Help, or possibly advice, from the peanut gallery?

[grundyscribbling]

Will preface this by saying that if sulien is thinking this is awfully coincidental, she's absolutely right - replying to one of her comments got me thinking.

I know as an author I love "meaty" comments. The ones where someone doesn't just say 'well done' or 'I liked it' but reacts or gives details about what they liked. These are the sort of comments I want to be able to leave as a reader. They are also the comments I feel I am worst at writing. (Seriously. Me trying to write one of those comments typically involves much flailing and handwaving, not all of it figurative.) I can say 'I enjoyed/liked/loved it!' but would rather say more.

Is there something I can do to get better at more substantive comments? I know Dawn Felagund has linked comment starters before. I'm not looking for a starter so much as a 'how do I get my brain to more reliably crystallize what about a particular story I liked/why I liked it?' And I need to convince my brain to do this in a timely fashion - while I've had some success with adding 'comment on [story]' to my to-do app*, in general if I don't comment right away, I don't comment.

*Yes, I have a to-do app. It's the one app that is on ALL my devices. It is key in getting me from the 'I thought about it' stage to the 'I did it' stage, not to mention extremely helpful in making sure I get repetitive but non-daily chores done on the regular and not just when I happen to think of them and am not distracted.

Comments

[bunn]

Do you use the Ao3 Review plugin? It give you a floaty comment box that follows you down the page so you can paste in lines you like. I don't usually use it on first read (who knows on first read if you are going to want to comment, or even read to the end?) but I find it very handy once I've got to the end and made the 'I must comment on this!!!' decision to goback to the the start and skip through copy-pasting good lines or just reacting to the storyline.

Not that I'm exactly a great commenter, mine tend to be a bit on the short side, but I think it does help.

On chaptered fiction, I like to respond to the characters almost as if they were telling me about what they did afterwards? That gives you comments like : OMG Fingon, what were you THINKING??? How are you going to get out of this one??? Which can be fun for the writer and I think are actually easier to reply to than pure praise.

[grundyscribbling]

I don't have the plugin, but I've always taken the tack 'if I want to copy paste, that's why some clever programmer gave us Notepad'. I'm inevitably commenting from a computer, not my phone, so it's always an option. (Despite my many devices, I don't trust autocorrect not to make word soup of any comment I compose... stupid thing tried to turn 'Nematron', an industrial computer/display maker, into 'Megatron' today. At least it was in a text to a co-worker who found it funny.)

I do the response to characters sometimes. Maybe I should try that more consistently...