What I Wish I’d Known About Feedback

Jumaana Abdu – Translations

If you’re writing because you love to write and not because you love to be published or praised, you should find it reassuring when an editor has a lot of feedback—it means they’re taking your work seriously. To me, the prospective publishers of my first novel who said ‘there’s not much work to be done here, it’ll be ready to push out soon’ frightened me more than they gave me an ego boost. It’s exceedingly rare to write something that can’t be improved, even after extensive editing. It’s equally rare for an editor to be ‘completely wrong’. Sure, I don’t always follow suggested solutions, but they’re generally right that there’s a problem. When I’m finding someone’s advice particularly difficult to parse, it’s usually because I’m in a rush. Time allows me to become less infatuated with my darlings until it becomes easier to kill them.

Aastha Agrawal – Enchanted Club

Feedback from at least two to three people is very important to me before I submit my work. Workshopping an early draft, getting a sense of how people respond to the world I have created and whether it feels convincing helps answer the immediate question I have at the start: Am I working towards something tangible?

The people I ask for feedback stand in, in some ways, for the general readership my work might eventually reach. Treating that stage like a trial run gives me clarity on where I can take the story next, whether there are plot holes I have missed or if something is not landing in the way I intended. Critiques and questions are highly encouraged. I want to be pushed and probed with queries as it helps me understand what a reader might be curious about and can often illuminate directions I had not yet considered. It is also a valuable practice in learning how to receive feedback more broadly. Not all of it will be useful or necessary, but developing the ability to discern what to take on and what to leave behind is an essential skill.

With self-published work, like my zine, I really value feedback just to make sure the ideas make sense beyond my own perspective. The process for something like that is quite different, though. I do not always have the visuals drawn or the story line fully developed, so I tend to workshop the concept itself or the direction I want to explore rather than a finished draft.

For my blog posts, it is a bit more instinctive. They are often more like rambles or rants that I do not necessarily self-monitor in the same way. When I write for my blog, it is usually non-fiction, either an attempt to make sense of the world by putting things into words or a personal opinion that I am not trying to get everyone to agree with.

Ashley Kalagian Blunt – Like, Follow, Die

Joining an engaged writers’ group that involved monthly critique was one of the choices that helped shift my manuscripts from rejection into publication—not only because I received valuable feedback, but because I learned how to think about many techniques while analysing others’ work. I’m still with that group ten years later.

When you give feedback to another writer, you’re being helpful to them, sure. But the greater value comes from training yourself to think critically about what works in writing, what’s not landing and how it might be improved. This is especially true when you apply dedicated learning—about scenes, sentences and storytelling strategies—rather than solely relying on subjective opinion.

Toby Fitch – Or: An Autobiography

I never knew how defensive I would become, and it’s something I initially struggled with—letting go of the work to be read and critiqued in the wild—but, once, when I watched someone storm out of a workshop (maybe it was something I said), it struck me that it’s far less important what a writer thinks their text is supposed to be achieving and more important what the text is actually doing devoid of paratextual, extracurricular explanation.

When giving feedback, the focus should first be on what the text is attempting to do, and then on how it can actually get there. That can be difficult to accept—that the text hasn’t achieved your aims yet, and that the text is not the author, nor the author the text, no matter how personal or autobiographical. This same acceptance and letting go has to happen at so many stages of any text’s life, whether when sharing it with a trusted friend or colleague, a group for workshopping, or with an agent, then a publisher, and most especially, if you’re lucky, with an editor, who will be your closest reader.

On the other end of this spectrum, if I can call it that, there are some writers who avoid much of this process, maybe because they feel their work is too sacred (nothing is, not even poetry) and/or because they’re too petrified to submit to the shame of discovering their work is flawed (every work is). Ultimately, giving and receiving feedback is about managing shame, a necessary shame.

Ian Kemish – Two Islands

I’ve learned that feedback comes in several forms and each matters at different stages of writing. Early on it’s often just conversation. For me, talking through ideas, characters and possibilities with others is a really important part of how ideas develop. These exchanges don’t necessarily produce the ideas that appear on the page, but they spark thoughts of my own.

