• I stared into her eyes...weeping. My tears fell on the picture, falling onto the eyes I couldn't keep mine off of. I sat there, just weeping, wondering to myself, why? Why did it have to end like this? I saw across the room my gun. It's shine was like a glimmer of hope from Hell, staring at me, until I finally gave in.

    I'll see you once more Bailey...

    That is the kind of crap that gets a 5-star rating in this arena. If you add sorrow, blood, romance, vampires, or any other cliche endlessly used in the pop culture world of entertainment, you get an instant 5-star. I'm probably just going to end up pissing everyone off by writing this, but the amount of flaws and tastelessness in the writing I see here has gone on for too long.

    I want to start this off by giving a brief vocabulary lesson. Fiction is a piece of writing that is not true, and has no factual basis. As you are, there is a section for that. NON-fiction is an article/essay or something else that is factual, has what actual writers call a thesis statement, and has a point to bring across. Most of the people here do not follow that simple guideline. I constantly find fictional pieces submitted under this section. The only non-fictional pieces I find are personal accounts sad "boy likes girl, girl doesn't like boy" of someone's life, which I cant help but question whether or not they're even true; this brings me to my next point.

    Gaia has an obsession with all things sad and/or romantic. I read a countless amount of Twilight rewrites with a few changes that is then called "original work". Now I won't get into the lack of literary substance Twilight has, but to copy a pop culture series, change a few words, will get people marveling over it. All of this just feeds a flame that might as well be burning actual books. Now all the sad/romantic writings aren't all Twilight copies. A lot of the writings are just teenage drama with all the cliche lines you can think of thrown in. They can all be summarized by the same paragraph, and all accomplish the same literary goal: mind candy. That's a term for stories with no symbolism, no theme, no meaning, just entertainment for the emotions. They don't evoke thought, only fantasy. Now that isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it is when used in excess with a bunch of cliche writings all in one spot.

    The worst part in all of this writing though, is the extreme lack of grammar. Most the entries don't have any capital letters, no apostrophes, and some don't even have periods. That's the main stuff though, there are still people who write in sentence fragments, dependent clauses, and run on sentences. Reading sentences in some entries drop down in a ditch of rambling words, where I completely lose focus of hat was originally happening.

    I implore many of you reconsider what you're writing, or even how you're writing. Many of you say how you want to become a writer when you grow up, now is the time to listen to critique. Think outside your comfort zone for plot, write about things you never have before. And if you really do want to be a writer, don't continue with the lack of grammar I'm seeing. Writing better now will help you get used to not writing with so many mistakes.

    I hope this inspires someone to reconsider their writing. If you actually read all of this, thank you, and feel free to get mad at me.