It's art, and therefore, subjective...

Except for when I think it's crap.

There is a national fiction contest that boasts a "thirty-year history of literary excellence" judged by Ernest Hemingway's granddaughter. I've never been very satisfied by the quality of the website, and that has caused me to not even consider submitting anything (okay, so I'm a website snob, I get that...) but I decided to read through some of the selected submissions listed on the contest's blog, to get a sense of what other people are writing. I waded through the first two stories, and came away with an impression of "pseudohyperintellectual wordsalad bullshit" being the hot new trend. The point isn't to use as many vocabulary words as possible, people. The point, I always thought, was to tell a story. Something to grab the attention of your audience, to make them relate, to make them think, to relive a moment, look into the future...anything but come away from your writing with a headache and a vague sense of confusion over what they've just read. I get wanting to be "different", or "avant garde", and to not write the same old thing in the same old style. But sometimes the pretention that a work conveys (even unitentional) is off-putting to a potential reader.

Also, my other gripe has to do with structure. Maybe I'm old fashioned, I don't know, but I grew up in the comforting uniformity of the block paragraph.

Now all I see is...

This kind of style. Especially with dialogue.

To which I say "Great, it breaks up the text, which may be pleasing to the eye. But, it also takes up more space on the page, leading to increased page count without necessarily affecting word count."

And sometimes it looks odd: paragraph...floating lines of dialogue...paragraph...paragraph...dialogue...

Of course, you might say "You *are* an inexperienced novice with no clue about how a publisher actually determines how the text should be formatted."

Point. And counterpoint.