How to Implement Feedback
Issue 11
Daniel Kellberg is back with a follow-up to his previous article “Getting Critiqued at Your Critique Group”. Once you’ve been critiqued, what do you do?
So you’ve survived your critique group meeting, and now you’ve got a pile of feedback that needs to be analyzed, collated, and implemented—or ignored, as the case may be.
Survival is no small task, especially since you might have different people telling you different things. That said, there are a few principles that can make implementing feedback a whole lot more manageable.
Know The Story You’re Trying to Tell
Technically, this step should happen before you ever get feedback, but it’s by far the most important. Before implementing any feedback, you should have a crystal-clear idea of what you’re trying to accomplish with your characters, plot, setting, theme, etc. Especially if your group critiques in small chunks, you’ll always know more about how changes will fit into your work than your group will. That knowledge acts as a filter that you should run every single piece of feedback through. If a piece of feedback would take you further away from what you’re trying to do, it can be safely discarded.
The reason this is so important is simple: your readers are people, too. They’ll come to your work with their own preconceptions, ideas, and preferences. If you don’t know what you’re trying to accomplish, you might end up implementing every piece of feedback and writing the book that your critique group wants to read, not the book you want to write. That’s a roadway to nowhere.
Wait A Bit
Unless you’re absolutely unshakable, don’t start implementing feedback right after a meeting ends. Remember all those possibly unpleasant emotions I mentioned in the last post? You’ll probably be feeling them for a bit after your critique group meetings. Give yourself some space for said emotions to fade before you start parsing the feedback. That way you can work with a clear head.
Look For Trends
It’s one thing if a single person gives you a piece of feedback. If multiple people are telling you the same thing or pointing out the same issues, ignore that feedback at your peril. They’ve probably identified a trouble spot.
Take Ideas Sparingly
To paraphrase Stephen King, if someone thinks there’s a problem with your book, they’re almost always right. If someone has an idea to fix it, they’re almost always wrong. Your critique group might give you suggestions and ideas for how to fix an issue they’ve found. They’ll hit you with the good old “If I were writing this. . . .” Be careful about implementing those kinds of suggestions uncritically. They might not mesh with the story you’re trying to tell.
While your critique group’s ideas might not be great for fixing issues, they’re darn useful for understanding them. When you get a suggestion, think about why someone would suggest a given change. More often than not, doing so will bring the root issue into stark relief. From there, you can come up with the fix that best aligns with your story.
Know Your Critique Group
If you’re new to a given critique group, this tip can largely be ignored. It requires you to get to know your critique members fairly well before you can use it effectively. That said, once you can, the rewards are well worth it. In short, the longer you’re with a group, the more you’ll find that certain people are best at giving specific types of feedback. One person might be great with characters, another with plot, a third with all grammar, etc. Once you know who’s great at what, you can start weighting feedback based on who’s giving it. For instance, if your plot person picks out a plot hole that everyone else misses, even if it’s “just one person saying that” it’s probably wise to seriously consider what they’re saying. By the same token, if you’re writing a middle grade adventure and you know one person in your critique group loves blood and guts, their calls for increased gore should probably be thoroughly examined before being implemented.
Be careful not to go too crazy here, else you risk siloing people off into their respective “roles.” Remember, your grammar nerd can pick out plot holes and character inconsistencies, too!
A Final Bit of Encouragement
Thankfully, handling feedback is one of those things that gets way easier with time and experience, like most things related to writing. And most other things in life, now that I think about it. As with all writing advice, the above should be taken as me saying “This is what has worked for me and given me results that I like” and not “These are written in stone and all else is heresy.”
Good luck!
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