[Plagarism vs Inspiration]

There is a host of references on Google to "plagiarism," but the following site talks about plagiarism in writing fiction rather than plagiarism in an academic settng.

http://www.fictionfactor.com/articles/plagiarism.html

["Best of" lists]

The idea of a Top 10 list was not to get a vote on the best stories, but to get one person's perspective, and eventually to find a person that shares your tastes and expectations. The parallel would be a movie reviewer: some I consider uniformly good to excellent; others (read Ebert and Roeper) are awfully free with their recommendations (thumbs) and some are hypercritical. Finding a reliable reviewer is a personal choice, and that's what would be useful.

For the reviewer, the discipline of having to choose among many stories should help him or her clarify what makes a story good--or not.

["Best of" lists]

As I read the pleas for referrals to good stories and read the responses--very good to mediocre recommendations, in my view--it occurred to me that a useful service would be to allow forum members to post their Top 10 (or so) lists under their own names in the same manner that Amazon has lists from its contributors.

These lists would be available at the click of a button so that a user could find a referrer that he likes and follow the recommendations with the expected effect of a series of good stories to read. At the same time, some recommendations could be discounted.

The thought of a Top 10 list occurred to me because of the wide range of quality of stories in response to recommendations for what to read--and the wide range of quality of the Best of Nifty posts, which to me run from the very good to the barely average, with no way to cull out the better ones, because nobody can agree on what is good or not so good. So, why not have a number of people post their Top 10 (or so) lists and let the reader decide which one matches their tastes and expectations.

[Status of stories]

As one who has debated whether to send a "good job" after each of 27 chapters before a more detailed post at the end of a story, and deciding usually that I will wait, perhaps another solution is in order.

Thus, a suggestion:

Perhaps each chapter of each author's story could end with a button to invoke a poll, which would be an easy way to provide feedback to an author. For example, the poll could be as follows:

I found this chapter/story:

-- Excellent

-- Very Good

-- Average

-- Below Average

-- Poor

Then there could be a further button to have an email comment.

Such a poll would be easy for the reader to complete, and hopefully the author would take good and bad poll results constructively.

Indeed, the notion resembles some of the computer-tech-help page polls that ask you if you found the article/answer helpful or not.

[Status of stories]

As one who has been burned by too many stories left uncompleted, I appreciate very much the notation that something is "Final."

What would be useful also is a note, perhaps in News and Views, when the last draft chapter of a story has been completed. I'm willing to take my chances then that the story will be done when it goes out for editing and proofing; besides, we can hound someone who doesn't finish a good story to get their ass in gear.

[What's wrong with this sentence?]

Well, unless you allow ties, you have to be ahead by 2 or 4 games--3-1 or 4-0. If it's ahead by one on points, it should be clearer.

[Hey: all you 'editors' out there!]

In reply to Graeme's question about whether or not to have another editing exercise, I offer the following:

Why not take two or three pieces, ranging from something very raw to something that needs only final touches--that is the range between editing and proofing/final editing?

What I suggest is that we all make suggestions for each using the current Nifty offerings. That is, for the former, find a good storyteller who doesn't write well, adopt him or her and edit the bejesus out of one of the chapters and present the various corrections back to the author--as an unannounced gift. For the second, take a story that is well crafted but needs the final touches and do the same--the gift again. Or maybe it will be considered a gift horse.

It would be interesting to compare the editors' takes on each of these tracks.

If people are interested, I'll look around and make my nominations for editing exercises and post them here.

[Hey: all you 'editors' out there!]

There is obviously a gradation of editing/proofing stages from advice and major rewriting to final proofing/light editing that looks for punctuation, grammar and the like. It really is up to the writer and editor what the relationship will be. The objective, though, is to foster the writer's product, because that is where creativity arises, which is the reason for writing in the first place. But the effort is a joint one, and the writer should learn from a good editor as should an editor from trying to make readable what the writer creates.

In terms of technique for an editor/proofreader, I find it useful to use the full range of Word capabilities, but I find the simultaneous change-tracking that Word offers as a major distraction. What I do is 1) save the original document, say a chapter--e.g., ch1.doc ; 2) create a new document, which I call, for example, ch1 - edited.doc, on which I will edit; and 3) at the end of all my edits, I create a comparison, using the Compare and Merge Documents Tool feature to, of the edited version to the original (using the Merge into New Document option on the Merge menu); in my example, I would I call it ch1 - red-line.doc.

The reason I prefer editing a document that doesn't show the changes that I have made is that I find it difficult to read a document that has all the red-line changes immediately shown. In fact, sometimes I may make a change to a writer's work and later change it back, because the writer had it right. Step 3 above would show no change whatsoever. An instantaneous red-line document highlights the changes, however, and may make me more reluctant to correct my change. Plus, it makes the edited text more difficult to read, in my opinion.

Just my thoughts.

[Dialogue question]

Some high school journalism teachers used to have students list as many synonyms for "said" as they can--stated, shouted, etc. When students later got jobs at large newspapers, they were told only to use "said."

The reason is this: "said" is unobtrusive. Readers tend to put it in the background and read what the person quoted actually, well, said.

I think the same rule should apply to creative writing. "Said" is unobtrusive, like "the," or "and," or "then." Attention is not drawn from what is said. I read a story recently in which there were many uses of "spat." He spat; she spat. The usage became annoying after a while.

There are, of course, no hard and fast rules on this, but simplicity is usually best. Besides, one can write something like this: "'She jumped and fell into the tub.' He laughed." Two sentences, but the same information is transmitted.