Hey all you 'they should have a baby' commenters [ Edit; Story count now 0 ]

[ChloeTzang]

.....It seems to me that since I started participating in this forum almost 9 years ago, there has been a significant uptick in posts along the lines of "How do I handle criticism?" or "I don't like negative feedback." Nobody likes non-constructive criticism, but it puzzles me that it bothers people so much. ..... it's life. You learn and get better at things by getting feedback, including negative feedback, from others. Compared to the "real world" criticism and pressure I've received outside this little forum, this is nothing. It's a tiny little drop in the bucket. I'm trying to imagine the lives other Lit authors are living where this is a big deal, and it's hard for me to picture it.
Chloe is right: when you publish a story, you have no control over the response to it, and you'd better get used to that really quickly, or reconsider being a writer.

Being bothered or offended by story feedback is a choice. It's a choice you don't have to make. You will be a happier and more fulfilled writer, and probably a better writer, if you choose not to be bothered by negative feedback.

You put it rather better than I did, Simon. Thanks, and I agree with all of that.

Dealing with negative feedback was something I expected when I first started writing here. You have to accept that there will be readers who don't like your stories and say so. You have to accept that there WILL be trolls who will shit-comment and one-star your stories. You have to accept that there will be offensive comments and there will be requests and suggestions you do not like. And I get some weird suggestions. Preganancy ones ain't the half of it. LOL. Honestly, my life has been far too sheltered for some of the story suggestions I have received, sme of which would never make it thru Literotica moderation even if I tried to wrote them. LOL. Ten years ao some of them left me a little stunned. Ten years on, I still snort my coffee sometimes. And then I repeat them to my husband and laugh as HE snorts HIS coffee. LOL. You have you accept that if you are female and a writer on lit, you WILL get dick picks too. LOL.

And that's just on lit, where you have to learn to deal with all of those - I do it by deleting comments I REALLY don't like. Or I write the poster into a story as the bad guy. LOL. Try Amazon where, as an author, you have NO control over ratings and comments at all.

My take on it is, you need to take a deep breathe, sit back, accept you will get all of the above and more, and decide how YOU as an author want to deal with it. Me - I developed a thick skin fast enough to survive LOL and now I really just leave all except the most gratuitously offensive comments stand. Tell me my stories are crap? Make weird suggestions? (well, my std of weird, which stretches a long way - and the old pregnancy fetish is one I am tolerant off - it comes up all the time, along with feet/toes, horses (well, centaurs anyhow), and a whole lot more). Whatever. Water of a ducks back. Mostly I laugh. Sometimes I even make a note to add in to a story somewhere.

The alternative is you filter - and Lit allows you to do that easily. Delete comments? Tick. Turn comments off. Tick. Turn ratings off. Tick. Not receove feedback? Tick. All geared to reducing the stress level you as an author might feel. Plenty of tools for you to use, and my advice is, if comments and ratings stress you out, use those tools. But don't be complainung if you post stories here and get comments you don't like. Just deal with them with the tools the site gives you. Absolutely no need to stress out over it.

And it's the same with posting on the AH. It's a public forum and like any online forum, things never stay on track and you have no control over the narrative. No good complaining about that. It's a fact of life. There aren't too many safe spaces online, much as we would like to have them. Gotta accept that and roll with it. God knows I have in the past, having nade some embarassing boo-boos and posts in my time! Some would say I still do LOL.

And if all else fails, post on the AH and get lots of sympathy and the occassional snarky comment as well as advice, wanted or unwanted. LOL

So yeah, I absolutely know where the OP is coming from and I understand, but I won't ooze false sympathy. I'll provide a bit of tough love and some advice and an open ended offer to PM me but really, it's something everyone has to learn to deal with in their own way. I can offer a bit of advice from my own experience and I'n sure others here can to, but in the end, the only person who can deal with it is YOU and you have to learn how to do that in a way that meets YOUR needs, not anyone elses.

 

[Five_Inch_Heels]

A dog dug up my lawn.

I paved it and put up a parking lot.

 

[Baztrachian]

I'm not contributing to anybody's fetish for people getting pregnant and having babies.

Getting pregnant and having babies are not 'fetishes'. They are normal human desires.

 

[ShelbyDawn57]

A dog dug up my lawn.

I paved it and put up a parking lot.

Careful you don't dox yourself. Now we all know you drive a "Big yellow Taxi."

 

[AwkwardMD]

Getting pregnant and having babies are not 'fetishes'. They are normal human desires.

Hey ya'll! I worked out every other day for the past two weeks and worked out 10 times! Hope that helps!!

 

[Voboy]

Being bothered or offended by story feedback is a choice. It's a choice you don't have to make. You will be a happier and more fulfilled writer, and probably a better writer, if you choose not to be bothered by negative feedback.

Yes, I said the same thing on Sunday. You can't choose what other people think, but you can choose your reaction to it.

The OP's choice to delete everything is, I think, foolish. I wish I had never known about it, but then she chose to start this thread in hopes of... hell, I don't know why.

None of this strikes me as a healthy way to deal with criticism and promote resilience. And for those wishing some of us would lay off and not pass judgement, well, it was the OP's choice to drag this all out into the open. Again, I don't think that was a healthy choice. I don't mind pointing that out.

 

[SouthernCrossfire]

You will be a happier and more fulfilled writer, and probably a better writer, if you choose not to be bothered by negative feedback.

I agree but would amend this to add "and if you are willing to study it. Even negative feedback not intended to be constructive can sometimes have constructive elements in it."

 

[Baztrachian]

I agree but would amend this to add "and if you are willing to study it. Even negative feedback not intended to be constructive can sometimes have constructive elements in it."

