Part of doing these writing contests is you have to review and comment on all the other stories entered. As you might have guessed, this is significantly more difficult than just writing a new story. You might think the difficulty might be because you don’t want to insult anyone by being mean to a less than stellar story. No. The issue I usually find is that so many of the stories are so damned good that it’s difficult to find anything real to criticize.
Once in a while I will read a story that is truncated or still shows evidence of some desperate cuts to fit into the one thousand word cap. Those usually show some promise, and often you can tell that the writer is very talented with words, but just missed the target on scope. Nothing a version without those restrictions couldn’t fix.
But what do you say about a story that seems almost perfect. One that hits all the right notes in only a handful of paragraphs. I think I might just start giving them all thumbs up emojis.