Getting Published - 3. Receiving Feedback with Good Grace

Photo: Writing Group - from flickr.com, by nadar

It can be difficult for writers to handle feedback on their work. After all, we’ve slogged long and hard to produce our short story or chapter or novel. One paragraph may have taken us days. We’ve dug deep into our pysche and soul and bared all of ourselves in this piece of text.

We offer our work to someone to read and they have the audacity and heartlessness and cruelty to tell us that there’s something not quite perfect about our baby, our pride and joy - about us!!!!! Our world crumbles, our sense of our own worth crumbles, our very self crumbles!!!

Okay, that’s a wild exaggeration of what it can feel like to ask for and to get feedback on our writing. But I think under the humourous example, we can all recognise an element of truth in the description. The question is: if we want our writing to be published, we must face the fact that our hard work enters the public arena and anyone has the right to critique it.

As a lawyer, I might draft a badly phrased legal document and no-one will know about it unless something goes horribly wrong between the parties to the contract and they dig it out and go through it with a fine toothcomb. My humiliation at that point would be confined to those parties and my workplace. Professional indemnity insurance would help to cover the financial cost of the boob-up and I would live to draft another day.

No-one is going to critique my legal document the moment it is finished and signed up. The best that can happen is that it goes in a filing cabinet and is never seen again because the parties to it are working swimmingly together. The world will not have to read a scathing review of it: “Ooi’s writing at clause 251 subclause (e) is weak and lacks panache. Her phrasing is inelegant and entirely lacking in characterisation. We just don’t care whether the Second Party hereto gets the compensation or not. There’s no tension or drama. The tone is completely flat.”

But once your novel is finished and polished and you start sending it out to agents and publishers, you are likely to face a lot of rejections before it finally gets accepted - if at all. Once accepted, you will get feedback from professionals on how to maximise it for publication - at that point, you don’t want to throw a big drama queen scene about how your editor can’t mess with your art. Unless you truly are a genius that the publishers will do anything to keep on their books, the result is likely to be: “The door is over there”. And then, when your novel comes out across several continents… Gulp, there are likely to be the bad reviews to deal with.

So, how can we thicken our sensitive skins and even turn criticism to our advantage?

In this post, I offer some tips on giving and receiving feedback among friends, before you get to the stage where you are talking to agents and publishers. I will talk in later posts about dealing with professional feedback from your agent and/ or editor and also about what it’s like to get bad reviews!

You’ve finished and polished your novel as I’ve described in the last two posts in the Getting Published series. Now you are ready to show it to others for get their feedback on it before sending it out to agents.

1. If you want complete unconditional love for your work, show it to your mum. “It’s lovely, dear” is lovely to hear but not very helpful if you want to be a professional writer.

2. The best place to start is to show your writing to people who love to read or other writers. Ask for honest feedback - and mean it. Prepare yourself for the worst.

3. When you get the feedback, don’t answer back. Don’t justify. Don’t get defensive. Don’t try to explain how the point they make is answered in Chapter 50. Listen.

4. Listen.

5. Listen.

6. Ask for clarification. Can they be more specific? Can they give an example of what they mean?

7. Now you have a list of the different points. You may also have a list of different points of view from different people. You may agree with some and disagree with others. Resolve to make amendments based on the points you agree with.

8. As for the points you disagree with, consider: of the friends you asked for feedback, whose opinion do you trust and respect the most? What are the points they’ve made that you disagree with? What if you tried what they suggest, even if you disagree with it - would that work? In other words, be open to suggestions, even if you do not agree with them. If you think the amendments might work, try them out. You always have your original draft to go back to if you change your mind.

9. But at the end of the day, it’s your novel. If you don’t want to make amendments based on any of the feedback you get from friends, whether you agree with it or not, have the confidence in your own judgement. Don’t make any changes.

10. Thank your friends who have taken the time to read your manuscript. It will have taken them a lot of energy also to think about how best to tell you their views without upsetting you or jeapordising your friendship. If they are other writers themselves, they will have spent time reading your manuscript which they would otherwise have spent on working on their own writing. Return the favour when they come to you for help.

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Next time in the Getting Published series, we look at the converse of receiving feedback. If you are asked by a friend or someone in your creative writing circle to read their writing and give feedback, how can you do this in the most helpful and constructive way?