Hi! I really enjoyed reading your Jungle Moon review! For a while now, I've been planning on making a YouTube channel for analyzing pieces of media that I love and I plan on having Jungle Moon be my first subject. Though the focus of my review would be a little different, your review makes some solid points about the episode that I might use as inspiration. Do you have any writing tips for novice reviewers such as myself?
Howdy! Thanks for reading! I’ve got three bits of advice from my experience writing these reviews. The first is to be clear with yourself from the start on what you want to write and why you want to write it. For me, I wanted to write about a serialized show episode-by-episode to explore how that serialization affects these episodes; I love reading reviews, but pretty much every review of any show looks at the series as reactions to the latest episodes, and by necessity can’t look into the future, so I wanted to take a retrospective approach. As for the why, I do it because I love writing and this is a good way to keep a regular schedule of writing. Which brings me to
My second bit of advice, which is to write for yourself! It’s cool if other folks like what you create, but I think the goal of satisfying your own creativity is way more productive than a goal of creating content for others. That way you’re learning how to develop your own voice, and folks who DO want to read/watch it are interested in your actual thoughts, not the thoughts you think an audience might like. Plus, especially when you’re starting out, you’re straight-up not gonna have an audience, and I can’t imagine how discouraging that would’ve been in the early days if my goal wasn’t to write for the sake of writing. If there was no internet I’d probably still be doing this, just with a big old Microsoft Word file instead of a blog. It’s fine to appreciate numbers of likes and followers and stuff, but obsessing over it makes the whole thing less fun!
Finally, and this is the most practical: decide on a schedule and stick with it. Nobody else is gonna put you to a deadline, and if you’re doing a series it’s important to have a continuous, regular output. Not just because audiences are big on consistency (see: my second bit of advice), but because creating stuff requires practice and discipline and it’s easy to just sorta peter out unless you commit.
As a bonus piece of advice that you can take or leave because it’s specific to video production and I’ve never made a video in my life, I think if you’re just starting out it’d be good to make a backlog before publishing anything. Just a few episodes that you can step back and look at. That way you can see how you might wanna fix up early stuff after finding a groove, get a head start on a regular update schedule by having some stuff in the back-burner, and just generally figure yourself out in private before putting it out in public. Growing pains are bound to happen but there’s something to be said for the very beginning being something between you and yourself so you can figure out your voice.
Good luck! Sorry this is so long, my other bonus piece of advice is to look back at what you’ve written and edit stuff down because rambling can be really annoying!