Why I Hate (Most) OC Review Books

I've noticed there seems to be a new OC review book every week on QuoteV. While I value reviewing stories more, reviewing character outlines can help catch any inconsistencies or help tighten up the character so the writer can have fewer problems from the beginning. That said, writers shouldn't choose the first person, or the first few people, they see offering these reviews.

I saw a hilarious thread title in QuoteV's Writing group that said "Detailed Character Reviews Up to 200 Words." How sparse are these character outlines that it takes only 200 words to review? And if they only accepted character outlines that were 200 words or less, then there'd be no way I could get any of my 4,000-words-on-average character outlines reviewed either. That's two to three paragraphs at most.

I would have loved to have found an OC review book that I liked and respected, tell you why they're awesome, and encourage other OC reviewers to follow their example. Alas, this is not the case. After looking through more than fifty pages of searching for these OC review books, I couldn't find any that I liked. Not one! To be fair, there were two that were . . . OK. Decent-ish. But they weren't outstanding. They weren't the sort of reviews I was hoping to find. The rest were complete rubbish, and I hated them all. It feels like people are settling for bad reviews. If they believe these sorts of reviews are actually good reviews, I disagree.

As an example of the typical reviews I've seen given, I'll tell you how someone reviewed my character. I chose a popular OC review book a few years ago that spouted the same Mary-Sue BS around to see what they would say with one of my characters. I'm no saint when it comes to writing, I still need improvement on characterizing and development, and I wanted constructive criticism to help me improve that. I was begging for it. What I got instead baffles me and reinforces the reasons why I scrutinize character review books.

I chose Jared Gray because he was the first character outline I "completed." I updated him in my OC Booklet and I still tweak it as I outline the story, but what's posted in the journal entry I linked to has remained unchanged since the end of this debacle.

First, the reviewer didn't understand that the private character outlines that I use are not as detailed as the character outlines I type for online reviews. I'm pretty sure other writers are the same way. At the time, for fan fiction, I only had the name, appearance, and rough history and I was good to go. My characters didn't have any hobbies, personality, goals, motivations, etc. in their outlines because that was easy stuff to remember or make up as I went, but if I wanted the character reviewed, I knew I needed to put down a ton more information so the reviewer actually knew the character short of reading the story. It's like editing your own story, even the obvious can be missed, and I did miss some needed details for the reviewer to understand. My bad. But there was no reason to give me attitude throughout the review with "Please tell me this is explained," or "You better have a reason for this." Either the information is there, or it isn't. If it isn't, they could have inquired about that in the review in a respectful manner instead of chiding me. I did have a reason, but I forgot to put it down in words.

Another thing they did was guess. "Let me guess, this is going to happen." And then when I proved their guess right, they said, "Called it," as if a little predictability was a bad thing. That was not in the least bit constructive and was condescending.

Here's the confusing part: the appearance and the clothing were meticulous. I described him so well you could sketch a mugshot of him with technical description, and even the shape of his hands and feet. I described different outfits for casual outdoor, casual indoor, semi-formal, and formal plus his superhero outfit, which the reviewer pointed to as a good thing "since people usually only write one outfit," as they put it. It's no wonder that I got a 10/10 under "Appearance."