Why hasn't anyone
suggested a club yet?
This hypothetical club could have a point system for critiquing writing, "moderators" whose job it is to write reviews, writing categories, featured writers, contests, you name it.
A point system would give you points for posting reviews, more or less depending on the length and/or quality, although quality would be more difficult to judge. Users could also potentially give you points for reviews they particularly liked. You lose points for posting your own writing. If you get too low down (either into the negatives or just a low number, depending on how many points you started with), you can't post anything again until you review something.
Ideally, this creates an environment in which people are both posting and reviewing writing.
The monitors could consider a prize or shop for high amounts of points, but I'm not sure what that would be on a forum.
Alternatively, if no one can be bothered to monitor a club, perhaps the simplest way to do this is a thread detailing some kind of system and leave everyone to work this out on their own. You could either ask users to keep track of points in their signature (possibly with a link to the thread), or go even simpler and have people that say in their signature "review my writing and I'll review yours". And there would be some kind of rule about minimum length, because if someone posts a three page review on your story, it's not really fair to ask you to do the same (and not fair to them if you don't unless you use points). Also it's not fair if they posted on a short story but to keep your word you'd have to read an entire novel.
You could even do something similar with a club in place - for extra points, users can write critiques on people outside of the club.
yeah just write one or two paragraphs no whole novels are necessary unless you want to take the time idk
If there were a system in place, obviously the length of the review should be somewhat dependent on the length of the piece in question. A 100 word drabble doesn't warrant an overly detailed review, but a three hundred page novel should get a little more attention.
Additionally, users who only write a couple of short paragraphs per review are likely being brief and uninteresting, and would get less points or whatever system is in place to prevent abuse. Someone who consistently writes organized and comprehensive reviews can't be compared to a person who shoves a few sentences in with their breakfast.
Or maybe you'd say "fewer" points, but I'm not using numbers and I'm imagining a larger quantity of points... You know, less ice cream, less wind, less points.
Yeah, I meant to say 'stories'.
If it's chaptered, it may be beneficial, and even expected, to review each chapter (naturally this varies depending on how long the chapter is, but here I'm assuming that we're writing real chapters here, not a conglomeration of drabbles).
When reviewing an entire story, you have to go for a more general review, (kinda like reviewing an entire series or a writer as opposed to a single book) whereas in reviewing a single chapter, you can be more detailed about exactly what interested you (or not) about this particular chapter.
Besides that, writers improve as they press onward with their story. In a 100k word novel that was written over the course of several years, reviewing the final chapter is significantly different than reviewing the first chapter, which the author may have already discovered many flaws in that they could fix if they rewrote it now. And with something like this, you can't
really review the entire story at once because the later additions would be so much better and different.