When it comes to feedback on the writing itself, I can’t pretend it’s always easy to receive. Like many writers, I’m sometimes attached to what I’ve written at a slightly irrational level, so my reaction can be mixed. But engaging seriously with feedback almost always improves the work.

For Two Islands I went out of my way to seek expert feedback on how I had written about PTSD, policing procedures and diaspora communities from what was once Yugoslavia. That was so important in ensuring the book treated these themes with respect and with authenticity. I also knew I needed some clear advice from my editor on structure at a critical point—the story moves across time and four main characters, so it wasn’t a simple task. She came through for me!

Emily Lighezzolo – Life Drawing

My first readers are always loved ones, as writers often need a cheerleader in those initial moments of a manuscript. However, once your confidence in your story is intact, it’s time to start editing and seeking feedback. I wish I’d known earlier that it’s okay to ask for help and to lean on someone else’s expertise and experiences. I often felt like an imposter during writing my debut book when asking for feedback.

I can’t stress enough that sensitivity readers should be consulted as early as possible for anything that might be outside your experiences or could be misrepresented.

Finally, while it’s imperative to seek feedback, it’s also imperative to know when to apply the feedback or when to trust your gut. It’s your story and you have to remain true to it.

Raeden Richardson – The Degenerates

The feedback from my first readers is both incisive and tender and has the greatest influence on the shape my manuscript will take. It’s instrumental, exhilarating, often unsettling, and has a tendency to make me withdraw from the rest of my life. The gift of my MFA was less ‘learning how to write’ than it was collecting a set of close readers who know me, who in themselves know differing lineages of writing and who see my tendencies in ways I don’t. They can be direct in their feedback with me in the way you’re direct with someone you love when they fuck up. These are the best kinds of readers.

I tend to be a ‘low-custody’ writer, as the author and teacher Frank Conroy describes; I err on the side of subtlety, I detest prose that holds the reader’s hand or heart too tightly, I want the reader to be an active participant in the creation of meaning. This means the feedback I seek relates mostly to questions of clarity, of whether I’ve given the reader enough such that they can roam confidently within the world I’m creating. I have to remember the subtlety I’m seeking should not leave the reader lost in my pages. Too subtle and the reader is burdened on this journey. It won’t be as smooth as I think. It may not be smooth at all. And so, generally speaking, I need feedback to know when to give the reader more emotion, more honesty, more of that dramatic affair sequence or this terse conversation. Having the individual feedback of a few trusted readers lets me make a constellation of responses that make things clearer for me, and so the excruciations feel necessary, the way it hurts to start running long distances after years inside, or to climb mountains. This means my art and I are growing.

The other gift of an MFA was learning how to read and to give feedback. Sometimes writers, when we’re trained and workshopped, when we’re enmeshed in the academy, develop a notion that a story or novel ought to look like this or like that. We may think that, based on notions of ‘craft’, an opening of a story ought to establish a single emotional question, or good prose ought to tend towards simplicity rather than lyricism, or that the narrator telling a story ought to be in total control of what they’re saying. There’s an endless list of ‘oughts’! This is the most diabolical kind of feedback. No doubt I once wielded such notions of ‘craft’ as a way to show off, or avoid using my own imagination, or to hide my insecurities behind the guise of intelligence. Rather, generous and instructive feedback aims to see the work on its own terms, to see the mind it is creating, and ask, ‘What is this novel or story trying to achieve? What is its relationship between aesthetic, emotion and consciousness? What are the rules it has established for itself by way of perspective, time, lines of tension, structure and so on? How do we help this writer achieve what they want?’ Rather than push the work towards prescribed ideas, good feedback should defy predestined genre or form and help the writing arrive where it intends to go. Be on the side of the work, rather than in opposition. And this requires our time, our closest attention, to let the manuscript have primacy, to approach it many times, with and without a pen. And to be always reading widely, such that the catch-all traditions of ‘craft’ or ‘genre’ don’t premeditate the feedback we give and thus limit the ways we write.

