7 / 22
May 2023

Some RoyalRoad readers like to believe themselves as critics. RoyalRoad can be very picky. If your story is not a LitRPG it is hard to thrive in RoyalRoad. Plus the comments of that person contradict each other.

You will likely encounter many more readers like that since your story is not a LitRPG.

I don't think it's a troll per se, I see some genuine feedback in there, but it's phrased pretty rudely. It sounds like what they're trying to say is:

  • The story would benefit from more detailed descriptions of scenery and/or events,
  • The characters could stand to be fleshed out more,
  • Some of the scenes don't seem to serve any purpose to the story.

Now I don't know how much of that is true, they could just be an overly critical reader, but I would say to take their advice with a grain of salt. There might be some truth to it, but it doesn't mean your story is bad or anything. Just keep going at it!

It kind of hit me hard, because the person thinks I just dumped a below par work even though it took months of thinking, world building, character writing and plot setting before I began publishing, but well, I guess.

I hope you're not under the impression that you have to give your time and energy to people who don't like your work, especially if you didn't request for them to critique in the first place. People are not going to always like what you do and you can't always assume that someone who writes negative comments is a troll. Now that being said, they have repeatedly commented negatively, but it could be a case of liking the story concept but not the execution.

I read game of thrones and lord of the mysteries to help with my writing and watch medieval stories to help with plots, but I guess the person just doesn’t feel what I feel for the story. I’m just hoping those comments don’t chase potential readers away.

I didn’t just expect to be hit hard in almost all the chapters. This is the first really negative comments I’ve had in over 2k views spread across 3 sites, so maybe I was just hurt a bit. My writing style for this work was drawn from game of thrones and lord of the mysteries, and I made sure to have people read it before I began publishing. But what can I do if someone doesn’t like it, guess I’ll just keep tugging it out for those that do

Yea, exactly. I mean, don't completely shut out negative critiques, they might be picking up on something you or those around may have missed due to their proximity to you, but don't treat them like the end all be all either. Now, whenever you see that username, you can ignore them or give yourself the time and space to get into a mindset where you're capable of taking on their negative critique with getting too upset about it.

I understand how disheartening it can be and it is a reason some people choose to not post on RR or disable comment. Some people here say that Tapas is the platform where the audience are well-behaved and in general less likely to give unsolicited critique. The culture in RR is different, critique or review swap is one of the most popular forms to get viewership and encouraged, so thus the tendency.

However, you said you get some nice responses aside of this one. I hope they are enough for you to keep going on your story. About the criticism, if you wish, please come back to it when your mind is clear and your mood has improved. You can also discuss it with readers or friends you trust and understand your story (very important, because casual reader may not).

So, I haven't read all of your novel, only the prologue and the first chapter (episode 1&2) and it's decent. I've certainly read far worse, there are no obvious mistakes or awful writing. I can't really tell you if they're a troll or not. I mean, for a start, they seem to be geniuely reading your story and giving what could be considered critique, which is more than most trolls do. And they do seem to be giving encouragement at times. Now, whether people should just throw out unsolicated criticism is an argument as old as time in these parts, but it feels to me that's more of what they're doing, perhaps insensitively, than actually trolling. Also, be aware that different readers across different platforms have different expectations. Tapas favours shorts and punchier a lot of the time, after all, as well as specific genres, while other novel sites might prefer other standards. What works with one audience won't always work with another

Now, as for your story itself (since, I guess you're here because you want feedback, if not please feel free to ignore everything from here): there is a lot of dialogue then descirption and not much weaving of the two. That's often a matter of preference. Some people prefere more or less dialogue. I went through phases of thinking books had too much pros and skimming to the dialgogue, and phases of wanting more pros less dialgoue. It's a personal thing, so as long as it feels right to you, go with it.

The descriptions, I can sorta agree with. You descirptions, especially in the second episode read like a lot of list without much character to it. Which while isn't wrong, isn't exactly brilliant either. It's ok. Again, this can be personal, but for me the descriptions were very bland. Now, by comparision, this is the first introduction of someone in one of my favourite novels, The Scorpio Races by Maggie Stiefvater (her work had a big impact on my writing and my reading in my young years, so ofc I'm bias), and while it is also listing a lot, it's characterful. It feels alive and gives character to both the older brother, the building and the character narrating.

He’s sweeping the walk in front of the hotel with a mighty push broom. The hotel is a forbidding, ivy-covered building behind him, the leaves cut in neat squares to let the sun into the windows with their bright blue sills. The height of the hotel blocks the morning light and casts a deeper blue shadow on the stone walk he sweeps. Gabe looks tall and grown-up with his brown jacket stretched across his broad shoulders. His gingerblond hair creeps down the back of his neck, a little long, but he is still handsome. I feel a sudden surge of fierce pride that he is my brother.

