When you are critiquing someone’s writing please remember the following guidelines.

1. Start the critique by telling the author what they did right, and then follow up by telling the author what they did wrong in their writing.
2. Critique the writing. When recommending ways to improve another’s work say “The story should…” or “This writing is…”
3. Do not critique the writer. Never say, “You are…” or “You should…”
4. Give a fair and useful critique even if you don’t like the topic.
5. Never say anything remotely close to “This is awful”, “That is stupid”, or “You’re an awful writer.”

Would you like a chance to sharpen your critiquing skills? If so, then join Review Fuse or enter our free Holiday writing contest.

Jacob

We know the holidays can be a busy time, so we wanted to give you some extra motivation to keep writing. We want you to write a holiday-themed short story. Write the best one and you’ll get an extra present for Christmas: a $100 Amazon gift certificate.

The contest is free to all. To participate:

1. Create a Review Fuse account if you haven’t already. It’s free!
2. Join the newly created group named “Holiday Story Contest“
3. Submit your story to the group
4. Review 3 other stories in the group

The winner will be picked by a panel of judges comprised of the founders of Review Fuse. Why do we get to be the judges? Well, it’s our $100.

Because this is a Review Fuse contest we want to emphasize reviews. Make sure to be helpful, thorough, and honest–we’re all trying to be better writers, not just win money. The scores you give other stories won’t influence our judging, but if it comes down to a tie, we might see who gave the most helpful reviews to determine a winner.

To keep things fair and ensure that everyone writes a story specifically for the contest, we’re implementing a few rules:

1. Your story must be an original work of no more than 3,000 words.
2. You must include the line of dialog, “What do I look like, some sort of djinn?” somewhere in your story. Why “djinn”? It was the first word that came up on my word-of-the-day screensaver while drafting these rules. Extra points if you can make it sound natural.
3. Your story must be holiday themed. It doesn’t matter if it’s Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanza, Festivus or some combination of them all, just make sure it deals with this great time of year.
4. You must submit your story and complete your reviews by Midnight (MST) of December 20^th, 2008 so we have time to read all the stories and argue about which one is the best.

The winner will be announced on our blog and the prize will be awarded on Christmas Day.

If you have any questions feel free to post them in the comments or use our contact us form. Good luck and happy holidays! We look forward to reading your stories soon.

Jacob, Steve, and Clark

Last week Steve announced our new public and private writing groups. We wrote about this exciting feature right before the Thanksgiving Holiday. A lot of our members did not have a chance to read about this powerful new feature so I wanted to quickly recap.

• Private Writing Groups
  • Invite your friends, family, colleagues, and current writing group members to join.
  • Receive critiques from those you trust.
  • Save time and gas by meeting online.
• Public Writing Groups
  • Focus on specific genres or topics.
  • Group creator can remove users who do not contribute to the group.
  • Improve your writing by getting help from your peers.

If you would like to try our public and private groups please join our writing community.

Jacob