But if I’ve learned anything, I’ve learned that receiving good feedback doesn’t become any less excruciating. It seems like a work dies the moment it leaves us, after we have nurtured and drafted and dreamed it into being, when we give it over to someone else. This is the first of many little deaths, which culminate in the greatest excruciation, being published, where the feedback often has nothing to do with the work of art.

Erin Vincent – Fourteen Ways of Looking

I’m like the man from the Operation game. When the feedback feels right the Charlie Horse and the Wish Bone come out smoothly, but when the feedback feels wrong my nose lights up and makes a loud buzzing sound… well, almost! What I’m trying to say is that I wish I’d known to listen to my body when receiving feedback, because my body always knows.

When I’m stuck, my first reader is my husband. He knows me so well that he can detect when I’m being true to myself and when I’m performing a ‘writerly’ voice that is not my own. He’s my live-in literary bullshit detector. So when he gives me feedback (negative or positive) that feels right, my shoulders drop, my breathing slows and my whole body relaxes. But when he gives me feedback that feels wrong, my body stiffens and I want to yell ‘No!’, and sometimes do, to which he responds with a knowing smile, ‘So, clearly you do know what you’re doing.’

Good and bad feedback are helpful in equal measure. The good feedback makes my work better and the bad feedback (and my reaction to it) tells me I know more about the work, and my goals for it, than I thought I did.

With feedback, I would say listen, be open, but ultimately trust yourself. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen perfect, beautiful stories destroyed because the writer ignored their better instincts (and maybe even their body) and took on crappy feedback.

Beau Windon – writer, poet and co-editor of Crip Stories

I wish it had occurred to me that the person giving feedback might be just as anxious about my reaction to their feedback as I was about their reaction to my writing. I’ve always been overly anxious about everything and the moment I send off a new piece I’m usually tormented by my inner critic and the worry that the editor will hate it. Having been on the other side of it as a guest editor for Griffith Review and for the Crip Stories anthology with Mascara Literary Review and NewSouth Books, I am now aware that it can be just as anxiety evoking sending off feedback. But from the editorial side, my main objective has never been to change someone’s work to fit what I would do, it’s about understanding what the author is wanting the reader to feel and giving them as much support as I can to help them achieve that. I think that’s how all editing should be. The editor has to drop the ego at the door and service the writing and the author. And because we’re doing that, it can be a bit intimidating coming back to the author with our feedback.

I often worry about misinterpreting and upsetting the author with my edits. But because my entire practice is funnelled through an accessibility lens, I always front load the ‘feedback email’ and edited draft with a thorough explanation of what I’ve tried to do and of the author ultimately having the full power over the piece. I think some editors think that stuff is just expected to be known. But unless I already know the person giving me feedback, then I’m always unsure of how to react to their suggestions. By reinforcing that my feedback is purely suggestions on how I feel they could strengthen their work (from my experienced position), I hope to take at least a little bit of the nerves away from opening the document. You never know exactly how your email might find the receiver (emails rarely ‘find me well’, it’s more often in extreme distress for no other reason than my brain has a kink for Beau bullying). So if my email doesn’t find them ‘well’ then at least I know that my feedback comes preloaded with tenderness and pushing a positive angle. ‘This is so good, I wonder if it could be even better if you…’ Remember, every edit is a suggestion—unless there is an oppressive style guide, but in that case I hate it as much as the author and I’ll explain that sadly it’s how a lot of the industry works and change is difficult and slow.

MORE

• ‘George Saunders on Overcoming Uncertainty in Writing’, LitHub
• ‘How to Get Quality Writing Feedback’, Meg Dunley
• ‘How to Survive a Creative Writing Workshop’, LitReactor
• ‘Shitty First Drafts’, Anne Lamott
• ‘There Is No Point in My Being Other Than Honest with You: On Toni Morrison’s Rejection Letters’, Los Angeles Review of Books