Sometimes I appreciate negative feedback when the only commenters to get the point of the story were the ones who hated it.

That tells me my writing resonated with them. Which to me is a far greater compliment than even five stars and an attaboy.

 

[ShelbyDawn57]

Hey ya'll! I worked out every other day for the past two weeks and worked out 10 times! Hope that helps!!

 

[Five_Inch_Heels]

Getting pregnant and having babies are not 'fetishes'.

And yet there is a plethora of assholes that make comments on stories as if they are.

 

[onehitwanda]

Hey ya'll! I worked out every other day for the past two weeks and worked out 10 times! Hope that helps!!

I feel dumber already. Thanks.

 

[Voboy]

And yet there is a plethora of assholes that make comments on stories as if they are.

But that's their right... do you not understand that?

You chose to leave the comments open. You opened the door.

 

[onehitwanda]

This entire situation feels like something Marcel Duchamp would create.

 

[AwkwardMD]

Everyone who knows better, who has seen this cycle before, should just stop. It's a bonfire, and you aren’t putting it out by throwing flammable logs at it.

 

[Five_Inch_Heels]

You opened the door.

And I closed it.

 

[ChloeTzang]

And yet there is a plethora of assholes that make comments on stories as if they are.

My experience is there's a whole entire subset of readers who get off on that particular theme. It's like the whatever they call it with the breast / milking fetish which I find a little stange and have no interest in, cannot see as erotica in the slightest, but a lot of guys do, which amuses me. And THOSE are popular on Amazon. There's a raft of others and we all have our own likes and dislikes. Scat for example, is another one, and one that I personally find rather revolting, but hey, whatever. I don't get offended by it.

What works in the erotica genre is a weird and wonderful collection indeed and the afficiando's of these are enthusiasts. You get them ALL on Literotica, and there's no need to call them assholes. They are just readers with a distinct focus that one writes to or not as one's interests take one.

If you don't like it, turn comments off generically - you can't turn them off for one user as far as I know, or just reply to them and say you don't write that stuff either in the comments or by email to them - that's what I usually do, I'm always polite about it and people appreciate and generally understand that. I don't see it as any big deal.

 

[ChloeTzang]

This entire situation feels like something Marcel Duchamp would create.

OMG - I was just plotting out a story called "The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors" and of course the male character is "Marcel"

I'd never heard of Duchamp before but somehow I came across an article on that and it just grabbed me as out there enough to be fun to try out.

 

[Five_Inch_Heels]

If you don't like it, turn comments off

I did it my way.

 

[ChloeTzang]

I did it my way.

LOL. And THAT is what we should all do. If it works for you, it's all good.

 

[Voboy]

And I closed it.

No. You burned the whole house down. Closing the door would have meant deleting the comment, or perhaps turning them off.

Your response was perhaps the worst overreaction I've seen here on Lit. That's no hyperbole.

I did it my way.

And then you posted about it. Which put it into the public sphere.

You seem to be enjoying the attention, which I hope is therapeutic for you. Good luck to you, in the future.

 

[Five_Inch_Heels]

Careful you don't dox your=self. Now we all know you drive a "Big yellow Taxi."

I don't charge people to see trees though.

Or a real blade of grass behind the glass.

 

[Comshaw]

I agree but would amend this to add "and if you are willing to study it. Even negative feedback not intended to be constructive can sometimes have constructive elements in it."

Yes it can, BUT it all comes down to is it worth trying to unearth it? It comes down to a cost/benefit analysis. Is it worth the effort to try to unearth a nugget of good advice buried in pig shit? That's a very subjective thing and different from person to person, and it changes over time. For my money, the older I get, the more experienced at writing I get, the bigger the nugget has to be for me to go digging for it. What I would consider new, good advice in the beginning isn't worth the effort to dig out now 'cause I've either adopted it or ignored it.

Which leads me to a question that has been posed many times but no one has ever given a good answer to:

If a person has such a visceral reaction to comments and suggestions, if someone rails against nasty, low-intelligence, ignorant voters, why in the world leave the comments or voting on, or even post a story for others to read?

I get the "I write for myself" in the sense that most of us do. We follow our muse and hope to hell the readers see it the same way. But to claim to write for ourselves, then EXPECT the readers to see the same thing we did in our story is either ignorance, arrogance or both. The only reason I can see to post a story, allow readers to vote and comment on it then have an apoplectic reaction to their reaction, is just to have something to bitch about.

Comshaw

 

[SimonDoom]

Everyone who knows better, who has seen this cycle before, should just stop. It's a bonfire, and you aren’t putting it out by throwing flammable logs at it.

Yes, we've all seen it before, and these threads recycle exactly the same arguments over and over again, with no new ground. But there's still a reason to sound off. There are always new members of this thread coming in, and I sometimes worry that the extraordinary number of negative threads complaining about anonymous voters, anonymous feedback, downvoting, trolling, how upsetting it is to get bad scores, how to avoid bad scores, etc. will persuade new AH members that it's normal and desirable to be upset and to want to avoid negative feedback. I want them to know many authors don't feel that way at all, that not caring is an option, and in my opinion it's the best option, because it leads to more happiness and a healthier approach to feedback.

 

[Actingup]

A dog dug up my lawn.

I paved it and put up a parking lot.

Said dog appears to be maintaining a dignified silence, but he did nothing wrong from what I could see. Anybody is free to look at the comments on another author’s story.if you have an issue, take it up with him or the mods.

 

[Kasumi_Lee]

Getting pregnant and having babies are not 'fetishes'. They are normal human desires.

PREACH!!!