Thread: Story Attention - Reviews, Critiquing, and Comments

@Gotpika; Thank you for the kind words!

My favorite part of writing fics is character development. If you've read some of my older work, you know that character development was my main weakness, IMO. I'm trying to improve upon that.

Writing for yourself is all very well and good, but I put my work on Bulbagarden precisely because I want reader feedback. I want to become a career novelist, after all, and accordingly, I yearn to know how my writing is received.

RE: chapter length - on a friend's advice I am shortening the length of my chapters to about 3000 words. Is that fairly ordinary for this site?

Originally Posted by unrepentantAuthor

Writing for yourself is all very well and good, but I put my work on Bulbagarden precisely because I want reader feedback. I want to become a career novelist, after all, and accordingly, I yearn to know how my writing is received.

This, I agree to. I still don't outright need or want feedback for any other reason than my future career, though, so it's still technically sharing it for myself. But I most certainly enjoy it when I receive feedback, both positive and negative, everything that presents an opportunity to improve oneself is good.

For those of you who want to get more reviews, and are willing to give out reviews in return, this may be of interest to you: NEW Review Exchange

Originally Posted by Llama_Guy

I most certainly enjoy it when I receive feedback, both positive and negative, everything that presents an opportunity to improve oneself is good.

Yes, it is important for writers of any calibre to see all critique as an opportunity to improve, whether by recognising and exploiting strengths or ameliorating weaknesses. Similarly, this is the end goal that should ideally be within the mind of a reviewer.

Originally Posted by Gastly's Mama

For those of you who want to get more reviews, and are willing to give out reviews in return, this may be of interest to you: NEW Review Exchange

You are a good person and should feel good.

Originally Posted by unrepentantAuthor

Originally Posted by Gastly's Mama

For those of you who want to get more reviews, and are willing to give out reviews in return, this may be of interest to you: NEW Review Exchange

You are a good person and should feel good.

Seconded - I'll probably be going to add my fic after I make this post.

As much as I'd love to say I write only for myself and I'll write what I want to write and screw anyone who doesn't want to read it...it's simply not the case. I'm pretty insecure about my work in general, and it's really hard to motivate myself to continue it if I feel like no one's reading it. Reviews are really the only tangible way of seeing that. I don't care so much if I get negative reviews - criticism is something I can deal with and incorporate to fix, and at least it means that people are reading and taking the time to review my work. Since writing is something I hope to do professionally one day and make my living from, I think that adds to the insecurity. If people aren't reading my more casual stuff now, then what hope do I ever have of being good enough to be successful in the real world? And those kinds of thoughts tend to spiral out of control more often than not :/ Call it shallow, but...yeah. I'm a bit of an attention whore when it comes to putting my work up in a public place.

Originally Posted by RaiThunder

I love reviews, comments, and critiques. They make my day, especially when they have useful things to talk about, like what someone liked or didn't like. Knowing that someone took time to review makes me happy and helps me have confidence that my writing and story-telling are good. I'm not a fast writer and I tend to forget that my readers might not have in-depth knowledge of what I'm talking about, so reviews help me figure out what needs to be checked, what needs to be explained, and what I'm doing good at.

I tend to write long chapters - 4,000+ for works I actually care about and 3,000+ for works I'm doing for fun. In my own reading, I tend to hate short chapters, so I try to avoid giving my readers extremely short chapters in response to that feeling.

And I definitely don't always review on other sites, just because the process tends to be annoying (on FFN you have to log in every few hours or every few days, on LJ you have to Captcha). Here, I almost always comment if I have something to say or hit the 'like' button if I don't. A simple like is a perfectly good response in my opinion.

This fits everything I feel about reviewing, critique and comments to a T. :)