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I just posted a few thoughts on working hard and reusing material as a comment to a post on ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
therealljidol:
How hard one works to put together an LJ Idol post is always going to be a subjective call, which would make it a weak criterion for judging the worth of a post even if we knew what effort was involved. Speaking of my own experience and confining myself to what I write for Idol, there have been weeks when I've expended what I think is a lot of effort to create a post. Then, too, there have been weeks when my post sort of "wrote itself." Both posts have equal weight, no?
As far as reusing one's own material, I don't particularly see that as a violation of the spirit of the competition, because if you've taken the trouble to create something on your own, outside the scope of Idol, that later turns out to be "good enough" (in one's own opinion) to use in response to an Idol prompt, then I really don't see the problem. In the final analysis, the writer did the work; the fact that it was done earlier, with no expectation that text would be used competitively, is immaterial in my opinion.
That said, I agree with Gary that using old material verbatim is cheating yourself out of the experience. In any event, I feel that in the end, any Idoler who routinely reuses old material without at least reworking it in some fundamental way runs a serious risk of invoking the ire of voters.
Cheers...
therealljidol:How hard one works to put together an LJ Idol post is always going to be a subjective call, which would make it a weak criterion for judging the worth of a post even if we knew what effort was involved. Speaking of my own experience and confining myself to what I write for Idol, there have been weeks when I've expended what I think is a lot of effort to create a post. Then, too, there have been weeks when my post sort of "wrote itself." Both posts have equal weight, no?
As far as reusing one's own material, I don't particularly see that as a violation of the spirit of the competition, because if you've taken the trouble to create something on your own, outside the scope of Idol, that later turns out to be "good enough" (in one's own opinion) to use in response to an Idol prompt, then I really don't see the problem. In the final analysis, the writer did the work; the fact that it was done earlier, with no expectation that text would be used competitively, is immaterial in my opinion.
That said, I agree with Gary that using old material verbatim is cheating yourself out of the experience. In any event, I feel that in the end, any Idoler who routinely reuses old material without at least reworking it in some fundamental way runs a serious risk of invoking the ire of voters.
Cheers...
