Request Thread feedback

[bodman54]

Hello there fellow writers. Like many of you, I have a request thread to search out specific ideas and cravings I have. I don't know if it's what I'm looking for, if it's the title, or if it's something else, but I get maybe one hit a month from my thread. And more often than not, that hit doesn't go anywhere. So I'm coming here to see if I can get feedback on my thread. And hopefully any suggestions to get it up to snuff to at least get more hits than I have been.

Thread here

 

[Chai]

As always, these conversations are heavily subjective so take this with a grain of salt.

'Request thread" is kind of a misnomer. What you're actually doing is putting out an advertisement of yourself, your skills, and what you have to offer to other writers. I think most people would benefit from talking about who they are as a writer, things that excite you about writing/roleplaying, and the kind of experience you want to give to a roleplay partner when you write a story together. That's really what draws people in and entices them to reach out.

Let me know if you would like some examples of this, and I'll see if I can get consent from those people to let me share their RTs!

Additionally, because you write in PMs and Discord, I think you could benefit from including a writing sample or two. If someone writes on threads, I can go to their post history and get a sense of whether we have a similar writing style. If they exclusively write privately, it's harder to make that judgement call, and so it's an additional hurdle people face when choosing someone to write with.

 

[Revelations]

I Like the writing samples, but I think they kind of blend in together since they aren't really separated. Maybe put them in quotes to sort of separate them? Just a suggestion.

 

[bodman54]

Thanks for the advice. Added some writing samples and made it clearer where one stopped and the next begins

 

[Nazgul]

Here's what I noticed:

• You don't coherently list your ideas but project a stream of consciousness per topic:
  • Writing partner expectations for example can be shortened to 2 points: grammar and collaboration. You turned these 2 points into 1 paragraph in a story format. I'd split these into 2 separate paragraphs, or even turn them into shorter bulletpoints so you don't need to spoiler them.
    • Like this:
      • A decent grasp of English. Higher than basic but not expert level. Too many times I've started writing with someone, and I'm not judging, but the structure is bad, the grammar is poor, and the storytelling is all over the place. Nothing kills my muse faster than opening a reply and seeing a lot of choppy, incoherent sentences. I'm looking for like B+, A- English paper work.
      • A desire to work together. I want you to come to me with ideas for what could happen next. Or be enthusiastic about the ideas I bring. And in a similar vein, be willing to say "not really feeling that idea, but what about ..." It's a collaborative hobby, so let's collaborate.
    • I think this is easier to read and makes it clear exactly what you're looking for. You can additionally also shorten them like this:
      What am I looking for in a partner?
      • A decent command of English
      • A desire to collaborate and plot together
        
  • Writing samples stand to be organized a bit more clearly, I would use quotes or spoilers to clearly section off each sample. Your writing is quite good actually but the organization of your writing samples is not doing you favors here and I can imagine a lot of people aren't reading them. Since they are quite good, I would give them a more prominent spot. Maybe with a 2x2 table where you display 4 writing samples?
    • Like this -- quotes for illustration, you should include your entire sample instead:

      • Using her gecko gloves and shoes, she crawled along the ceiling, once again grateful for all the core work she did to keep her body tight to the roof as she made her way through the bank to where the villain was using his plants to break the final vault open. "Sorry. Banking hours aren't for a while," she said as she dropped down on silent feet, throwing a handful of black orbs at the man. As soon as they made contact, a large jolt of electricity shot through him, paralyzing him enough for her to move in close, slamming a flurry of blows into him to knock him down. A quick application of her special restraining gel later, and that was one villain for the cops to pick up. Whenever they made their way there.

        Lying in a heap, she tried to catch her breath. But she didn't expect Jo to lift her like a sack of flour, laying her across her shoulders as they walked out of the twins' room, leaving them to sleep. "That one," she pointed as Jo strode to the room, dumping Natsumi on her bed when they arrived.

  • Kinks didn't need to be spoilered for me, I think the table is short enough that it's not an eyesore, and easily readable. Good organization in my opinion.
  • Genres and themes didn't need to be a table, you could split these into two separate bulletpoint lists
    • Nitpicking but I personally hate the starring system to show what you like. Are you going to say 'no' if I ask for your least favorite? No? Then there's no point to starring them. You can be picky when you have lots of partners of course, but does your preference for a setting not depend a lot more on your whims and mood than a hard and fast line?
      • If you really want to organize and star your lists there are better ways to do it and display it than just putting stars in front of it. It looks disorganized in a list format and it makes my eyes jump around a lot from words to words on every line because they don't line up. Which leads to...
  • Pairings and plots is arbitrarily centered. I personally find this very hard to read because it makes your eye jump from line to line without having a clear singular starting point for reading. Align them to the left, if you really want to format it justify the text, but I wouldn't center it personally. Especially because you don't seem to center anything else in the thread, it just seems like a random decision to center that part specifically?
    
    I made an image to show what I mean, the red line represents where my eye must go to find the next line:
    
    
    
    
    
    Compare this to straight text where the next line is always in the same spot 1 line down:
    
    
    
    • You could additionally also put them into bulletpoints. The sentences are short enough that that is possible.
• Nitpicking but you have 2 extra spoiler tags at the end of your thread - it looks a bit careless but honestly I don't think anyone that's going to not write with you over that is worth writing with anyway. Still, you should remove them.
• Another nitpick that jumped out at me is that your first table has arbitrarily defined cells:
  
  
  
  
  
  I think there is a better way to make these yourself without using the table system that inserts tables for you. But it's a lot of work... and I am not sure that it is worth it. As I said, it's nitpicky, since I am just looking for things to critique. I don't think anyone that's going to stumble over this is worth writing with either.

Bear in mind I am trying to be constructive, so I apologize if my comments seem unnecessarily harsh. I think your writing samples were really good and you should be having no issues finding partners at all. I tried to not only critique but also offer up how I'd do it/prefer to see it. I also want to add that I am probably not your target audience, so I hope you also get some feedback from people who you'd be hoping to attract with your thread.

I also noticed you gave a shoutout to the design team, which is awesome, although I wasn't able to determine which layout you'd used. There's a lot of ready to use BB-code here where all you need to do is fill it in. I'd really suggest using one of these as I think they capture the quality of your writing very well.

Again, apologies if it seems really harsh!