Handling Feedback

At some point within a writer's career, they will start sharing their work with others, be it critique partners, beta readers, editors, or friends. Sharing that work with others comes feedback. How you handle that feedback is just as important as getting it.

From the feedback that makes us blush to the feedback that makes us angry or want to breakdown and cry, there is an art to handling that feedback and identifying what you can actually work on as a writer. So let's get to it.

The Flavors of Feedback

There are three different flavors to feedback and each of them has their own uses.

The Useless Feedback

There are two different sub-flavors of this particular feedback dish: the stuff we WANT to hear and the stuff that we should NEVER hear. From the comments, regardless of the form that they come in, you will have one of three reactions:

1. You'll get a boost to the ego — the feedback that inspires you to write more.
2. You'll develop that "Watch Me!" feeling — the feedback that fuels your persistence.
3. Or you'll scratch your head completely bamboozled. "Did you actually read my story?"

I'll give you examples of each:

This is the best story I've ever read.

Blush now and accept the compliment. Use it in the future to remind yourself that someone actually did like your story. Unfortunately, there is nothing there to work on. (And there is always something that you can work on.)

You're insane if you think anyone would want to read this!

Yeah, not productive in the slightest, but it's fuel for the fires! Watch me prove all the naysayers wrong!

Magic doesn't exist. You need to remove ALL magic from your high fantasy novel.

This particular comment is actual feedback that I received several years ago. I'm still scratching my head trying to figure out what about fantasy screams out real life. Last time I checked, magic was one of the defining characteristics of a fantasy novel. But hey... I've only been reading fantasy since I could read, so what do I know?

The Emotional Response Feedback

This particular dish has multiple varieties as well. You might get word of the scenes that made others laugh or cry, but you might also get the feedback that is filled with so much aggression from the reader that you're not sure if you should be running and hiding or simply laughing your head off. Regardless, the emotional response feedback is GOOD feedback.

We write our stories with the intention of eliciting that reader engagement. If your reader wasn't so engaged, they wouldn't have reacted the way they did.

Let me give you a real example that happened to me:

I had shipped one of my thriller novel manuscripts off to a beta reader to get some feedback. She expressed interest in wanting to read it after hearing the first chapter during a cold reads session at a conference I was at, so I thought she might want to read the finished work. Well... After two days, she emailed me and told me that she had stayed up until 3:30am to finish reading the story. She was that engrossed, but she became extremely angry with the ending. She actually didn't want to read the final chapter.

She spent two full days trying to convince me on how I should rewrite my ending to save the character I killed. (She even tried to convince me that everyone would leave such negative reviews because of what I did.) Her response had me laughing my head off for days.

If she hadn't been so emotionally invested, she wouldn't have cared if the character lived or died. But that response alone was enough to tell me that I had nailed the ending of my manuscript — that I had the emotion perfect! (FYI, the ending has not changed.)

On the surface, this feedback might appear to be useless, but it tells you so much about your writing style as a whole.

The Unintentionally Mean Feedback

This is feedback that on the surface tears at your soul, but was given with good intentions. And the reason it hurts so much... because we, as writers, are emotionally attached to our writing. So, when someone gives us feedback of this variety, many of us will crumble in tears. Yet, this is the feedback that we NEED to hear.

It hurts so much because it often targets things that we're so attached to, but for whatever reason, it just isn't working. It's incredibly hard to hear this feedback, the comments might even come across as mean and heartless, but it's the BEST feedback that you will ever get.

With time and experience, the sting of this feedback will lessen, but even after over 10 years of writing fiction, I still get those lines of feedback that make me want to breakdown and cry, but they were the words I needed to hear.

The Steps to Handling Feedback

Here are a few guidelines to get you through reading that feedback.

1. Read through the comments, then put the feedback in a drawer (metaphorical or real, it doesn't matter).
   • DO NOT edit your manuscript right away.
   • Deal with your emotional responses first.
2. When the emotions are under control, read through the comments again and assess their worth.
3. If you are still struggling to deal with the emotional responses to the feedback, then get a friend to read it. Have them find that one nugget of useful information that you can work on.
4. Now that you're able to look at the feedback objectively (for the most part), deal with the issues that you agree with first.
5. In addressing issues that you don't agree with, look at what they have highlighted and try to identify for yourself the true issue with your story.
   • Sometimes, you agree there's an issue, but the way they've suggested to handle it might not be right for your story. Only you, as the writer, can make that call.

Regardless of what particular flavor of feedback you get, it is ALL feedback, and it ALL has value. It can be the fuel you need to keep moving forward, finally seeing your own self-worth. Or it can make you want to push back harder, generating that "Watch me!" feeling. Or it can be the feedback to help us identify the weaknesses within our writing, honing our craft and becoming better writers.