All Comments on 'Observations of a Picky Reader'

This was quite fascinating, Barns10, and I never miss the opportunity to read another take on the mysterious art of writing - and this has gone some way to clearing a path through some of the misty obstacles. Now, if you could only come up with a sure-fire way of overcoming 'static friction' in writing (dynamic friction never to seems to have quite the grip!) we might just be getting somewhere!

Thank you - five stars

Sorry to have to point this out but you failed to follow your own "Tip no.1".In the description the apostrophe in readers' is in the wrong place;it should be "reader's". Cheers,Malcolm.

Regarding my last comment,I now see it's been sorted. Cheers,

Malcolm

I admit - I've worked as an editor. And I'm a horny old bugger. Yet, despite my horniness, there are some postings to this site, with good plots, which have me losing all erotic interest and ranting about 'please go back to Primary School and pay attention this time?'

The number of people who can't distinguish your/you're, for example - or any several of a hundred homonyms. Or who mix past and present tense in the same sentence.

I could go on (and on), but 90% of this pleasure-killing crapola can be fixed by nothing more complex than running a piece through Microsoft Word spelling and grammar checker. Early grammar checkers were abysmal - but now as an occasional writer I routinely use this tool before I hit send, even for e-mails. It would improve a large percentage of postings to Literotica.

The best proofreading in the world will not make a bad story good.

The two essential things are credibility and a plot. Real sounding people who do nothing is bad, and a wonderful plot with impossibly talented charactrers, endowed with super human attributes, are both destined to be lousy (or at least weak) stories.

Avoid the maudlin, sweet gentle man, loving 12 year old children who are wiser than Solomon.

Don't make people faultless, they are human, and seeing genuine failings makes them more interesting.

Don't use cute or funny names, like Miss Goodbody or Uncle Fuckit.

Never use false qualifiers such as: "people seem to like me" as a way of giving self praise, , or "somehow I came out all right" when he just told the reader what exactly he did.

Avoid the use of the pronoun I. Often it can be assumed,"I was thinking about killing her, but I thought better of it." The second I should be removed,

Avoid the word decide or decided, it sounds lame, especially when used more than once in 100 words. "We decided to go to the club without wearing underwear." replace with "It would be hot to go to the club..." or "We agreed to go to the club."

"It would be hot to go to the club."

Oh well those are my buttons

Chilley

Well done, Barns. A definite read-and-heed for us all.

You touched on many of my Lit ;'pet peeves:', but here are some you missed:

1. CLARIFY THE NARRATOR'S GENDER RIGHT AWAY

Let the reader know - at minimum - the gender of the character who is telling the atory. And do so early on, ideally in the first couple of sentences of your story.

It is difficult for the reader to lose themselves in the world of your story when they don't even know this very basic thing about your narrator.

Yes, being intentionally vague about this can be a literary device used to promote tension, but - don';t overdo. Some readers (such as yours truly) will very quickly start to feel that they are simply being jerked around, or are in the hands of an incompetent storyteller, and will abandon your story.

2. AVOID LIT CLICHES

Here are a few:

** Your character's eighteenth birthday

Yes, we know that the charactrs must be eighteen or older, but don' hit us over the head with it.

** Nine-inch penises

I'm certain this is a turn-on to many, but, to others, it can either seem like an impossibility or like a tired, hackneyed attempt at erotica. Breasts the size of Volkswagens also fall into this category.

** Purple prose

Over-used phrases such as "throbbing man-meat"

3. INCONSISTENT TENSE

This is highly distracting, and is a neon indicator of an incompetent writer.

I have even seen tense change within a sentence in lit stories, as in "He opened the door and will be seeing her standing there".

Ugh

4. GENDER-NEUTRAL CHARACTER NAMES

... especially within story descriptions, can leave a reader feeling a victim of "false advertising", expecting one type of story, only to find a totally different one, perhaps one written from a POV the reader has no interest in.

... there are more, but these are the ones off the top- of my head,

'please go back to Primary School and pay attention this time?'

It's this type of condescending 'feedback' that prevents so many from trying. When giving feedback try to be encouraging even when pointing out the errors highlighted in the above. There's never a need for this type of comment. Critics need to remember that whilst the writers here are amateurs, so are they as critics!

This is a piece which deserves more attention from writers than it will get. I think the “tips” in the first two sections are very well taken.

In particular I say AMEN! to these:

....

