As great as it is to receive comments such as 'UPDATE SOON I LOVE IT', it quickly loses meaning when it appears a thousand times a day on the Wattpad site. Anyone can write a comment like that. It shows no depth that you've even read the story.
The other day, I received a comment on this rant that said something like 'great story'. It's not exactly a story and this person had actually been spamming stories with pre-made, identical comments just to get attention.
The real reason I upload my stories on here is to get feedback. Things like: "I liked [this] section because the dialogue was realistic, but I felt the ending was a bit boring." It's not complicated or sentence specific, but it tells the writer so much about what they've written. By all means, say a lot more, but if you're only going to say something short, say how it made you feel: "It was heartbreaking/cheerful/angsty/boring."
Obviously try to be tactful if you didn't think something worked, but how is a writer supposed to improve if they don't know it's going wrong? Give them constructive criticism and tell them how to improve if you think you know.
One thing that really annoys me is when readers feel entitled to like the piece. Their attitude is if they don't like something then the writer is clearly doing something wrong. But this is horrendous reader behaviour, nobody is going to like everything, and writers don't write for people who don't like what they're writing about. It's okay to not like something but that doesn't mean that what that person has written is bad. It's just opinion.
Oh, also on entitled readers: if you're a reader!reader (opposed to a writer!reader) then back off on the "WHY ARE YOU NOT UPDATING YET :@@@@". Writers have lives and it's not easy to write masterpieces. It takes time to write something and if the writer is spending a lot of time on it, good. Some writers have jobs and exams that trump updating on Wattpad. Writers don't exist for the reader population to harass them.
Over and out. Leave me some things to rant about/give advice on.
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Novela JuvenilCharacter Archetypes, Cliché Plots, Self-Insertion, Reviewing. I'm joining in on the rant hype and offering some advice on how not do what everyone's getting bored of.
