On Fabulousness

An anonymous OEDILFer asked, “How do we encourage this great community to write a book full of fabulous lims, instead of a book full of acceptable ones?”

We already have a book full of fabulous limericks. It’s a subset of the 34574 approved limericks. Those 34574 are ten times as many as we could ever fit into an actual book anyway. If you mean a database full of fabulous limericks, you may as well wish for the moon. You’re expecting all of our writers to be equivalent to our best writers, and those best writers to be on their best form all of the time—and “best” is highly subjective. As writers, we’ve all had the experience of our personal favourites being slow to be approved, while ones that strike us as good but not all that great gain more praise than we expected. Who’s right? If you think a particular limerick isn’t all that hot, you may just be the wrong audience for it—even if you’re the one who wrote it.

We already have raised our standards where we can. The bar is much higher than in our early days, as attested by all the complaints that we’re too strict about metre, too pedantic about punctuation, or whatever. But how do you set a bar of “fabulousness”? Great definition? Hilarious punchline? Stunning wordplay? Most limericks that get approved have something going for them, but you’ll rarely get everything in one verse. If your idea of fabulousness is humour, you’re inevitably going to be disappointed, because many of our limericks play it straight, and we see nothing wrong with that: successfully defining a word in a limerick is our aim; hilariousness is a bonus. (Some of us make hilariousness our personal aim, but that varies from writer to writer.)

Hilariousness is also fickle; there’s a reason comedy movies are rarely longer than 90 minutes. Reading too many poems in one sitting can weaken the impact of any individual poem, and yet our workshopping system encourages us to do just that—read the same poems over and over, and lots of them—so it’s hardly surprising that they start to blur into sameness after a while.

Compared with a lot of limericks on other websites and in print, a lot of our stuff is fabulous. What’s wrong with “a lot”? Why does it have to be all or nothing? If an edited version of the OEDILF emerges in print, of course it will have lots of great limericks. But we can only be sure of having a large core of greatness if we have sufficient limericks of an acceptable standard to choose from.

If despite all of that you still think too many approved limericks are rotten, the power is in your hands: either submit better ones yourself, or write twenty adequate enough to be approved and then start workshopping with all guns blazing, blasting at weak lines and zingless limericks left and right. It might not win you any friends, but at least you’ll have told ’em, and can then retire from the field satisfied.

Or you could take a softly-softly approach, try to workshop in a reasonable and genial fashion, and realise over time (as many of us have) that some writers are easier to work with than others, some limericks are easier to suggest changes for than others, and some words are easier to write fabulous limericks about than others; and that “fabulousness” is only meaningful in comparison to the average; that what stands out as exceptional can’t be the norm, by definition.

Reworked from comments written for an OEDILF Forum thread, August 2007.