“2. If your story is location specific, know the location you are writing about.” YES!

....

“6. Be consistent within your story. Nothing is more disorientating than when a major detail, such as someone's name, changes within a story. This is something proofreading can fix, and is more important than grammar or spelling.”

These mistakes drive me nuts – and you see then sometimes from pretty good authors.

On the other hand I disagree with the following

“Tips on getting long term readers

....

2. Unless it is part of a personal writing exercise (in which case more power to you), be careful of not writing the same characters in all of your stories. Different names will not hide the fact that the characters have the same quirks, insecurities, or idealistic qualities. Even best selling authors have this problem.”

In the Loving Wives category the most consistently well received stories are practically carbon copies of each other: The narrator/protagonist is a not particularly bright husband, there is a cheating wife (who is never motivated by anything but greed and/or boredom), a bad guy with whom wife cheats, a rescuing angel (a beautiful woman who comes into the husband’s life when he needs it most) and REVENGE

A very well written LW story last week featured a strong woman who tired of her useless (but not cuckold) husband and told him she was going to start taking lovers. She did. He didn’t like it. So far he hasn’t done anything to change his life or circumstances.

The last time I looked the ratings averaged 2.47

The lesson: LW in particular has a readership that does NOT like changes to the formula – and the formula is invariably that a strong woman will be crushed unless she is the rescuing angel.

In other words, one of your tips should be for the author to stay away from that sub-genre unless (s)he is will to stay completely within the conventions.

Hi, I just thought I'd add my two cents worth. As you may or may-not know, I'm a writer here. I have found while posting stories on this site that there are some things beyond our control.

1. We post our story's and it goes through about twenty different computers before it gets posted for public view. (This can be irritating when magically words are mispelled or even change).

2. When you have editors, make sure you do a clean-up draft in the same program you origanally work with. I have foud that the more people I had edit my work, the more common word mistakes showed up in the finished project. She to He, is to it.... those kind of things. It has something to do with the different filters in the different word prosessing programs.

3. Don't always blame the author... see above. I know that people have corrected me on mis-spells etc... But in my raw file, it was spelled correctly... again see above.

4 Please appreciate the time and effort that goes into these stories. I know it takes me 4 to 8 hours to format, supmit, proff-read, and post a story. And still a few of these errors show up. From what I've learned, all the stories have to go into a filter program of some sort, so it will post on the site. That way it doesn't matter if you have a HTML or Fat-32 or whatever.... computer; you can still read the story.

Take time to thank all the people who work dilagenty so you can sit in the comfort of your home, office, car...wherever, and read these stories. As far as I know they don't get paid for the work they do.... I sure as hell know I don't.

5. For the love of god... please remember that 90% of the stories on this site are just that; STORIES! They're fiction, frabrications, not real. There is no need to belabor the point of opinion of the characters. They are not real people. They only live in the mind of us demented authors.. and yours while you read the story. Yes, some of them are wimps, some are not. They are figments of the imagination made up for your reading pleasure. I mean, I love a lively discourse on most any subject, but some of the comments we get, go a bit far. It's free entertainment... nothing more, nothing less. If you don't like a piticular subject matter, then don't read it.

Well, I better stop now, before I go off on a rant. Thank you for your time and attention.

Myhands316

and helpful.

Excellent Article Barns, not that I'm anything of a writer, probably never will, but Myhands just made my day. probably as he/ or she did yours.

Perhaps it was intentional 'supmit' and " proff-reading" , if so bouquets, if not, then brickbats to you Myhands. It's a toss up as to which you're going to get. ... because... elsewhere in your piece, you remind folk to at least announce their details, gender at least, and if you're writing about a locale, get the details straight. Your State again is spelled how? T e n . . . . s e e ".

Myhands, dear me, in the first two paragraphs, has two different spellings for "stories" , and further..writes "are mispelled or even change)." ( Mis-spelled or even ChangeD).

It could well be I am picking at a well-thought out jape. I certainly hope so.

Cheers, and thanks to the both of you, Barns and Myhands.

To add my piece, one of the many processes that text goes through seems to change the spelling of common words to close homophones, an amusing exercise to read.

Lose becomes Loose. Discreet becomes Discrete. Me, I blame voice recognition software.

but again, Cheers and thanks to all, Barns and respondents so far.

Kilroy.

This post really needs to be not only written, but also read and FOLLOWED!

Thank you for writing it!

