Seeking feedback

If you’ve gotten far enough along in the writing process that you’ve completed a draft of anything, chances are you’ve sought feedback: from a friend, from a formal writers’ group, from your mom (probably not a good idea unless your mom is Barbara Kingsolver). And you’ve probably come away from that conversation with some ambivalence—and a lot of questions.

Is my work good enough? What does “good enough” even mean? Should I bother reworking this piece or shove it in a drawer? Why do I suddenly feel like stuffing my face with Cheetos and watching Netflix until Netflix asks me if I want to keep watching because it’s been four hours already, dammit?

But if you go into the critiquing process armed with knowledge, you’re much more likely to come out on the other side with the energy and willingness to revise your draft. Here are some tips I’ve found helpful:

Before you get feedback:

• Pick people who will give you good feedback. This one may seem obvious, but if your readers aren’t helpful, you’re kind of on your own during revision. Pick readers who are knowledgeable about writing (preferably in your genre), willing to tell you hard truths (so, again, maybe not your mom), and encouraging. This last one is a bit tricky, but basically, your readers should support your vision for your work even as they point out areas where the execution could be improved, and they should believe in your ability to execute their suggestions. Vague suggestions without any details generally mean one of two things: the reader is new at giving feedback about works in progress (a good list of questions can help with this), or the reader isn’t invested in this piece and doesn’t believe in it. Trying to get usable, practical input in this situation is like pulling teeth. So pick your readers with care.

• Know what you’re like when you receive bad news—and good news. If you know you feel like you’ve been hit by a dump truck when someone tells you your efforts have fallen short, at least that dump truck can’t blindside you during a critique. This lets you keep the news in perspective. You can observe your feelings as they come up, reassure yourself they’re normal, and continue hearing your reader’s impressions of your writing. Then, if need be, you can curl up on the couch with those Cheetos after your session. Additionally, it’s a good idea to know what you’re like when you get good news. If your boss sees a half-finished project you've been working on and says it looks great so far, do you rest on your laurels? Or do you automatically distrust compliments and suddenly doubt the judgment of whoever’s giving them? Knowing your tendencies in the face of good and bad news will help demystify the critiquing process so you can get helpful information from it. And it's very helpful to understand your own emotions about the feedback you're getting once it's time to actually implement it.

During feedback:

• Write everything down. It may be tempting to weed out suggestions you don’t find helpful, or you may feel overwhelmed if you start wondering how you’ll ever make all these changes. Don’t worry about that now. Your only job in this moment is to take notes that you’ll use later.

• Stay silent first; ask questions later. This is designed to keep your own biases from creeping in and skewing the readers’ perceptions (or making them wary of sharing their honest views with you). Down the line, your published work won’t come with you hovering over your readers’ shoulders and saying, “Oh, that’s not quite what I meant in that paragraph.” Try to mimic that experience as much as possible in the feedback process by keeping your mouth shut. Then, if there are issues your readers didn’t bring up, ask those at the end of the session, when you’ve already gotten their views without planting anything in their heads. But again, if your readers aren’t experienced with giving feedback to writers, you may want to prepare a list of questions ahead of time so they don’t just say, “Yeah, it was really good. I don’t know what else to say.”

Of course, once you’ve collected all these notes, you’ll have to figure out what to do with them. Come back next month (yes, it's April 1, but that’s no joke!) for a simple process I recently came up with for figuring out which suggestions to use in your revisions.