Give It Your Best Shot

What is your best Vocal Story?

I, and many other Vocal Creators, are often asked “What is your best story” or “What are you most proud of?” and it is a question I find very difficult to answer for many reasons, not least of them being that I have over 460 Vocal Stories to choose from. Many are poems, a few are Fiction and then there are my observations on situations, happenings, art, and creations.

There are also a lot of criteria to think about on this subject.

My Modus Operandi

In everything I do my modus operandi is “There Must Be A Better Way” and to some extent when I write, even putting these words now, my mind is telling me there must be a better word I can use, or maybe there is better software I can use to do this. The situation is usually I am doing the best I can in the given moment.

When I lived at home my parents told me “You Can Only Do Your Best, And That’s Enough”, and that did make me try. I never got to University, got very few qualifications, and have gone through life just trying my best.

Every time I write I take all the lessons I have learned and try and apply them to the subject I am covering.

Can I Do Better?

When I started on Vocal I was excited but soon realised that I wasn’t going to get any big prize money and they were asking for ten dollars a month so I could enter for prizes that I (that is me) would have no chance of winning…. but …..the read payment was higher, and there were bonuses for so initial targets like five stories and ten stories and a thousand reads.

This meant that for the first couple of months my subscriptions were paid for and by actually producing stories on a daily basis my reads rose steadily until they actually paid for my subscription on their own.

Every Story You Write Should Improve On Your Last

This is generally true of my writing, although I still think my first story is quite good. The ones that I don't rate as highly are the ones where I experiment, say with dictation, search engine optimisation and clickbait.

Use everything you write to learn lessons.

Use the Vocal Challenges and subjects or prompts to write rather than to win them. If you do that you are an immediate winner because you have produced something you will be proud of, and you never know you may even win that challenge.

Before Vocal I never really wrote poetry but I am closing in on two hundred poems and putting some of them together for a self-published book of poetry.

Every poem I write is an improvement on the last and some are, in my and other people’s opinions, close to real works of art. I often go back and can’t believe I actually penned those words. Yes I do have a Muse and she is the direct subject or inspiration behind almost a hundred poems and she has helped my writing improve beyond anything I imagined.

I have ventured into fiction, which I still find very difficult, and started with horror but have also extended my remit on that, not always successfully, but always learning from previous efforts.

In Conclusion

It is unlikely you will be successful without failing a few times, but you need to learn from those failures and not let them define you.

Feel free to discard work, or even put it on hold until you can get it perfect.

As I said close to the start , You can only do your best, and if you do , that will be good enough.