Let's talk about... Reviews. mrstrentreznor.

If you write just for the reviews you will give up; there are not enough to sustain you. Write for yourself, write because your head is full of dialogue, write because you can’t NOT write, write because you love a certain pairing and no one else writes them or write to fix up all the mistakes but for whatever reason, do it for yourself.

But reviews are icing and they don’t have to be perfect. If we tell people they have to be perfect, they won’t review.

I work very hard to reply to every review. I have people who leave the same comment on every chapter of every story and that is fine with me. I will always thank them. They all count. One person left a smiley face on all the chapters. Excellent! It all counts. And fanfic, rightly or wrongly, is judged by the number of reviews.

Reviews have made me rethink a storyline, they have pointed out issues, suggested that I have made a grammar or tense mistake (it’s Seth; he messes me up every time) and they have helped me make the story better!

When I answered reviews for my one shot ‘I’ll be home for Christmas’ I asked reviewers five questions about extending it and they answered me! Some people said they had never responded before. I thanked those people when I finished the story and it morphed from a funny crack fic about an older generation of wolves into a major dramatic epic.

Of course there are bad reviews. And they hurt. I think it is human nature to remember one bad thing out of 100 nice ones. And they are always anons. What is it about not signing your name to something that makes people think they can be truly awful?

And ffs if you are going to tell a person they are wrong be damn sure that you are right, first! I can’t tell you how many reviews I get that just flatly tell me I have Paul’s age wrong or whatever. Nothing will piss me off faster as I waste my time to find the proof to deny it.

I review everything I read, both in fanfic and at Goodreads for books. Some days I think I might be the awful reviewer but I do try to be constructive. If the plot has gaps, I will say so. If I think the dystopian world didn’t make sense I will say so. And when I read my own stuff, I imagine I am a reviewer and I think… well, does this make sense? Is there a hole in my plot? What would I say if I was reviewing this?

 -mrstrentreznor.