Easy To Read

Introduction

I know I complain about short-form challenges on Vocal because it results in so many takes on the same format.

Then I started thinking about how we choose what to read on Vocal and even outside of Vocal.

What Choice Have We?

We have forty-eight communities and eight hundred thousand potential creators, and stories are being published continuously, twenty-four hours of the day seven days a week.

Most of these we don't read. That would be an impossibility.

If we look at the latest stories that are published, most of it looks like spam to me, often telling us how to make money, become fitter, lose weight, get the girl, and many other things, so it is very seldom I do that.

Often we will see things that are AI-generated and that holds no interest for me at all.

My biggest source of stories is my subscription feed, top stories, certain communities and the Facebook groups that I am a member of.

Sometimes I get overwhelmed by challenge entries and I am just not able to read them, because there are so many of them, though I know that may annoy people. After all, I do write and publish a lot of stories and articles on Vocal.

I was wondering if when Vocal do the weekly leaderboard, do they count the length of comments on stories. I get some quite long ones and then some that are just a heart.

If it is just a heart, I appreciate that because it lets me know that the reader has been there, so I will say "Thank You" or reciprocate with another heart, but the longer comments I believe extend the story and I try my best to reply properly.

I do believe the more informative comments should carry more weight but I don't know how Vocal does that. Sometimes they are very sophisticated, but other times they are extremely basic.

Poems are usually quicker to read and appreciate so if I am short of time, I will go for poetry, but at other times I will take my time to appreciate, enjoy and leave an informative comment on the story so that the reader knows I have been there and what my feelings were.

I know this is essentially about how we read and what we read, and I truly believe if you do not read then you can't really write. Reading gives you ideas.

I just read one for the latest Vocal challenge, and while it hasn't sparked anything in me, that story did. It is the sort of thing that I would come up with , very left field. I will share it here, it is very good:

Then there was this one one, not what I was expecting from the title but brilliant nonetheless:

Both these are from writers I subscribe to, and while I do not catch all their work, these two have given me a lot to think about. I now have two challenges to write for and they may both be published in the next eight hours.

I was also looking at my recent publications and only one of them has been a poem, but just at the moment I am not inspired to write any poetry, but I know I will be.

Conclusion

I think we all look for things that we think we will enjoy reading, and most of the time we do find something. I am reading two books at the moment and they are giving me ideas for my writing on Vocal as well.

I hope this makes some sense to you, and you have got something from it.

Thank you so much for reading.

The music is "Between The Lines" by Janis Ian