But again, this can be relative. What I think it lovely atmospheric and characterful can just as easily be overwrought and purple to someone else, so take these things with a pinch of salt, but to me personally, yes, you're descirptions could use work to be more vivid and alive and less list of what's there.

Totally understandable; getting unexpected negative feedback can be pretty disheartening. All I can really say is try not to take it to heart too much. As others have said, some people aren't going to like your work no matter what, so you can't waste too much energy in trying to please those people.

For what it's worth, I checked out the first couple chapters of your novel, and it does seem pretty good! The descriptions are nice, and don't feel as flat as the commenter seems to be suggesting. I think I do agree with the opinion that it's a little dialogue-heavy—the back and forth between Everard and Ayla went on a bit long, and it was a little difficult to process all of what they were talking about. I feel like it could be helped by describing Ayla's thoughts a bit more rather just than having them talk about it. But that's just my take!

Thank you. Will definitely take this review and work to make my descriptions more alive. It’s a little hard doing this alone, but I’ll keep at it for now and maybe one day have enough to hire an editor to help out

Thank you for your time. Will use your review to work on my writing and get better.

No one feels what you feel for the story. You are the author that much is obvious. Now you need to learn from this experience. You also need to digest all negative critics. If one single negative critic hit you so hard.... I have bad news... you will have a very hard time as an author. Many more people will appear with just hatred towards you for no reason at all (it is the internet after all).

My suggestion is to learn which advice you should take and which advice you shouldn't (advice from critics).

You can't listen to all comments but you should be objective with your own story. If you feel a comment a reader made has some merit then work towards correcting what you feel they were right about. If you did it on purpose on the other hand knowing what errors you may have made then ignore said comment.

In order to be more objective on which critics to take you should try to know the weaknesses and strengths of your writing style beforehand. This way you know how something can be interpreted allowing you to measure the cons and pros of something you wrote. For example, lack of descriptions can be a strong weapon when used correctly.

P.S. you should remember that on the internet everyone believes they are an expert. Which is another reason for using your own personal critical thinking in order to choose which critics and advice you should follow. If you still don't know which advice/critics to pay attention to then you should probably hire an expert in the field. They know way more than any internet reader.

I don't think is a troll, just an entitled writer who kinda wants to give advice but seems that they don't know how to debuf the arrogance, to me it seems that they are somewhat frustrated considering that they have 3 stories and all of them are on Hiatus, not to mention that by glancing at their work I could easily say the same things to them that this person said to you.

Trolls usually never give hints about what could you improve, or won't even tell you to not give up. This person means well to a certain degree, but I highly doubt that anyone would take them seriously with their bitch-slapping. So far they only look petty and arrogant, and I know all about that kinda people not only because I'm one but because I've dealt with these so called critiques that think they look intellectual by comparing you to stuff or sending you off to read something.

Like I'm sorry, I'm not a writer but I imagine that one, especially this person, if they really wanted to help someone and if on top of that they are a writer then I expect at least from them to know how to phrase things if they want people to interpret it properly and read it with a connotation that would... actually encourage the person to follow their advice. So far, this person seems to fail miserably on that which not only makes them look first like a reader that came out of a sewer, but also a bad writer without etiquette.

And here is my moment of true arrogance:
Someone hand down that poor bastard a Canva or Photoshop Tutorial, those covers are disgusting man. You buddy on the other hand at least have a decent Cover art and not something that you made from Windows XP photo editor by slapping textures, an anime image from google and some... unfitting text font there... Including the size of the damn image file.

Not a troll but one of a million reasons no one asks for critique if they can avoid it: The help is just not up to snuff.

It sucks,
mulitple, way too long, unsolicited critique comments.
Some of it is phrased rude.

But I wouldn´t see it as trolling and there is still something positive that
you can see in the comments. The person and other readers have took
the time to read your story and that alone is good. They didn´t dislike everything
about it.

I don´t know if this is the case but there is a psychological thing that people
often see their own mistakes/flaws/weakness in other people and imo that´s
often the case when people write comments like that. They are often writers themselves
struggling with things that they think they see in another person´s work and that´s why
it´s easy to point it out.

It sometimes helps to read the comments again after a while, I just did that with comments
I got on lushstories. I uploaded my first ever story and my first comment was from someone
saying they gonna puke when this and that happens in the next part. And that was actually
the exact thing that I planned to write in the next part :smiley: , the first time I read it I was really
pissed off and now I don´t care about it all.

When you get comments like this, it usually means you're on the right track.

There's a meme among people who speak Japanese as a second language, that the most devastating phrase in Japanese is, "Nihongo ga jouzu desu ne!" (You're good at Japanese!) ....Because Japanese people will only say this to you if you're speaking Japanese pretty badly, like an amateur. If you actually do speak Japanese well and fairly fluently though, they'll either act like it's a given that you speak Japanese and converse with you normally, or they'll criticise and correct your mistakes.

