Getting feedback on your writing can be a painful and confusing process. You’ve spent your time and energy crafting a piece of art that you are proud of. It’s yours. You’ve worked up the courage to post it publicly. Most likely you are looking for feedback, but perhaps also hoping for a little praise and validation. What you get instead feels like a clinical deconstruction of the worst aspects of your work. It can hurt.
Your natural reaction might be to try and defend your work. But this can be a distraction from the value of what feedback–even negative feedback–can give you. Feeling hurt is normal, but it doesn’t help your writing improve. Instead, moving past it can open up an opportunity for insight and critical reflection.
Feedback is opinion. That’s all it is. It’s not fact, it’s not law, it’s not rule, and it’s definitely not always right. Much like how the films you like and the films I like are different, the reader of your work is subject to subjectivity. But, in gathering a broad sense of opinions–or the opinions of a small group of people that you trust–it can help you see the big picture. If one person thinks your work is boring, that’s subjective. If ten people think your work is boring, that’s consensus.
Utilizing Feedback
So what do you do when you get feedback?
My advice? Sit on it. Let it percolate through the mind. Let it find its way down into the unconscious part of your person where you aren’t acting and reacting on flash emotions. This is your writing. You aren’t trying to satisfy anybody other than yourself (unless you are a professional receiving script notes from a studio, in which case you don’t need to take my advice here). The feedback that you get is not an order that you must fulfill. You don’t need to rush to make someone else’s changes. Instead, try to recognise what it is about their suggestion that will improve your writing. In essence, critically analyse the critical analysis.
Receiving feedback on your work is a skill. And, like any other skill, it takes time and practice to develop the callouses required to filter through the raw emotion of someone taking apart your precious craft. It takes time and practice to develop the ability to filter out the suggestions that are useful, and those which are simply not for you. But, the more you do it, the more you put your work out there, the easier it becomes