Quote:
Originally Posted by wassupimviet
In the case of having two winners, one for poetry and one for short story, instead of hybridizing themes, how about having a coin flip decide between two different themes? IMHO, I'm lukewarm on the idea of having separate themes for poetry and prose, as I think it would stifle creativity, but hybridizing two different themes might just dilute the effect each one would have had individually. One will be left out, but it's a pretty fair way to do things.
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How is it fair. You would lose even after winning. And over a petty 50/50 toss on top of that. If we're going to do it like that might as well not have a theme at all, or winners picking themes at all. Frankly the way the discussion is going, it seems this hole theme business (borrowed from SotM) is merely getting in the way of other more important matters. If you look at the discussion so far, you'll notice that "writing" is far in the back of all this theme restriction talk. Am I the only one who finds that a bit strange, I mean isn't that what the contest is about? We don't really have a established "writing community" at all, so I think the contest is getting a little ahead of itself.
Additionally, if you look at the entries so far, even though we all fit the theme in our own way, it's all very washy when it comes to theme—entry association. Mario's entry is pretty close, but given it's
his theme you have to wonder which came first, the idea for the entry (his first one) or the theme. We may be tacking this theme a little too lightly as well. Yeah yeah, so in SotM it works and it's all
just for fun, but in SotM the theme just forces you to
search for a image, or in the case of a few themes, apply a certain one-two steps. In writing on the other hand a theme takes far more liberties away; and IMO it's a far harder restriction then people give it credit.
And to top it all off, isn't the winner picking a theme for next contest giving him a really really big advantage? I mean think about. People love the "this fits best the theme" idea when voting, and it's generally one the first things to come to mind. If the winner just picks the theme, he can just pick something that favors whatever he wants to write (intentionally or not). This isn't the case in SotM because the themes influence only goes as far as what you're searching for.
Maybe we should consider alternatives.
Getting back to the multiple winners problem, are we still doing "three favorites" when voting? I don't know how much of a good idea that is should we end up with only the current three entries (or relatively few).