You're writing at a level where this person, sadly lacking in tact or a sense for where's an appropriate place for criticism, is invested in your story and feels motivated to write detailed comments about how they think it could be improved. It's kind of annoying, yes, but it's better than being ignored, and it's more complimentary in many ways than everyone being like "Ohh, keep going! Well done making all these chapters! Good job, honey!" ...Because when the few comments you get are just "Keep at it!" and "Well done!" it probably means your thing needs a lot of work and you need a ton more basic practice. If somebody is giving you specific feedback like this, it means that on a basic level your story is readable, the plot can be followed and any areas for improvement aren't broader things like "terrible English" or other things that can only be improved with practice or reading really basic writing advice.

This commenter is a bit of a "back seat editor", but you can see from comments like "I'm not sure why this story is rated so low when this opening is good enough to draw interest" that they see promise in it, and in your writing. They said it's like a "bad Netflix series" but you have to remember... even a bad Netflix series was successfully pitched at a professional level and written by pro writers. This commenter thinks you're at the lower end of professional standard, and has devoted time to trying to give advice on how they think you could push up to make the story more compelling and professional. I know it's hard to take that as a compliment, but it is.

Comments like this mean you're not being perceived as a baby hobbyist who just needs encouragement to build the habit of writing regularly and trying things out. This person sees you as a writer who has made a decent effort at writing an entertaining piece of media with room for improvement. As you improve and build a readership, you're only going to get more comments like this, so try to contextualise them as a sign that your writing is fundamentally sound, and that people want it to get better so you can entertain them more and gain a bigger following.

Don't have much to add that people haven't said already, but I will advise people in general to not focus too much on whether or not someone is a troll. You have the right to engage or ignore a comment for any reason; if you felt hurt by this person you don't need to 'confirm' they're a troll in order to feel 'justified' in ignoring or blocking them, if you choose to do so. You are always justified. (And conversely, actually lashing out at them and accusing them of being a troll is always a bad move, even if they actually are a troll.)

Yeah, good advice from @TheLemmaLlama .

Also reminds me of this hilarious video which everyone should watch now and again to remind themselves not to think like this:

When somebody criticises you, it's not helpful to obsess over it and wallow in self-pity or try to find people to tell you "Ohh no, that criticism doesn't count, the person who said it was being mean! They're just a hater! A Troll! There's nothing wrong with your work!"
Of course there's stuff wrong with your work. There's stuff wrong with everyone's work. There's always something in even the most beloved thing that doesn't appeal to everyone.

Very few people who post critical comments lie. Yes, they might be saying things that are purely their opinions, but that's not a lie, it's "their truth". So when you receive criticism, the key thing to consider isn't 'is this person saying lies to troll me?' (they're probably not. If they say it sucks, they probably think it sucks, even if their reasons for thinking it sucks are ridiculous ones like being jealous that it has more subs, or depicting types of people they feel deeply prejudiced against as heroic which pisses them off), it's "does modifying my approach to address this person's feedback help me achieve my goals for this work?"

If you're only writing for your own satisfaction and truly don't care what other people think or who reads or doesn't read, the answer is always "no". ie. You write a story about frogs because you and your best friend like frogs, and you don't promote it or really care who reads, and somebody comes along and says "EW a story about frogs? If it was about Newts, maybe I'd care." it does't matter, because you don't care if they care.

If the person's opinions seem deeply at odds with the general feedback you're getting from a growing core audience and your main aim is building an audience, the answer is probably "no" unless you want to expand your audience to include that sort of person. ie. Your whole main cast is male and most of your readers are male and love the themes of brotherhood and male friendship it explores, and somebody says, "This story doesn't pass the Bechdel Test. As a woman, I find it hard to relate to. I wish it had some female characters." Making changes based on this feedback would only be helpful to you if you if you want people who feel this way to read (at the risk of alienating the existing audience).

If you've been failing to grow an audience or get other comments and would really like to grow an audience, the answer might be "yes". That said, it's probably best to ask for reviews or feedback from other people to confirm what the issues are. If people aren't engaging with a work at all, it probably has issues, and if somebody is highlighting some issues they had, that's at least some sort of a clue.

If the comment aligns with the sort of thing other people who seem interested in your work, or who you want to be interested in your work (based on interest in similar works) say, then the answer is probably "yes".... Though sometimes you may want to stick to your convictions that you can make it work. ie. If you take a risk and kill a beloved character, your audience won't like it... but sometimes it's best to stick to your guns and have faith the story or character development payoff for that death will be worth it rather than bringing them back to life. It's not always an easy decision.