Handling Difficult Critique
Greeting and salutations Scribblers, thank you for joining me again this week. Today we’re chatting about one of the most crucial skills you can master as a writer: Accepting Critique and Making Actionable.
I’ve spoken about this before in my beta-readers series of videos, but I wanted to do a deeper dive into this process because it’s so important to learn how to move past the initial sting of feedback and pivot into using it to improve your writing.
Samples:
the pages are full of tension, and now I want the promise of danger to be delivered on in the first 5.
By the end of this sample, I can’t see when the1st inciting incident is coming. For this reason and because of the amount of tension in the pages, it seems like the book might open a wee bit early.
I also left the pages feeling unclear about what the stakes are in that scene.
These are all comments I’ve received on different variations of my manuscripts over the years. I have the distinct memory of cringing a bit as I read them and immediately refuting that they could be true. Had they even read the manuscript I sent them? Were they distracted when they read? My pages had promise, they opened precisely where they should, and how could they miss the stakes? They were right there in the first scene.
My reaction to feedback is pretty par for the course for most of us. I think, because we’ve put so much of our heart and soul into writing, we tend to take things a bit more personal than we should. And this is something we have to be aware of as writers. We tend to want to immediately defend ourselves and point out exactly what our reader supposedly missed.
By becoming aware of that feeling and by stopping ourselves from immediately jumping to be defensive, we’re able to listen and process that feedback. And this is something that takes practice. If you’re getting the feedback live, you definitely need to work on keeping your defensiveness on the inside. This doesn’t mean you can’t have a dialogue about it–you should so you can get more insight from your reader. But it does mean that you aren’t pointing out what you feel is the obvious sentence on page three they must have missed.
If you’re reading an edit letter, you can let those reactions fly if that helps you to process them–there isn’t anyone around to watch you! But don’t immediately fire back an email enumerating all the ways in which your reader missed the point of your writing. Not only is that considered bad form, it means you’re likely missing the point of the feedback.
You need to give yourself some time to process whatever your reader has said. Whether it’s good or bad–giving your brain time to absorb it and work out connections and rationale is very important.
Because, as much as we like to believe we’ve made it achingly clear in our manuscript, we often haven’t. It’s clear to us because we wrote it. But, thankfully, other people can’t see inside our heads, so it isn’t clear to them. This is one of the biggest things I see in writers receiving feedback for the first time–they aren’t taking the time to process it and instead they want to argue with the reader.
Again, having a dialogue about something is a great way to unpack feedback. Going back to some of the feedback I received–one of them was about my opening pages and the reader felt I was opening too early.
This would be a great place for me to ask a few follow up questions before I decide how and if to take action on that feedback. I might ask them where they felt the book should open. Another question might be what tension did they feel was on the page and didn’t they feel it delivered? Getting into these specifics will help me to uncover what action I should take. It might be something as simple as adding in a few sentences to deliver a specific breadcrumb toward the plot point they want or it may lead me to scrapping the beginning and starting at a different point in the story.
Regardless of the feedback though, it was given because the reader felt something was missing. And, it was what I asked my critique partner or beta reader for, so in the end, it’s not really fair for me to get upset that they pointed something out. This is another part of joining critique groups that writers need to prepare for.
I think we all go into these situations thinking this will probably be the time when everyone is just blown away by our writing, characters, and plot. They’ll just rave about all the wonderful things and there couldn’t possibly be any issues with it…
And, dear Scribblers, this is never the case. There will always be something you can develop in your writing. A revision or tweak that really makes your writing stand out and deepens the story. Which means a great way to go into asking for critique and feedback is to remind yourself that you’re actively asking people to point out the weaknesses in your writing. Hopefully they’re pointing out the amazing things too because that’s just as important.
So, the point of all this is to take a breath and work towards being objective in listening to feedback. You have to remove the emotional part of it. Being told something didn’t make sense or that you should probably add something in or take something out isn’t a reflection on you as a person. It’s your critique partner doing exactly what you told them to do.
Learning to recognize when your emotions are starting to influence your reaction to an edit letter or feedback will help you to become a better writer because you’re able to process that feedback more quickly and take action on to strengthen your manuscript.
My final caveat is that yes, an editor or a critique partner might give you bad feedback on something in your story. How can you tell? You need to ask yourself a few questions. 1) Does this feedback support my goal for this story? What I mean by this is would taking the advice get you closer to what you feel is the heart of the story or does it take it in an entirely different direcion. And, follow up question, do you like or dislike that new direction and why? Second question is how well do you know this reader? Do they mostly read thrillers and you gave them a rom-com to read? And they were asking for more jaw-dropping plot twists? This might be a case of them being too entrenched in their genre conventions. Do you want to have good plot twists in a rom-com, sure, but are they likely to be on the same level as a thriller? Probably not.
I will personally never forget feedback I got on a novel I was writing which had a slow burn romance in it. My beta reader gave me a whole paragraph bemoaning the fact I didn’t have more physical intimacy between those two characters. I didn’t know this reader very well and I made the choice to not take the advice because it was clearly a preference toward that style of romance story–what I did take away from it was trying to increase the tension between my two characters with banter and longing. So I did incorporate the feedback, but I did it in a way that was true to my story and my writing.
In the end, you’re going to need to spend a lot of time analyzing and dissecting an edit letter or feedback. You don’t necessarily have to act on it exactly as your reader believes you should, but you need to recognize that there is an element that needs to be addressed and it’s your duty as the author to find it.
My final tip for working through feedback or an edit letter is to have another, objective third party go through it with you. I share all of my edit letters and feedback with my one writing friend. She’s the one I brainstorm with and she knows everything about my manuscripts. But she also isn’t the one who wrote it, so she’ll read and interpret something in a completely different way than me sometimes and then, when we discuss it, it becomes clearer to me. So I highly recommend finding someone to read through your feedback with so you can discuss what you think it means and brainstorm ways you might take action.
Alright, Scribblers, Thank you so much for watching. Remember to check out our website for writing coaching and editing options. We also have a retreat happening in June and we’d love to see you there! All the links are in the description below.
We’ll see you next week! Happy Writing Scribblers!
As always, your mileage may vary! If you have any tips for recognizing burnout before it takes over completely, please drop those in the comments below.
Consisting of five sections, this course will include strategies for revising characters, plot, pacing, and worlding building. It also includes resources for copyediting and for gaining insight into your manuscripts theme and purpose
