’re looking for. It is my suspicion that a lot of this goes on and since a writer is expected to learn to write for an audience I don’t see this as such a terrible evil. There are however those purists who choose not to go there and I think most writers fall into that category….As a consequence I think the Wow! Factor by itself is flawed because as hard as judges try to be objective they are turned on by different things.

This takes us back to the same question as above….how do we deal with that…For example a male judge considering something written by a woman, who has written a kick ass piece of literature that doesn’t exactly conform to the masculine tastes of the one sitting in judgment?

The answer here again is for the judge to show some flexibility and put on a male or female hat, which deep down whether we want to admit it or not is not all that hard to do. Every man has a girley streak and every woman a touch of macho. Take my word for it, get past it and put on the other gender hat….

There is another aspect of this and that is orientation….I will not go into the more proscribed variations of orientation and taste but stay focused on the three mainstream variations. Gay, Lesbian, and Hetero. I already talked about the Hetero/gender issue.

Now this is another dilemma for a judge who does not share the perspective from which the writer is writing…Judges carry the same emotional baggage that everyone else does and one orientation is not going to be excited by the same approach to sensual expression as another.

This is a serious matter because it limits what writers are going to submit to a contest….how may gay and lesbian vignettes do we see in a contest? Practically none and if an author submits one it will probably be the last. Again a stand alone “Wow!” criteria makes it all but certain the variant form will not receive much recognition even if it were written by Earnest Hemmingway. Again I think the Judge needs to be able to wear a wig or enter into a world we would not normally go when doing the evaluation. This might not be a particularly agreeable task but consider it a worthwhile exercise in your professional development.