Nothing is a bigger jolt to reading than "their going to go to..." or "there car is a Ford...". Also "it is better then ..." THAN! for Pete's sake. Grammar, vocabulary, spelling!

PLEASE!

Well stated!

I write myself and know how painful it is to proofread. I sometimes find silly typos in my stories after years of reading and rereading them. I once found a typo for the life of me I could not figure out what my intent was when I wrote the sentence and had to rewrite the sentence from scratch, hoping it was in the meaning I originally intended.

That said, there is no excuse for a writer to submit a piece of junk where there is a typo in every line or paragraph or where names keep changing.

One thing I hate is stories where there is a hundred characters, where I need to take notes to follow the story, especially if they are all introduced at the same time. I am afraid that providing a list of characters at the top of every pace would not help. They are just too many to keep track of even briefly.

Regarding the content of the story, it is okay to write about wimps, etc. as long as the description or warning at the beginning of the story says what it is about. It is not okay to have the wrong description or surprise the reader with gay stuff or whatever in the middle of a story that seems to have nothing to do with that.

Thanks to the writer and the picky writer.

I might also add, "If it can fit into more than one category, put it into the more diverse of the two." Fetish Romance should be in Fetish. Gay/First time. Gay. Etc. For me, nothing is a bigger turn off than to be reading a Group sex and suddenly there s guy on guy action.

This was well thought out and concise!

As far as our dear writers who lose steam, although I don't publish here, I'm guilty of same. It's best to finish the piece - or at least a solid outline - prior to starting to post chapters, but it is less fun. Please understand that you can't force writing for many writers, or at least good writing. The waiting is usually worth it!

"1. Its pretty obvious, but there is nothing more important than thorough proofreading . . . . ."

Ironic that the first tip is to proofread considering that the first word of this tip wasn't proofread. :) The contraction of "It is" is "It's," with an apostrophe. "Its" is the possessive form of "It."

very well thought out and more helpful to writers than some of the negative comments i see posted.

The first one on getting a story read is so true.

If a writer can't be bothered spelling the title or description right, well then I can't be bothered to read it.

I like reading series stories, but why bother to read a series where the description for every chapter or part is the exact same as all the other parts.

Unless I start when the first is posted that will not grab my attention in a good way.

Whatever Ch. 01 Unimaginative description.

Whatever Ch. 02 Unimaginative description.

Whatever Ch. 03 Unimaginative description.

Whatever Ch. 04 Unimaginative description.

and on and on.................................

(yes that is made up, not to single out a writer who may have fanatics - that is the root word of fans after all)

Hare are some other advise that might help.

1= Don't Assume that all of your readers are into 4000 Inch Sized Cocks and Double S Sized Boobs, try to be as Real as you can.

2= Don't Treat your Readers like FBI Agents because they aren't. Please for the Love of everything that is Erotic Spread out your info including ones on your characters, don't be afraid to Naturally Scatter your character's Profile, and make your readers work for it. You don't have to Smash all of the Information in one Massive Paragraph and in my own Personal Opinion and Experience it's Better that you do Scatter the Info as I have said, for two reasons. One as I have said Make you Readers Earn it they Aren't FBI Profilers, and the Second is that If you Smashed it in to one Massive Paragraph it kind of Slows and even Stops the Story In My Own Experience and Opinion.

3= And Hare's a New one if Your Story is Suppose to Invoke a Certain Emotion. Don't Spoil it in your Description. For Example if your Story is Supposed to me Sad in the Description Area don't writ down "This Is A Sad Story" it sort of Lessens the Affect and it Spoils the Emotional Surprise of it, much like in a Sitcom when ever the Laugh Track Goes Off it's there way of saying to you "Hay this is Funny you're Supposed to Laugh Now" after when a Character says or does something that is Supposed to be Funny.

On a Side Note for me in my Opinion there is one way of Cheating the Name thing, and that is if you use a Very Common Name in your Stories such as 'Sam' or 'Tom' or 'Sarah' etc... there are many People with those names. Even in Real Life and Besides, everyone knows that each one of your Stories is Highly Likely Taking Place in a Deferent Universe.

One Personal Pet Peeve that I have regarding this How To is when Arthur’s add in things like “Or Do They?” or “Or Does She?”. Etc…. For me not only that Screams ‘Click Bait’ but also a Big Red Fat Ass Flag telling me that this story is most likely going to Waste My Time. In their Story Disruptions.