Feedback: How to Tell, How to Be Told

I. Your friend emails you something they’ve written (or recorded, or shot and edited). “Will you read this?” they say, “and tell me what you think?”

Several things go through your mind:

1. I barely have time to read things I’ve paid for!
2. What if it’s awful? 
3. How truthful do they want me to be about it?
4. How did they get this address?

II. You work on something for weeks, months, maybe even years. You send it to your friend. “Will you read this?” you say, “and tell me what you think?”

As soon as you click Send, several things go through your mind:

1. I’ve made a huge mistake.
2. No, this is great. The thing I wrote is great. They’re going to be amazed! Maybe they’ll even tell that editor friend of theirs!
3. You know what? Even if it needs a lot of work, that’s a good thing. It’s better to know. I hope they’re honest with me.
4. I’ve made a huge mistake.

In each case, we have what might be called an agenda. The creator wants to be handled a certain way, the reader worries about his or her level of responsibility. There are several most likely outcomes for this scenario.

Here are the best cases:

• The reader likes the piece overall, and has several constructive criticisms that might help make it even better
• The reader does not like the piece much, and can point out exactly where it doesn’t work for them

Here are the worst cases:

• The reader barely reads the piece and offers only superficial comments (e.g., “I didn’t like the names,” or “this was good.”)
• The reader has only negative things to say about the piece

And here’s the case that will never happen:

• The reader says: “Oh my God, this was great! I was amazed! And you’ll be happy to know, I gave it to that editor friend of mine. She says she’ll call you in an hour.”

On that last one: I’m not saying it couldn’t ever happen. I’m saying stop thinking it will. That way, if it ever does, it’ll be an honest-to-god surprise.

So what are the responsibilities for the reader/listener/viewer of someone’s creative work?

1. Be completely honest – you are being asked to give your opinion on something because your opinion counts. If you don’t take it seriously, or if you try to spare the person’s feelings, you are doing them a disservice.
2. Be gentle – at the same time, be mindful of your approach. Take into account the kind of person you’re dealing with.
3. Be specific – “I liked this” or “This was fun” are not helpful comments. They’re great starters! But then you need to get specific. “I like this because I so rarely see this kind of character” is better. Likewise, “The dialogue was bad” is not so helpful. What about it is bad? Is it bad because people don’t really talk like that? Or is it bad because it’s too lifelike and thus doesn’t really go anywhere?
4. Talk about it in the present tense – Wait, what? This one comes courtesy of the amazing author Alice Mattison, with whom I studied in graduate school. Her idea is that if you talk about a work in the past tense, it begins to feel closed-off, like a done deal. If you talk in the present tense, it maintains the quality of being in-progress. This thing has a future, in other words — and it does. A piece of writing can be rewritten, a piece of music can be re-recorded, a piece of film can be re-shot or re-edited. I use this rule in all my workshops. It seems silly, but it matters.

Which brings us to the creator of the piece. You need to remember a few things before you’re ready to hear what someone really thinks of your work:

1. You really do want to know what someone thinks of your work. If you didn’t, you’d have just sent it out or released it on your own without getting feedback. So now you have to take whatever comes back at you.
2. It isn’t personal. You made a thing. That thing is not you. It is of you, but it is not you. If you were a good person before you made that thing, you will be one after. If you were a mess, you will remain a mess. Getting amazing, glowing feedback will not make you whole, nor will getting a list of harsh truths ruin you.
3. Anything you make, you can make better. If you’re making a thing with wood and one piece doesn’t fit right, you can cut a new piece. If the thing looks good but then doesn’t sit right, you can shim it up and add trim so no one sees the shims. If you have ever taken down sheetrock in your home, pulled up flooring, or done nearly any kind of repair work, you have seen someone else’s “drafts” — the shims, the fixes, the improvised solutions. Which brings us to…
4. All that matters is the finished product. Do you want to make a good thing, or just a thing that makes you feel good? If you just want to feel good, then make the thing and keep it to yourself. Really, there’s no shame in that. But if you want to make a thing that other people think is good, it will be because you did the best work you could and listened to the opinions of the smarties  who wanted to help you make it better. In the end, everyone just wants to see something good go out into the world. You’re all on the same team.

None of this is easy. It’s hard to tell someone their stuff isn’t working. It’s awful. And from the creator’s point of view, it’s also pretty awful. This is one reason why I like to pass on the advice I heard somewhere (possibly at a writers’ panel?): Never show your work to someone who has a personal stake in your happiness. They’ll either not be honest with you because they want to protect you, or they’ll be brutal because they resent you.

I’ve given that advice here before, but I don’t know that I fully believe it anymore. For one thing, it can be hard to find people to show your work to, so why not your smart friend or spouse? For another, I think the best critical scenarios occur when both parties are upfront about everything — with each other, and with themselves. I am sometimes great about being told what’s wrong with my work, and I’m sometimes a huge, resentful baby. If it’s the latter, 99% of the time it’s because I didn’t really want to hear it. I wasn’t actually ready to show the work. Either it was a very early draft and the other person’s confirming things I knew in my heart weren’t going to work, or I simply haven’t gotten enough distance from the thing.

You have to be ready. Not only ready to have someone else’s critical eyes on it, but ready to do what it takes to make a thing what it needs to be. There does become a point, or so you hope, where you stop seeing it as an extension of yourself and start seeing it as a thing you would like to be as good as possible. That’s when you want eyes on it.

For the reader, you also have to be aware of your role. Someone asking you to read their 200-page YA comic detective novel is asking you to read it as a YA comic detective novel — not as one of the sprawling Victorian sagas that are more your personal taste. In other words, ask “What is this writer trying to do here, and do they achieve that?” Because while good writing is good writing, there are a lot of types of stories, techniques, devices, etc., that may work well for the story and for the intended audience, even if they don’t work for you.

(Though maybe that’s good advice, too: Don’t show your 200-page YA comic detective novel to your Victorian novel-loving friend, or your David Foster Wallace fetishist.)

Finally, there’s the question that comes up in a lot of workshops: What do I do with the feedback I get? Which means a few things, really. It means: How much of this do I try and incorporate? It can also mean: Do I have to listen equally to everyone?

The answer is, it depends. Which is a frustrating, sucky answer, but that’s the thing: When you receive criticism, and from multiple sources, it becomes your job to decide what to do.

Sometimes it’s easy. Sometimes you’ll have a whole room full of people telling you if you make chapter three your chapter one, you’ve fixed every other problem in the book. But more likely, one person has issues with X, while another seems fixated on Y, while another thinks you have a Z problem halfway through. And three other people thought it was basically fine. What then? Who do you listen to?

All of them. Listen to everyone. Hear what they’re really telling you. Then start sorting them into piles. Here go the people who think everything’s just great. Here go the people who seem to hate everything they come across. Those two piles are slightly less helpful, right? So you can probably set them aside. Then here are the people who had issues with quality X in your work. Now you need to take a good, hard look at quality X. Are they right? Did it set off that little alarm in your skull, the one that magically confirms something you weren’t even consciously aware of? (I trust you know what I’m talking about here.) Then okay: What of the suggested fixes might make this thing better?

And so on. Does it ever get easier, knowing what advice/issues to take and what to reject? I don’t know that it does. But there’s a deeper danger in rejecting all of it. We’ve all read books, watched films, heard albums where we thought: They really could’ve used someone else’s hand in this. Remember that the end goal, as if all the other stuff weren’t hard enough, is to make something good, not to make you feel good.

(Note: I’m saying this last line to myself in the mirror right now. New mantra.)

Photo Credit: Hizonic via Compfight cc