I'm in the category of liking a direction - usually. Now if it's a opening where there's a lot already happening (IDK lets say your character came into contact with someone trying to steal their purse, cause I'm creative). It's already got a direction. My character, depending on who I am throwing in there, is either gonna go after the guy cause they are an idiotic hot head or call the police and try to comfort yours, right? So I don't need a direction there. We have one.

For your example, we're just being the leaf in the wind. Going with the flow, which is great, but like...me personally, I suck IRL at maintaining conversations just for the sake of it, so you'll end up with the brunt of it because that bleeds over to maintaining IC convos, its just something I never learned to do. If we've got a general idea of where we're trying to get to though, I suddenly get a little better at it. Are we aiming to make the two characters friends? Enemies? Lovers? Whatever, now I have a direction - and honestly, I'd have noted if xyz goals was capable in our initial planning and let you know something like "hey, you might unlock being friends with this person, but they have trust issues and the first thread or three might be a little slow with them being closed off, so we can just make them shorter threads of the two getting to know one another to break the ice." and then we can proceed from there. Just like I'd expect my partner to let me know something like that, lets us both know what we're getting into, makes it clear that the RPer is def interested in the plots, even if the character may not seem like it.

Nova's example is really good too.

Dialogue is great, but that action added in is :chefskiss: some of my favorite chars of my partners aren't talkers but are doers, so as long as there's stuff to respond to, you're doing great.

But yeah I think this is just one of the areas where knowing your partner and communicating with them is going to be key. In my intro posts / on my OOC accounts on sites, I try to be upfront about my own personal preferences. I love communicating, I love plotting, I love people "bothering" me. It's not actually bothering, but somehow so many people seem to think sliding into DMs is bothering, ya know?

I'm extremely open to preplotting stuff that happened in characters pasts, and discussing things we hope to achieve, and if we get there, great, if we take detours, well also great, sometimes that happens. Even though I like preplotting, I am pretty flexible on how long it takes to get places - and I'm always open to changing things on the fly if it's what makes the most sense for either of the characters.

Not everyone is like that of course. Might be worth asking when you first start threading with someone if they have a direction they'd like to work towards or if they'd like to just go with the flow - if you're flexible that is. If you, yourself have a preference, it's also very okay (at least in my mind) to state your own preferences and finding some sort of middle ground between your preferences and theirs.

I tend to reply quicker to characters I am most excited about the plots for (or I'm most excited over in general).

Additionally, some characters I write are easier for me to reply to than others. EX: My super happy, outgoing chars typically are chars I can reply to quickly and whenever/wherever (like via phone if I am phonebound). Whereas, my more stoic, serious characters require me to be in a certain mood to reply with. This means my partners really can't do anything when that's the case.

But I'm the type it's not hard to get me excited over plots and thus rope me into rapid responses. Send me memes that fit our chars ongoing plots. Send me pictures of yours or my characters. Toss me ideas to further our plots or to go with our characters past interactions. If it's an IRL modern day site, do text messages or letters to fill the time in between replies as a quick filler.

The more openly excited my partner is about the plots, the more excited I get because I tend to be a bit reactive. In return I try to match that energy.

For the posts itself, I tend to prefer easy to read posts that aren't filled to the brim with purple prose. I don't enjoy large words that you know the person probably doesn't use in day to day conversations to be the brunt of the post. Also, if it's not a jam packed filled with emotion or action post, I tend to take longer to respond to overly long posts. I'm okay with shorter posts as long as there's stuff to reply to - actions, dialogue, stuff like that.

Lastly, at least in my case, if my partner always taking a week plus to reply, I tend to lose excitement for plots - especially if there's no filler content happening (like the stuff noted above). My own anxiety kicks in and makes me feel like you're not interested in it and feel pressured to RP with me because so few people are willing to be open and just admit they've not got interest in the plots so they just kind of ghost, ya know? So my anxiety hits and my excitement plummets. Like life happens, but there's ways to fill the space in between if you can only reply once a week or something.

This is all just for me personally, other people certainly vary, but for me personally, this is what keeps me going - and usually going quickly.