How To Apply Useful Writing Suggestions (And Know What To Ignore)
Not all written feedback is created equal.
If you are part of a writing community filled with great reviewers (like The Write Practice Pro!) You will be the lucky recipient of a lot of feedback on your writing. Sometimes it is obvious how and when to address the problems the feedback poses.
But often it can be overwhelming to know which feedback items you should address first or last, or whether you should address specific ones at all. Should you address every nitpick and complaint? Could your readers possibly be wrong?
And what if the written feedback you received is hurtful? After all, readers and critics are human, and we have all conveyed harmless messages at some point. How do you work through the trauma of hurtful words about you and your art and keep writing with confidence?
Here's how to sort your written feedback into "essential" and "optional" items and make sure you don't take any of it personally!
Find out if feedback elements are important or optional
Every time you find out that your story is in trouble, you want to do one of two things:
- Fix everything right away.
- Light the story and forget you ever wrote it.
The first rarely works, and the second you should never do.
What should you do instead?
As I described in my last article, you first need to categorize your written feedback into three categories:
- history
- style
- surface
It is very likely that you will receive feedback in all three categories. So what should you address first?
That depends on whether the feedback is inherently material. And that depends almost entirely on it genre.
What is "essential" feedback?
The essential feedback on writing will deal with issues that affect your reader's expectations and experience of the story.
In other words, helpful feedback on your story will help ensure that you are writing within an established and understood genre (what the reader expects from the genre of the story) and are telling a story that is clear, engaging, and entertaining (that of the reader's experience) .
Anything that helps you with these things – the reader's expectations and experiences – is likely to be essential.
Everything else, however, is likely to be optional.
Here are issues that you will receive written feedback about that are most likely essential in each of the three feedback categories:
- History: Action holes; clear and empathetic goals for your characters; Conventions and scenes within the genre; meaningful character selection; where the story or certain scenes take place (shot); Structural elements like a clear beginning and a clear end.
- Style: Whether the pace of scenes meets the standards of the genre; whether the dialogue is in the right style of the genre; whether descriptions are in the style of the genre (note a pattern here?). Style feedback can be a huge issue for writers, so it's important to focus on the genre and the reading experience here!
- Surface: Distracting mistakes that cause your reader to forget they are reading a story and start editing / judging instead.
Note that it all has to do with how the writing affects the reader's experience with your story.
Nothing creates expectations like the genre. When you write in a well-defined genre, it's a lot easier to know what you might be doing wrong. However, if you choose to write outside of a particular genre, the rules and expectations become more fluid.
That might sound good, but it isn't. Readers generally enjoy trying new stories as long as they come in the context of a trustworthy genre. Readers seldom pick up a non-genre book by an unknown author and say, "It's worth six hours of my time!"
The genre is the true north of a writer's compass, and this is true even during the revision.
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Do you want to know if the feedback you are getting is important? See how the suggestions will affect your reader and whether or not they will help you fit the genre well.
What is "optional" feedback?
One of the few downsides to receiving written feedback is that you will likely get it from a different author. And something writers should do is rewrite other people's stories.
That's not what you want
Of course, you should humbly accept suggestions that can make you a better writer – no one likes a writing partner who insists they are the hottest good. But don't let another writer take your work and tell you how to write it.
Here are some issues that can arise and are potentially "optional" if they do not directly affect the reader's experience:
Choice of words
Some people just don't like certain words (“wet” is a word I despise) and personal preference will turn you away from their hated words.
Ask: Is this word in the genre and does it effectively tell the story?
Character changes
Readers have strong opinions about characters as characters are the lifeblood of stories. Some review partners urge you to add or delete a character, or make significant changes to their personality, goals, or decisions.
Ask: What impact will this change have on history? Does it increase my ability to fulfill AND innovate within the genre, or am I instead fulfilling the wishes of my critic?
Content concerns
Large sections of the population loathe certain types of content, mainly curses, sex, and violence. Some readers are not mature enough to recognize their own dislike for these things and will tell you to "tone down" them out of disgust on their own behalf, not on the reader's behalf.
