Common Mistakes When Posting Stories on Mibba

We all know there are rules to posting stories on Mibba, but often stories are posted that break Mibba’s posting rules. Sometimes, the author makes a simple mistake and misses it when editing it. This article is not referring to those small and normally rare occurrences, but intentional errors. Most of these mistakes are easily avoidable if you just keep them in mind. This article is going to cover the most common mistakes I have seen on Mibba, but it is not an inclusive list of Mibba’s story rules. Let’s start at the beginning.

The first common mistake seen on Mibba is titling mistakes. Titles should be properly capitalized. That means the very first word and all main words should start with a capital letter. Prepositions and articles should not be capitalized. Tags should only be included in the short or longer story descriptions. For an example, these are improper story titles:

The Two Sides Of Black Blood In The Dark (The prepositions and article are not supposed to be capitalized.)

the Two Sides of Black Blood in the Dark (While the first word is an article, it should be capitalized because it’s the first word of the title.)

The two sides of black blood in the dark (All main words should be capitalized.)

The Two Sides of Black Blood in the Dark [Frerard] (Tags have no place in the story title.)

The proper way to submit this title would be:

The Two Sides of Black Blood in the Dark

The next common mistake is rating errors. Rating a story properly helps the readers to know what to expect from a story. While there may be similarities between the ratings, there are still differences. If a story is a romance rated “PG-13”, there might be some sexual innuendos or implied sexual actions, but there are never any actual sex scenes. To include a sex scene, the story must be rated “R”. The biggest mistake is made between stories rated “R” and stories rated “NC-17”. In a rated “R” story, the sexual actions may be put into the story, but explicit details must be left out. If the story is to have explicit details, it must be rated “NC-17”. What are explicit details? Explicit details are heavy descriptions of the five senses; if the reader can come away knowing how the character felt, it is explicit details.

The last mistake most commonly seen on Mibba is formatting and grammatical problems. Formatting refers to the way the body of the story is set up. Grammar refers to the spelling, punctuation and sentence structure. Between each paragraph, there should be an extra blank line. This makes the story easier to read. Whenever a new person begins talking, there should be a new paragraph. Here’s an example of an incorrect formatting:

Janice asks, “Hey, let’s go to the movies tonight. You want to?” “Yeah, that sounds great. What do you want to see?” Bob replies. “There’s that new fantasy movie playing we both have been wanting to see.”

The proper way to format this would be:

Janice asks, “Hey, let’s go to the movies tonight. You want to?”

“Yeah, that sounds great. What do you want to see?” Bob replies.

“There’s that new fantasy movie playing we both have been wanting to see.”

Spelling is another big issue. It doesn’t take very long to copy over a story from a word processor program, so it is best to type the story in a program like Word. Word will help you with correct spelling. Chat speak is only accepted if it is quoted as an actual chat or text message. Word will also help you with various sentence structure issues. But, be sure to pay attention to the changes Word wants to make; not all changes are right. “When I was a boy.” is not a complete sentence. A sentence must include a subject (some sort of noun) and an action (some sort of verb). Only one conjunction (and, but, or, nor, for, yet, so) can be used in each sentence to connect two complete sentences. An example of this would be:

Janice wants to go to the movies, and Bob want to go with her, but he has to be at work in an hour.

Removing either the “, and” or the “, but” and replacing it with a period would correct the grammatical error there.

Excessive punctuation is not allowed on Mibba. One exclamation point is plenty; it means the statement was meant with great feeling. The only time a story should contain two punctuation marks at the end of a sentence would be the combination “?!”.

If these basic rules are observed when writing a story, it will increase the readers’ enjoyment of the story and, in the process, help the writer to have more subscribers, something every writer on Mibba wants to have. If you have trouble with these errors, it might benefit you to have a beta reader. There is lots of writing help to be had in the “Tips” area under Writing in the forums.

For a complete list of Mibba’s rules for all areas, including forums threads, blogs, stories, etc., here is Mibba’s Comprehensive Rules List.