Style Mistakes that Weaken TF stories

[TF-Viewer]

Originally Posted by ~Circe~

Second person is tricky though. It's just first person addressing the reader. I usually use it in first person past-tense... telling the story to the reader. Care to elaborate on why that is a bad thing? I would find it enormously helpful and illuminating.

"Your hand stretches into a paw. Your bones shift into a new shape."

That's 2nd person TF, the narrator is telling the reader that they are transforming. I've never liked it, and when I see the story starting out like that I Just immediately close the page and find something else to read. Not everyone with a TF fetish wants to be the subject of the TF themselves.

[godleydemon]

Originally Posted by TF-Viewer

"Your hand stretches into a paw. Your bones shift into a new shape."

That's 2nd person TF, the narrator is telling the reader that they are transforming. I've never liked it, and when I see the story starting out like that I Just immediately close the page and find something else to read. Not everyone with a TF fetish wants to be the subject of the TF themselves.

OH! yes yes! totally agree with this. This is a huge turn off for me on a story, as soon as I see it happening like that in a story, I'm done. Immediate close or refund of product.

[Lycanthrokeith]

Originally Posted by TF-Viewer

"Your hand stretches into a paw. Your bones shift into a new shape."

That's 2nd person TF, the narrator is telling the reader that they are transforming. I've never liked it, and when I see the story starting out like that I Just immediately close the page and find something else to read. Not everyone with a TF fetish wants to be the subject of the TF themselves.

In a TF text-based game, 2nd person is perfectly valid. In a story, it's much more difficult to pull off. Unless the story is a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure style of story, 2nd person doesn't really work.

Two mistakes that wreck a story for me:

1) Typos, grammatical mistakes, and the like. It doesn't matter how much I'm into a story, the instant I see a typo or a badly written sentence, all I can focus on is the mistake. If the author doesn't care enough to proofread, why should I care about reading it?

Exception: Dialogue. People don't always speak in complete sentences, so imperfect sentence structure is fine there. It actually helps to keep dialogue from sounding stilted.

2) A lack of synonyms for "transform": Shift, alter, change, mutate, become, and so forth. Not using the exact same one over and over goes a long way.

[Peanutt_Buta]

I normally hate it when there are a lot of grammatical mistakes or spelling errors. A few are okay, I normally forgive about five errors per page but no more than that.

And speaking of tenses, I hate it when the tense changes in the story. Also, I stay away from giant one paragraphs stories. That seems to be everyone's first mistake, though.