I expect simple behaviours here. Friendship, and love. Any advice should be from the perspective of the person asking, not the person giving! We have had to make new membership moderated to combat the huge number of spammers who register
Location: UK, in Devon
Registered: February 2003
Messages: 13751
There are several tales, and I am not going to comment on whether some are even published here or not, where the author fails to know when the end of the story has come, and maunders on for many more chapters, the plot having vanished a long time ago. Often, they started out brilliant and the meteor burned out a long while ago.
How do we even tell them that enough is enough?
Other tales are emperor's new clothes. I suppose the folk who rave over them enjoy raving, but the writing style is often so poor that the rate high on the barfometer. One such is written in Little House on the Prairie stayle. I half expcet it to star Michael Landon, it's so wooden. It is raved over as being so true to life (not a chance), and so wonderful. But it isn't. It could be, but it isn't, not without a total rewrite. No plot, no suspense, no development.
How do we tell the author that it doesn't work?
The answer is that, in neither case do we do so. We just stop reading, or we carry on knowing the warts.
The problem is that these tales have such promise. They just fail to deliver. I think that's what pisses me off!