Which YWSer has given you the best writerly advice?

Obviously, and first and foremost, the mission of this website is to help young writers improve. The other day, I was thinking about what I've learned from certain YWSers about writing. Of course, the improvement and betterment of my own writing is also due to what I read and from lots and lots of practice, but I imagine that various YWSers has given all of us, at one time or another, a piece of writerly advice, or done something in their own writing that taught you something valuable about the writing process. I thought it would be interesting to start a thread where we share who gave the advice, and the advice itself.

I'll start.

Snoink -- we don't talk much, but she taught me (whether she knows it or not) that poetry requires some kind of plot, or story, however small. That in the end, description needs some kind of scaffolding to keep it from crumbling away.

-Kylan

I have too many people to single out just one.

Andy (Squall)- The importance of every single little detail in a work. (The advice he's given me actually is much broader than this, but that is the summery). I'm paying a lot more attention to where I add in words, and what words I use, thanks to that advice. And I also review a lot differently thanks to that advice.

Snoink- A bit of a tie-in to Andy's advice: the importance of conflict. If there's no conflict, there's no story.

Master_Yoda- His simplistic writing style has influenced my own greatly, and he also (indirectly) taught me the importance of POV and making each character's POV different.

Bickazer- Using specific words in descriptions, not vague ones like I have a bad habit of using. This has influenced not only my writing, but my everyday talking.

And I have to give a special mention to June and JWF, for helping me get started in reviewing well, nicely, and in as few words as possible.

There are many more who have given me smaller bits of advice through fantastic reviews/ranted with me about writing.

Kitty15 once gave me a review that really made me think and reconsider what I had written. I was quite new to poetry back then, and her review gave me so many new thoughts and views, I still remember it now, more than a year later.

And both Galerius and you have made me get rid of using too many adverbs, little by little...

Rosey - She has helped me a lot in general with writing but also for one story that she helped me with, she made me realise that a character needs an arc through the story, some sort of journey. Not necessarily physically but emotionally as well. I think that has helped my writing a lot. It has helped to give it more direction.

Kitty15 - She told me in one of the first reviews I got on YWS, that in description I should consider not only what the character sees but also all of the other five senses. Now when I am writing I always pause and think about that.

I'm sure there are many more pieces of advice that I have taken from reviews and am implementing in my writing without even realising it but those are the two that stuck out in my mind.

Bickazer helped me with emotions a lot.

Stella Thomas, she was one of the first reviews I ever got on YWS and I still remember her many ramblings about how to improve my work.

Linx and Clo have both, at some point, helped me with stories by showing me where I have awkward sentences, and how to fix details like that. On the other hand, Hannah and anti-pop have helped me look at the big picture and bigger, overall problems with my prose. They all rock.

And reading Kylan's and Galerius's poetry has opened up a new, non-rhyming, free form of poetry to me.

I wouldn't say advice since many, many YWSers have advice to give.

The YWSer who's gave me the best impression on YWS and what it can do to help me improve would have to be Kitty15. She was one of my first reviewers, if not the first, and she helped me the best way anyone could: critiquing with a smile on her face, so to speak. When I get stuck as to what I should do, I always think of Heather and that red font she uses in her reviews, wondering what she would say.

However, the YWSer who's given me the most motivation is Sachiko. I've always just written something and let it sit in the attic of my documents, but Mama Sheik has always given me the urge to write and even to edit. Even if I get an awesome critique from Heather, it takes a lot of willpower to go edit my work. It's something about her that motivates me to write, so I hope she doesn't go anywhere anytime soon.