Wattpad 101: Your guide to the world of Wattpad

Commenting 101

If we make a 15 yo girl cry and quit writing forever, we just tell ourselves that if she had REALLY wanted to be a writer, our words wouldn't have mattered to her, because she'd be writing for herself. This chapter tries to dispel this myth. OF COURSE we are affected by the things people say. OF COURSE comments matter. If you work a job, and you're faced with a boss who savagely criticizes you every chance he gets without ever giving you any encouragement, or a boss who promotes you and tries to help, while occasionally guiding you from mistakes he sees, which is going to get more productivity out of you? Regardless of how much you "love" the job, which job would have you more likely to quit? Which job would you be happier and work harder at? 

It doesn't seem to me like a hard concept to grasp. In this situation, you commenters are the people we're working for, and even if we're tough, even if we love writing and are doing this for us... your words are always going to matter. And if you're in a place where you want to see more of our words, then what you say should matter to you too. Please try to keep that in mind as you read this. This chapter is about giving you some awareness, by facing an interaction we've all had many times, but from a direction you might not be used to seeing it from. This chapter is for commenters to understand the weight of their words, and to possible consider turning comments that discourage writing into comments that encourage writers. 

Don't Respond With "Great" or "Write More"

It's usually a good idea to avoid a one-word comment that adds absolutely nothing to the conversation. It's not like we get all that motivated by 10-20 comments that say "great!". A single thoughtful comment could completely override 100 "great!". And perhaps more troublesome... a single negative comment can make it feel like your work is hated no matter how many "Great!" people write. When you don't add any details in your comments, they lack substance. They make no impact on the writer. They don't excite us to write more, and they don't even make us feel that much better. I'd go so far to say I'd rather see a star and no comment, then just a comment that said "Great!"

The other response, "Write more...", is a problem all onto itself, and really should be its own section. It's generally not a good idea to nag your writers, and saying things like "I want more!" feel a bit like being unappreciative of what a writer does. We either have a very specific launch schedule, which is the norm for most consistent writers, or we're writing as fast as we are motivated to write.

In either case, telling me to write more doesn't excite me to write more. It makes me think that what I wrote was emotionally nothing to you. You'll scoop up whatever crap I'm writing, and so it doesn't matter what I produce, as long as it has a word count. That's the impression a "write more" comment gives me. Therefore, unless you don't care what your writer is shoveling out, perhaps think of something a little more substantial to say then some poorly worded command. It'll irritate your writers every time they see it, or their eyes will just glaze over it and they won't even consider it a thing at all.

Don't Always Be Negative and Don't Start Your First Comment Negative

Now, you seem to have two kinds of commenters, the kind that only says positive things of encouragement, and the kind that only says negative things. There are very few that sit in the middle ground. Since I'm not talking about a chapter on writing a critique, I think when it comes to comments, it's okay to lean heavily on the positive side. However, that's not most people's way. We tend to only review an item or restaurant when they fail expectations and piss us off. Likewise, we tend to only comment when we reach something in the story that bothers us enough that we feel the need to say something.

I experienced this first hand with the release of Hawtness 1.5... a story that took me three times longer to write than the first Hawtness entirely because I didn't receive very many comments. I wrote 15 some chapters with diminishing returns on each one, until the final chapters almost didn't get any comments at all. Then, I released a chapter stating I was dropping Hawtness. It got like ten comments about how "regretful" my readers were that I was dropping the series. Had these same commenters been commenting every chapter, Hawtness two would probably already be finished, but they only decided to comment when there was a negative thing... something that shook up their equilibrium. I asked them how they felt about the fact that the thing they were "regretful" was ended wouldn't have ended if they had just spoken up and let me know they wanted it... but what can I say, they didn't comment.