Feedback. A difficult pill to swallow.

The Writing Life

Writer feedback. It's a difficult pill to swallow.

I am a member of multiple writing groups. These groups provide me with a strong sense of social support and belonging that I would lack otherwise, given the solitary career of a writer. For some of these groups, membership depends on sharing your work and receiving feedback so that you and the entire group can discuss and grow based on experience, thought, expertise, and sense-making.

Who should be part of your group?

• To play it safe: surround yourself with people who will applaud your work. If confidence is what you need, there is no question. Play it safe. There are warm and welcoming yet critical writing groups that are good at weeding out disparagers.
• To grow: choose from a wider pool of people. People who you would otherwise not meet.

Why?

For the ego, seek accolades. For success, your work should appeal to a broader audience.

Caution: Know the people you are talking to and what makes them tick before blindly accepting their feedback.

So many writers have discovered the secret of learning more about their weaknesses and strengths and building their craft by looking at another’s work. When you explain how you put together your dialogue, the puzzle pieces click together, and mastery happens. In the same way, sometimes you need to be strong and defend your work because you are aware that your audience or genre will be able to understand what your critique does not.

Some authors are reviewing my work whose feedback, though sometimes painful, shines an honest truth on a failing of my work. Here are some examples:

• Rewrite the prologue as 1 page. Prologues aren’t long.
• Strip out all the unnecessary details from this chapter that don’t contribute to your greater plot/story. In the rewrite, I have left details that are no longer necessary. Suggestion to do this after I’ve written the rest of the book.
• Sentences are frequently too long. Vary the sentence structure to help your reader digest.
• I love your character X but he should be even more of a trickster.
• Name all the characters that X encounters in this chapter. If not relevant to the plot, why are they there? Is this part necessary? Extra characters don’t need to be there unless they serve a purpose.
• Can you instead re-use this chapter to introduce flashbacks in a more action-oriented sequence?
• Increase dialogue, decrease characters OR start the story from ‘where it should start’ and not here.
• A question raised: What is character X’S goal? Leaves me wondering if he needs a goal for my genre.
• Stretch out the story more -> Too many things surprise the reader.
• Create a plot map to help pinpoint the relevant details that need to be retained.

You are in control of what you do with your feedback.

As you can see by the above examples, no one was saying my writing bad. That doesn’t stop the feedback cycle from being hard to digest. I always make it a point to thank my critiques. Then, writing down the list of feedback, I figure out what actually needs to happen.

Say Thank You — Giving feedback is hard. Someone has to read your work. They have to think about it. They have to formulate a polite and generous response despite adding criticism. We think it’s hard to ask for feedback, but it’s equally difficult to give feedback.

Live by the 80:20 rule. Your work does not have to be perfect.

The chapter I shared was on its 7th–9th rewrite. I will wait until I finish writing the story before returning to it. 100% needed feedback = remove irrelevant characters and details.

Better yet, that feedback applies to all of what I’m writing. So — wish me luck on the next rewrite cycle so I may get that much closer to being done!

-D.M. De Alwis