Frustrations with Fiction - A Steemit rant
I am into my fourth week curating fiction for the @minnowsupport project. I look for five good pieces of fiction to feature, upvote with the @msp-curation account and share on Steem to get more visibility and hopefully more follows and upvotes for the authors. Incidentally, I also share the SBD income with the featured authors upon payout.
Me after a search for fiction
Source
My usual modus operandi is to visit the https://steemit.com/created/fiction link which shows all new posts tagged with the fiction tag. My first problem is that the tag is over abused. The good proportion of tagged posts have nothing to do with fiction stories: poetry is also tagged as fiction, and I have even found #introduceyourself posts tagged as fiction. I mean, is this really you or an invention?
In among the fiction tagged posts are freewrites which, although they could be classed as fiction, are usually incomplete stories lacking character buildup and an arc. These I automatically dismiss. Don't get me wrong, a freewrite may be a great exercise help to develop a cohesive story, but stood alone, they do not warrant inclusion. My opinion, of course.
Some may call me a grammar nazi, but I feel that with today's technology there is really no excuse for misspellings. One or two may be excused and overlooked, but a piece riddled with spelling mistakes will just not cut it. Use a spell checker people.
My other problem is I only read and speak English fluently. I wish there was a way to filter out other languages. They may indeed be the best fiction of all time, but if I cannot understand them, they are of little interest to me.
Am I looking for the best stories ever written? Of course not. What I do look for are interesting stories with a bit of an arc, a journey with an interesting character or two. Grammar is not as important to me with this curation effort, but I really do insist that they are presented well, with minimal spelling mistakes. The truly excellent fiction I leave for @sft to curate. I enjoy fantasy, science fiction, horror, drama and many other genres. I tend not to read or curate anything overly sexual and risqué. It's just not my bag.
I often leave a fiction hunting session feeling like I need a shower. My search through the fiction tag is time consuming, frustrating and annoying. Yes, I could report misuses of the tag, but then I would spend all day doing nothing else. If only there was an automatic penalty for such things. I can dream.
As it stands, I possibly miss a lot of little gems hidden among the detritus of mistagged, badly spelled annoyances that litter the new fiction tag. If by chance you do find any excellent pieces of fiction along your Steem journeys, feel free to contact me on Discord. My username is Muxxy#8276 and I can be found on PALnet, The Writers' Block and several other servers.
I totally agree. This is one of the main reasons The SFT stopped curating. First, we turned to fiction within the Writers' Block. But then, our own writers got so frustrated with low visibility on Steemit that they stopped putting their best work on it. So we hit the pause button for a while. . .Gatlinburg could change things, at least for us.
Maybe you need to start doing some flagging? Flag the tag spam?
I would have no power left...
Sifting through the work of others is never easy. Soldier on!
It's especially difficult when most of the work is, for lack of a better term, poor. I don't think most people who write as a hobby or because they're passionate about the stories they want to tell realize how much damage they do to their readership by putting out incomplete stories.
I was going to curate for Curie, then decided I literally could not force myself to go through tons of posts looking for the gems. I'd rather spend my time writing, but when I post fiction it is often the least popular of my posts. Thank you for taking the time to curate, you're doing a service to the platform, and especially to the authors taking time to publish here.
That sounds crazy frustrating! I hope I'm not one of the "abusers." :F