haiykuties:

I been seeing a bunch of you say that you’ve been too scared to give feedback, so I’m popping back in for a minute to tell you something.

Story time!

Before I became an admin for this blog, I wrote Percy Jackson fanfic on FFn. And then I ventured a little bit into Star Wars imagines, when I made a secondary blog and then it was deleted shortly before I joined the team. But a couple weeks before that, on a Sinful Sunday, I submitted an imagine to the blog.

I got like 70 notes on it, but I was completely addicted to the feeling of people actually liking my writing. I had never gotten so much feedback before, even though it was just likes. The few comments I got were lovely, and I found myself wanting more and more to admin for the blog, knowing that I will get responses that I sorely desire.

And then Lana and Kay picked me to be the new admin, and I started writing, and I was getting over 100 notes, a couple of which even reached 200 for a single imagine. It was like crack to me. You guys have no idea how much it motivated me to write more. I have never in my life gotten so much response to my writing. It made me feel appreciated.

And then I realized, my previous ventures into the world of fanfic had been cut short because there was little response to anything I was writing. Knowing that somebody enjoys your writing is the best feeling in the world. Knowing that people want you to continue even more so. I’m not lying when I say that it’s literally what keeps us going. We cannot get enough. Feedback is like crack to every single writer, no exceptions.

Think about it. We post our stuff because we need to know what people actually think. We need to know if we’re as good as we actually think we are. If we didn’t want feedback, we’d just write to ourselves, put it all in a folder, and be done with it.

So please, please, please, don’t let something like this happen again. Don’t let another writer quit because of something like this. Support your writers, and give them the feedback they deserve.

-Admin Jen, probably for the last time

I am a similar story to Admin Jen. As some of you know, I broke into the world of reader insert through my Bleach blog @bleachfanficfanatic

I stumbled across this realm via ffnet when I found an anthology of them for a number of characters and was hooked. Eventually I had an idea of my own for Renji and wrote my first piece.

Since the writer was also on Tumblr, I created a blog with the same name and posted the story then reached out to her and let her know she inspired me and I’d love to see what she thought. Yeah, that was a little nerve wracking but I’d already been writing fanfic for over a year so probably less so than if it had been my first post ever. She read it and gave me lavish praise and REBLOGGED it on her super popular page giving massive praise and encouraging everyone to follow me, even mentioning some specific blogs.

I legit did not expect her to do that. I can’t even describe the level of happy I felt that day.

So I posted a few more original ideas then got my nerve up and opened the ask box for requests. It was still a little slow going cause I didn’t fully understand tags and was still gathering followers but y’all I was hooked.

Even likes got me excited. I loved getting comments. Reblogs with fun tags were my jam.

Then I rewatched Haikyuu and decided I loved it so much I wanted to write for it too, plus I figured the fandom would be a little more active because the manga is still going on.

And for a while that was true.

But now, well, I’ve already had a say about that.

I don’t know if telling you all of the above will make a difference but I wanted to not only echo what Jen said in regard to the importance of feedback but to share a bit more of myself.

If you’re scared to leave feedback, please don’t be. The only feedback we’ll criticize or ignore is flat out rudeness.

You’re seeing the result of little to no feedback. A closed blog, at least four blogs (including mine) that are on hiatus. More time going between asks being fulfilled. And on and on and on.

You may be one person, but as Jen said we value and appreciate EVERY SINGLE RESPONSE. Once that goes away, eventually, so do we.