Whether it's your sibling reading your first-ever story, or a professional review in a national newspaper, feedback is a fact of life for every writer. It's also an essential part of our training and professional development: there's no point in trying to communicate if you don't have a sense of the who/what/why of the receiver. Which is why almost all writers have beta readers of some form: fellow-authors, spouses, ex-coursemates, professional editors.
But that doesn't mean it's always easy to make the best use of feedback: to taked on board and work with everything that will help, and absorb nothing that will harm. And it's even less easy when a painful mixture of hope and fear is making your heart bump as you sit down for the one-to-one, click on the email, or open the magazine. So this is a quick aide-memoire for ways to make the most of feedback. Click through to the Tool-Kit for more extended help with how to give feedback, and how to work with feedback you're given.
1) Notice your first reaction, which probably falls roughly under one of these headings:
- "Duh!" = Of course! How did I miss that?
- *Sigh* = You’re right, and I half-knew it. I was hoping readers wouldn't notice, but clearly they will.
- "Fair enough" = I see why you might feel that, and I'll have a think about whether and how to act on it.
- "That isn't relevant" = It’s not that kind of story, it's not your kind of book, you're not the right kind of reader for this stage.
2) Separate out the problems which the reader has found from the solutions they suggest. This sounds obvious, but many feeders-back will express a problem in terms of a solution: they'll say, "I wanted more to happen" when the real problem is that what does happen isn't written grippingly enough: the piece needs re-writing, not more bombs in baby-carriages. Similarly, there are many possible causes for a novel feeling "too long" or "too short", and only one solution involves adjusting the wordcount. Click through to The Fiction Editor's Pharmacopoeia for help in diagnosing and treating the disease at the root.
3) Ask yourself: "Tool, Rule or Fool?" when parsing feedback, and see if it makes a difference to what you do. In other words:
- Who is giving this feedback? Do they read enough of this kind of writing for you to trust their experience as usefully representative? If they don't read this genre, are they still saying useful things?
- Are they a writer, so they have helpful specialist knowledge and technical know-how about how stories are read and written?
- Or are they a writer over-sensitised to particular "rules" such as not moving point-of-view or avoiding adjectives and adverbs, so they base their feedback on whether you've kept or broken those rules? Or, more generally, a person-splaining know-it-all who actually doesn't?
4) Does this reader have power over your writing? Are they a tutor giving you a grade, an examiner, an agent or an editor? Have they already paid for the work, or are you just hoping they will? Are they a tutor trying to help - but who you might eventually need a reference from? Even if you disagree with the feedback, you probably need to be seen to be addressing it.
Some parsing of their response is still in order, and they're still likely to express problems as solutions. Have confidence, though, that finding your different solution to the problem they have very properly raised, should satisfy them - and perhaps better than if you'd gone against your grain by pushing their solution onto your work. Certainly, if they haven't paid you for the writing and you're just hoping they will, you don't have to meekly do a ton of work on the off-chance that they'll offer you a contract - unless you choose to.
5) Ask yourself: "Accept, Adapt, Ignore?" This is my shorthand for the whole process. When the reader points out problems, ask yourself whether you should accept them and act; adapt them - for example by trying a different solution; or simply dismiss them. In the end - even with those who have power - it's your right to write what's right.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