Ask: Is my use of this offensive genre of content appropriate? Did I do it in a way that the story and its characters "deserve"?
Paraphrases
Some reviewers will literally rewrite large chunks of your story for you. Don't let that happen. Thank the partner for their enthusiasm, but then ask them to come up with suggestions instead of rewriting them.
Ask: Does the suggestion make sense within the genre and story I am telling? How can I fully own the ideas of rewriting in my own voice and style?
Random grammar settings
In general, around 99% of the grammar feedback you receive is essential. But every now and then you write for someone who has learned a "rule" that isn't actually a rule.
For example, you shouldn't start sentences with conjunctions such as "and" or "because". Is that a rule? No it is not. It's a preference. And you're not asking others to share their grammatical preferences with you.
Ask: Will following this “rule” / preference really make a difference in my reader's life? What do I risk if I make the change or leave it alone?
Handling optional feedback
This is where it becomes particularly difficult to prioritize your written feedback.
The most important thing is to let out your ego.
Don't get defensive if someone gives you optional feedback or feedback with a strange mix of essential and optional. Your partner is unlikely to realize that the advice they are giving you is off-target. You can be of great help by talking to your partner about the feedback, avoiding defensive speech, and focusing the conversation genre and the reader's experience.
As long as you focus on these two things, it will be much easier for you to know if the advice you are getting is something to look out for.
It's your turn: share a traumatic feedback experience
Perhaps a good first step is to think about a time when you received optional feedback but was given to you as if it were essential.
This is a traumatizing experience for any artist. So much of what we do is subject to opinion, and just a few words can shake our fragile sense of self.
Before giving or receiving any further written feedback, take some time to ponder a moment in your life when you experienced the trauma of poorly delivered feedback.
And to get the ball rolling, I'll start.
When feedback doesn't work
In 2005, I wrote a play that some of my college friends produced. It was called Coffee Bar and it was my attempt to bring Samuell Beckett, perhaps the most famous Aburdist playwright of all time, into my own style and vision.
The show was attended by a professor from a nearby college who would give us feedback during a “talkback” session after watching our last performance. And when I went into that talkback, I was on top of the world. I had written a "deep" and "important" piece that "would change the world".
Sigh.
Actually, I was an insecure 21 year old boy who didn't know how to tell a story. And when I sat down on that talkback and heard this man point out all the issues my precious game was struggling with, I got mad. I refused to acknowledge any of these alleged "shortcomings" insisting that I was a victim and that he – the professor – was an idiot.
For the next seven years (yes, years), I got angry at this man's words. However, looking back, I see two things:
- He was mostly right about the story of my play.
- He was wrong about my style.
Much of what the man said to me was probably essential. He pointed out serious flaws in my story that needed to be addressed.
But so much of what he said was aimed at my style, the aspect of storytelling that is most personal! And since it was a talkback, not a talk, I didn't learn anything from the process. I felt judged, belittled, and ashamed. And whenever an artist feels these things, they will never grow.
Instead of studying the professor's feedback on my story (at least until I started rewriting it as a novel in 2014), I became obsessed with his hurtful, arrogant words about my style. . . or should I say about myself.
What comes after the feedback?
Here's the big advantage: words matter, but what you do with them is more important.
If you get hurtful feedback on writing or a laundry list of tasks that seem optional, you need to know what to do with them. You have to put your ego aside, like I haven't done in 2005, and search the pile of feedback to find the good stuff.
If you don't, feedback will continue to be just a source of trauma for you and those around you.
However, if you process feedback in a healthy and helpful way, it can turn your writing into the best it can be.
How do you determine what writing feedback to apply to your story? Let us know in the comments.
WORK OUT
Take fifteen minutes to think about and write about a traumatic feedback experience. Please do not use names, but refer to others as "my review partner", "a co-author" or "my beta reader".
Try to find out where the process broke down. Did you receive any optional feedback that wasn't related to your genre or reading experience? Was the feedback too personal, maybe focused on your style and nothing else?
Share your story in the comments below, then leave an encouraging comment on someone else's story!
David Safford
