Costructive criticism: does really anyone want it?

If you have trouble recieving criticism, just remember that anyone posting actual constructive criticism cares enough about your work to do so. If your work bored someone to tears, they wouldn't mention specific issues with a work, or better said even if they did there had to be some spark, SOMETHING that spoke to them and made them want to leave a comment or critique, and that is a good sign. I do feel a little bad with a very long critique that I felt was constructive I left here, being new, and missing that there was a forum I felt the comments were the only place I could leave it, and also not knowing the DMing culture here, getting a DM right out of the blue that was criticizing the work felt like it would be kind of ringing one someone's doorbell to leave a flaming bag of dogshit.

I haven't posted anything here yet, but working on erotic fiction for a living in other formats, I did find that respecting critiques is important from my end. If I do see someone coming to me with issues even if I don't agree I do thank them for the comments and criticism, even if it isn't actionable. I think authors often times have trouble putting themselves in the minds of a reader, and understanding how a character's actions may or may not be seen. Or not understanding that while YOU know your world very well, a reader does not. Critique gives you an outside perspective, sometimes good, or sometimes bad. But it is often imoprtant.

 

That is a problem I've encountered before. Some authors seem to think that you can show us one set of behaviour, then tell us something else and expect it to overrule.

 

It's like, want the bully character to have a heart of gold? Maybe don't have him pop the cherry of the childhood best friend of the audience identification character in a scene of dubious at best consent, at least if that is not your theme. Gonna take a whole lot of work to make readers not want to see him castrated.

There is also the desire to make an absolutely massive cast of characters from siblings, parents, friends of siblings, co-workers, school mates, aunts, uncles, distant family friends, exes, and the like. Nearly every time the cast starts ballooning outward the pacing and story suffer. It's a fictional Nebraska town of 10,000, they don't all need a role.

 

I've read stories like that. They have characters betray their friends, commit rape, express horribly bigoted views and even bully people into SUICIDE and then tell us they're "genuinely good people" or "redeemable" and that we should sympathise with them.

Often in those same stories, they'll tell you other characters are "psychopaths" or "cowards" for reacting in ways that are perfectly reasonable given their circumstances, .

That is something I'm gonna need to be careful of. Good thing the protagonist of the isekai story I'm currently working on is an orphan with only one sibling who's associates I wouldn't describe as friends, and no co-workers, school mates, aunts, uncles, distant family friends or exes.

 

Granted, a lot of CHYOA readers do root for rapey characters out of misguided empathy. Stories about John Doe getting time freeze powers so he can assault and humiliate women without consequence don't exactly attract paragons of morality.

 

I think the difference is that with those kinds of stories, they're just intended to be smut. It doesn't work so well with a more story driven story (I don't know how else to put it) with character development and plot.

Also, the author in your example isn't trying make him out to be a "genuinely good person" and those kinds of stories are pretty upfront about it. It's not like the author promised a story about a guy giving a hate sink they're comeuppance only then have him turn into a complete monster himself for no reason and then start trying to make the hate sink "sympathetic" for reasons that are stupid.

 

The key word is finishing!

When a story just keeps going and going and going, you have little choice but to keep expanding its scope. You can't have your protagonist keep fucking the same 3 people over and over, there has to be progress. Of course, there are multiple axes of progression. You can go from flirting to kissing to heavy petting to full-blown sex, but at some point you've done it all, and further escalation becomes... well, let's just say unappealing. At that point you'll probably have to resort to multiple partners. First the protagonist seduces her childhood sweetheart, then the buxom neighbour, then her brother or mother (probably those first, actually, and probably both), and before long you get the scenario you're sketching, where the story just grows out of control (and sometimes other things do too). Branching only encourages this kind of uncontrolled narrative sprawl.

But when you keep in mind your story has to end, that puts an upper limit on how broad you can reasonably make it. Unless you're planning a 10-volume fantasy epic, you can't hope to tie together dozens of disparate storylines and characters into a cohesive, satisfying ending. This will also force you to focus on story (your arc has a beginning, a middle, and an end) and a few central relationships (say from strangers to lovers to soulmates), rather than just piling more and more meat onto your orgy.

I strongly believe that you can't truly call yourself a writer until you've written an ending.

 

Of course, hence the mention of theme. If the story is about humiliating the main character, or the bully is the main character, or it's just PWP thing can and do change. But that was just an example. In your case the fantasy of the story is about not having moral limits, and the dubcon is the point. No one is going to complain if there is rape in a story called RapeWorld: Gotta fuck em all.

Agree, though expansion can be done naturally, and fairly well, it just has to stay archored, and strongly anchored to the main characters of the story. Even then there is a severe danger of spiralling out of control. It can happen without a writer realizing it is happening. George R. R. Martin, still one of my favorite writers, fell prey to this in terms of juggling so many threads it became hard to put them all back together. And at least then, it wasn't difficult for the reader to keep the main character's story straight, even if you forgot a side character here or there. If he hadn't anchored everything to POV characters, it could easily have become like the abject insanity of the later Wheel of Time books.

Ok, that was a digression.

On endings, I agree. Though being cyoa, many stories have a pantser feel to them. Not bad in and of itself, especially in an open work. However as many stories here are CYOA in name only, having a stong ending in mind that one is working towards definitely helps. Even in a game or heavily branching story, I would argue that having an outline of things is even more important than in a linear one, lest it keep ballooning outwards.

 

Classic gardener vs. architect! From the man himself:

In fact, I think that topic might be worth a whole new thread.

And done! https://forum.chyoa.com/threads/are-you-a-gardener-or-an-architect.5050/

 

George R.R. Martin writes on here?

 

The adventure itself can be choose-your-own, but the destiny can be predetermined by the author. So there can be countless paths and routes through a story, but if the author (or lead author, or owner, or whatever) is committed to concluding the story a certain way (or at least in a relatively limited and finite number of ways), it allows for plenty of CYO exploration and variety while still not necessarily becoming too pantser-y.

 

Better than the jerks who just randomly drop in and offer criticisms on a chapter even though they don't write anything to show how they'd do it.
I hate those a-holes.

 

Commenters often don't know how to say how to do what is bothering them in a story better. All they know is what bothers them. It's best to be clear if possible, but under the assumption that comments aren't just a troll, or that your story isn't for them, then even those comments can be worthwhile. They just take more effort to parse.

 

You also have to be in a state of mind in which you're ready to accept feedback. If you post a "give me feedback!" thread, that's pretty much a given. When you just randomly stumble on someone saying something harsh but possibly holding (or not holding) a nugget of insight, then more often than not that isn't the case.

 

I might have already said this in this thread, but I think the important difference is whether it's possible and reasonable to deal with the reader's concern. If you're reading a story about MILFs, you wouldn't leave a comment saying you hate MILFs in a genuine attempt at constructive criticism, because the implied solution is effectively to delete the story. Less obviously, an observation like "I wish there were multiple different choices after every chapter, I feel railroaded!" on a non-game mode story might be valid, but it's an impossible expectation for any single author (and even large groups of them) in a story that's not trivially short: even a story of just 30 chapters deep would require over a billion chapters to fill out every branching point with two options.

Criticisms like "this character doesn't feel realistic" or "the story seems to have strayed too far from its premise" don't offer solutions, but might be accurately identifying problems, so it's still worthwhile to consider them.

 

Exactly, complaining about noncon in a noncon story is pointless, but those are the easiest comments to ignore. I also think that comments like that would bother an author the least, but that's me speaking for myself. But saying someone feels out of character, or that there is less sexual tension than before, or the story is hard to follow, even without solutions offered in the comment.

Even simple things like "I'm bored" can help.