Writers Against Bad Reviews! Forum I wish people would be HONEST ..

This is a novelist's take on the situation:

If the piece of writing is longer than a few lines, it requires a review that is longer than a few lines.  Nothing worse than posting a novel chapter, or a 3-page poem, and getting "Beautiful!" as the whole of the review.  Nor is a 3-sentence review on a 4000-word chapter a fair exchange for a 3-paragraph review written on a 400-word short story fragment.

Being honest means not just saying "I like it, you are the best!"  A bit of explaining why the reviewer likes it would be good, yes?  But it also means not finding fault merely for the sake of finding fault.  I got one review that even said that:  'I couldn't find anything wrong with this, but I'll tell you that something is bad because that is expected.'  No, it is not expected that the reviewer will tear the writing to shreds even though they liked everything about it.  That is perhaps worse than the fluff reviews.  There is nothing wrong with giving a detailed explanation of what you do like, after all, and writers need that kind of feedback, too.

I also think that honesty in reviewing means not claiming some kind of expertise that you don't possess.  I hate it when someone "corrects" my writing by telling me that I've misspelled my protagonist's name (it's Grey with an e - deal with it) or that I obviously don't know the right term for a sci-fi weapon because they heard some other word in a video game once.  (Sorry, but there's no such thing as a sound laser.  Really.)  People who give a review saying "i didnt see any grammer in this, it is good" aren't being honest, are they?  They're certainly not being helpful.

The trouble is, we're "preaching to the choir" here.  The people who need to hear what we're saying are the ones who are deliberately giving those one-line, fluff-and-cheese reviews.  And they do it because they can.  They do it because their little cliques of followers will always give their reviews a thumbs-up, no matter how useless the reviews are.  They want the fluff and cheese; they want the empty accolades rather than constructive criticism.

No one should receive glowing praise for having a pretty picture that they found on Google posted along with their poem or story... Judge the writing by the writing, not by the fancy fonts or pretty pictures or the writer's avatar or whatever we read on their profile.  Especially in a online environment where we have no way of really knowing if anything we "know" about the writer is true or not.

Don't make the mistake of assuming that young writers won't take constructive criticism and that older ones will.  Maturity matters; age does not.  I've seen young writers who were very serious about becoming better at their craft, and older ones who were so sure that they knew it all that they threw tantrums at anyone who suggested that they had some small room yet for improvement.

I've often wondered, myself, why anyone would post writing on a review site if they don't want honest feedback.  When I am asked to review something, and I do, and then the writer sends me a message saying 'i dont care wat u think, ur a hater!!!!'... Yeah.  Because I tried to help someone with their grammar after they asked me to, and only the most mean-spirited people even think that that stuff matters... Must be why I'm never on the Top Reviewers list.

You know what puts a smile on my face?  Knowing that someone has read my fiction and gets it.  Knowing that they say they like it because they do like it, not because they're afraid to hurt my feelings or they think that giving me nothing but glowing praise will get me to give them a review of the same kind.  Even knowing that they say they don't like it because they actually don't like the writing, not because they dislike what they think they know about me, and they are treating me like an adult, able to take honest criticism without getting all angsty about it.  I didn't get mad (well, slightly annoyed for a minute or two) when The Perfectionist said that he hates the female lead in my novel.  He explained that he hates all female protagonists (Whatever made you think she's the protagonist, TP?) because they're only written by teenage girls (I'm a 39-year-old man) and are therefore cliche.  But he was willing to explain where his opinion came from, and that made it a lot more useful to me.  (Mental note:  Some mundanes are still living in the 1900s.  So are some sci-fi fans.  Listen to what they say about plot clarity, but ignore any feedback they have about characterization.  They're not your intended audience anyway.)

I do wish that reviewers would pay more attention to the questions I ask in my author's notes, though...

     

I've given reviews that were a full page in Times 12 (I type 'em up in Word and then paste to the review box - easier for me to see) that I only got 10 points for.  On about 2000 words of story.  But when it's part 2 of the review because I had to break it up into manageable segments, I don't get as much for anything past part 1.

What I want to know is, how can people who habitually give one-word reviews end up at the top of the Reviewers list for months at a time?