Stupid rules

[Raphael]

So we have this literary journal at my school, and i am one of the judges. Just about all the stuff that we got was kid's stuff. I hated a lot of them. But the parents that check the submissions that we send to them to put in the journal are G rated. Because we wouldn't want to scare kids that read it or anything like that. So no horror, suspense, thiller, any action mimicking violence, and the like we can't put in. So now we are stuck with the stuff that's poorly written and stuff that junior high kids wrote. Stuff that has no style or all the same sentence structure because of 'mature' content. Even if it's not full of gore, blood, or violence, but simply because it is horror. While we read stuff like the Great Gatsby that has tons of mature content, or poems that include a girl that was raped, but then had her tongue cut out so that she couldn't tell anyone. Or books like Crime and Punishment that has 3 different main characters that are prostitutes.

[sapphire]

Ah, that's really frustrating. I was an editor for a sort of literary journal in high school, too, and we never had those kinds of rules. We just went by quality and age.
I don't know who they think they're protecting - the most violent submissions we ever got were from second graders.

[Endovia]

Second graders? That's brilliant.
You could do stuff that was kind of like pretend violence. You lead the reader on to think it's really bad and then switch up into another scene so it's not real. I did that in middle school and that was okay.

That could be a contest though. Writing a good, non-violent story. I think that's challenging.

[Raphael]

I couldn't enter Cinder in it though. And I was really careful not to show anything.