5. Feedback: A gold mine for a writer

We love it, we hate it, often we don't know what to do with what people tell us about our work. To be able to listen to it, to gain from it, there are some things we have to do.

“Feedback on our writing is a funny thing, isn’t it?” my Substack colleague

Nicole Meier

wrote recently in a Note. “We want it. We need it. But sometimes, even when it’s well-intended, it can shake something loose inside us in a way that doesn’t feel quite right.”

She’s right, of course.

We crave response. Yet sometimes it unnerves us, robs us of our confidence, confuses us. Worse, it makes us feel angry; we want to argue.

Yet feedback is an essential part of the writing process. Objective readers provide us clues as to how our words are being received. They tell us what parts sing, what parts are confusing or boring, show us how our words are misinterpreted, under-developed; we learn which sections work, which don’t.

Most importantly, it helps us focus our own objective lens on our work. It helps us know what to revise. And good revision is the secret to good writing.

From the reader standpoint, giving feedback is a terribly difficult thing to do. You don’t want to hurt the writer’s feelings. It’s hard to express what you are thinking, what you noticed. Heck, it’s even hard to know exactly what you think. And it’s much easier just to ‘like’ it and move on.

I’ve been studying commenting for close to 20 years. When I ran Young Writers Project — a nonprofit dedicated to helping kids write better and teachers teach writing better — I developed a commenting curricula for teachers. Initially I shared it with those in my Master’s degree class but later sent it to all the teachers using the private websites for writing in the classroom.

The guidelines for commenting were fairly simple:

• Don’t grade. Don’t judge.

• Let the students establish the rules of engagement. This builds community and they become the ones responsible to resolve deviations. (FYI, students ALWAYS did well with this exercise and chose guidelines that promoted civility, respect, honesty and kindness).

• You are an expert in what your brains notice about someone else’s writing. Articulate what you notice in a way that is well-received.

• Remember the purpose: Your insights will help the writer improve their work.

• Start with the good, shift to the more complex.

• First comment on posts that don’t have any (or many) comments.

• Writing a comment takes effort; make the commitment.

These guidelines, of course, can be applied to how we behave here on Substack if you accept my belief that this could become a vibrant, vital writing community.

And here’s a fun tidbit for any of you teachers out there: The class bullies became the class leaders. Really. In every school that we worked, bullying stopped. Because the “bullies” discovered that a) what they said — those snarky, nasty little things they liked to whisper to classmates — could be seen by everyone. Busted. And 2) they realized they could get even more attention if they accented the positive and gave a lot of people a lot of comments. And that’s exactly what they did.

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Feedback on Hiram Falls

Getting feedback on a novel is no different, really, except it feels totally different.

As a writer you are asking someone for a huge commitment of time and energy. So you have to give them plenty of time, like a month.

That’s a long time to wait. On my first draft, it was agony. I wanted to get back to my writing routine. I missed the book and wanted to get back into it. Some days the waiting felt OK. But mostly it didn’t. Mostly I worried that the characters were drifting away, the ideas and energy was fading. Not to mention the late night fear that the book was crap.

I had chosen “beta” readers that I knew and a few that I didn’t know that well. But I trusted them. When I restarted the novel in late 2019, I decided to reach out to five people to see if they would provide ongoing feedback. I really was asking them to collaborate with me on my project. To my amazement they all said yes.

They ranged in age from their 20s to their 60s, from Colorado to Michigan to Vermont. They had different experience and tastes in writing. They had very different personalities and professional skills. They were all women — by design. I had several key women characters and being a woman was not exactly in my knowledge base. They would tell me if the characters I created were credible.

My primary criteria were: good readers, good writers and willing to tell me exactly what they thought. All five of my ‘angels’ — provided me feedback on multiple drafts.

On each major draft, I also added a new reader who knew zilch about the book.

I, too, established some loose ground rules:

• Do not hold back.

• Don’t worry about specific lines or passages; look at overall flow, consistency, plot movement and depth. Does it draw you in? Do you get lost, confused? Where? Does it ring true? Where not?

• At the end, when they finished the draft, I asked them to answer this question: “If you saw this book in its present form at a bookstore, would you buy it for a friend?” Yes or no.It took me five years to write the book.

(It took me five years to get the majority of them to agree to buy it for a friend.)

When they’d finished they sent me notes and then we talked via teleconference.

For the first session, I had to steel myself. Truth be known, I’m not the most confident person in the world. And this was my first novel. What the heck do I know about writing a novel?

• To prepare, I re-read what I had written.

• I jotted down the flaws I saw but spent most of my time thinking about what worked, what I liked. And I reminded myself I had accomplished something that is difficult — I wrote a novel.

• I gave my ego and my lack of confidence to several Peruvian worry dolls I had near my desk. I reminded myself of what I had told students and teachers over and over all those years: Don’t take feedback personally.

I needn’t have worried. My first real draft brought some wonderful huzzahs, like: “Wowzers. Just wowzers. I am in awe that you could actually pull together a cohesive and coherent novel. You are something. And onto something. There's so much I love here.”

And some terse, spot-on points, that would serve to guide me the rest of the way: “I’m not convinced you’ve found the full story here.” “Gevalt, you are still writing like a fucking journalist… Get inside the characters. You’re looking at them from afar.”

Like I said, they didn’t hold back.

But they also gave me tremendous insight into the characters, the rhythm, what they found captivating, what confused them. They had questions. Lots of questions. And sometimes they told me things about the story I hadn’t even seen.

The most interesting aspect was when they seemingly contradicted each other. On one draft, one reader told me how much she loved the ghost and loved how he could communicate with animals. Another reader, a former newspaper editor, said, “Gevalt what’s with the ghost shit? And the fucking talking animals? I don’t get that?”

That contradiction was easy. The ghost and “talking” animals stayed.

But there was an interesting dynamic between two readers — One I call Yang, a professional editor I hired, and the other Yin, a longtime collaborator and fellow writer. Yang was focused on structure, pacing, plot and characters; she was aiming me for The Big Five. Yin told me she defined a good book as one “that tells me something about the condition of humanity that I did not know.” Hmm, Yin, set your sights low why don’t you?

I realized, after a time, that they did not disagree at all; they just had a much different emphases and a different way of expressing themselves.

And once they did totally agree: My introduction, the Prologue, “is beautiful, but … it no longer works.” The only part of my novel that was exactly the same from the get go. Jeesh.

But I agreed. I now have a totally new beginning. And it’s better. And it works.

One highlight of my first round of feedback. After I’d spoken with the last reader, I sent out a note of thanks and said that I’d take Friday off but would dive into it on Monday.

One of the readers called me. By profession she is an art therapist. “Do not start in on Monday. Take two weeks off. Let your brain absorb and work with all that feedback you’ve been given.”

Point well taken. I was used to short stories. I was used to working on a newspaper. I held off for two weeks. I let my brain do the work. By the time I did resume, I had settled in my mind what I wanted to do and how to do it. She had given me brilliant advice.

So feedback is something we crave. It does sometimes unsettle us, but that’s a good thing. That’s how we get better. That’s how we begin to look at our work with an objective eye.

And that is absolutely essential for us to be able to do a good revision. And good revision is the secret to good writing.

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NEXT: The art of revision.