Feedback is essential to your growth as a writer.
If you enter our First Chapter Contest, you are guaranteed feedback. But what exactly do we mean by “feedback”?
Feedback can come in many shapes and sizes, with widely varying levels of quality and utility. For example, a single sentence only pointing out a minor inconsistency in your story could qualify as feedback. So could a thumbs-up—or down—emoji. That wouldn’t be too helpful, would it?
Our feedback is unlike any other you have ever received—and it’s the best you will find in a short story contest setting.
Instead of just writing you an email (like other contests), we thought of a much better way to structure feedback: our Publishability Index (PI). After submitting a story, you’ll receive feedback in the form of a completed PI report.
If you’re not familiar, the PI is the perfect tool for evaluating your writing. As part of my ongoing research, I examined hundreds of free writing tools available online. My key finding was that none of them adequately answer this question: How good is my story? Equally importantly, none of them answer the next obvious question: What can I do to make my story better?
The PI answers both these questions, in a way that is clear and actionable. Here's how it works:
I. The PI captures the collective wisdom of today's most highly regarded writing experts and organizes it systematically.
II. Next, it expands on this brain trust by providing much more concrete standards for what constitutes a good story.
III. Finally, the PI adds an entirely new set of considerations that we call cohesion: something that's often hard to articulate, but that's absolutely critical to successful writing.
In either case, the PI will identify your work's strengths while pinpointing its weaknesses. In this way, a complete evaluation will give you a set of next steps on the road to perfecting your story.
The PI is set up as a checklist with several elements: character, world, conflict, theme, plot, language and cohesion. Each element is split into dimensions; there are twenty-three in all. Every dimension contains criteria for execution at both good and great levels. For example: under "character," the backstory dimension calls for "a past that contributes to identity" to count as good and "relevant histories that spur individual development and action" to count as great.
Our editors will carefully review your story and complete the PI, identifying whether each dimension meets the criteria for “good” or “great.” They will also provide a letter summarizing major takeaways from each dimension and outlining next steps, what you should focus on during revision. Revise thoughtfully based on our feedback and you’ll have a solid chance at being named a finalist.
The magic of our PI doesn’t end there, though. Members can now access Targeted Exercises, one-page lessons on specific dimensions, from the PI. Each exercise is designed to take you from “good” to “great.” Simply click the exercise link underneath a particular dimension to access them.
You can view a sample PI report
here. If you want to do your best writing, you need the best feedback. Enter our First Chapter Contest today to receive yours!
