Handling Feedback

Image credit goes towww.creativeeducation.co.uk/blog

So this topic has been on my mind for a few reasons. First, I just went through my last round of beta-line edits with MIRRORPASS (first query letters sent yesterday!) and most of my normal readers were so busy with their own novels that they weren’t available. So that meant soliciting some new help. Second, my siblings I have started a monthly prompt-based short story club, and one of our rules is we all have to comment positively on each other’s short stories.  Since none of us are very good at short fiction—that’s why we started the club—they’ve been struggling with the whole “positive” feedback thing.

And basically I just want to talk about it.

Here’s one of the truest things I know about handling feedback: it requires balance. 

Ideally, your beta readers are writers like you, professionals like you, who will honestly evaluate your work for errors. They’ll identify problems and suggest realistic solutions. At the same time, they’ll make a point of encouraging you on what did work, and they’ll round out their feedback with an honest but encouraging summary—something like “While your character development needs work and I’d like to see more descriptions, I think this has a lot of potential. I really enjoyed reading it and I can’t wait to see what you do with this.” That’s what balanced criticism looks like. 

But if the reader doesn’t balance their criticism, you’ll have to do it yourself.

This can be hard. Because unbalanced criticism comes in a lot of forms.  When I was a newbie writer on a fan-fic forum, tons of people told me I had amazing talent and I should get published. Newbie me was very suspicious of this. I thought I was good, but not that good. And besides, they said the same things about everyone’s stories. Something was up. Their excessive praise confused young, newbie me, and it took me a long time to learn how to evaluate my own work critically. 

One of the ways I learned that was through AW—the Absolute Write forums, especially their “Share Your Work” subforums. Those people don’t go easy on you. Two of the most commonly used phrases are “rip it to shreds” and “tough skin.” But again, I found this kamikaze editing attitude to be somewhat unbalanced. If all people ever did was rip my writing to shreds, how did I know what was working? It was discouraging and demoralizing. 

Again, I had to evaluate my own work critically. I learned to trust my instincts about what was good or what wasn’t, and then I let everyone else’s criticism inform my editing decisions. 

There’s a third kind of unbalanced criticism you have to watch out for—namely, the lack of criticism. This is when someone reads your work and can’t find much to say about it. It can be just as confusing as too much praise or too much negative criticism. A professional reader should always, always find something to say about your work—even if it’s, “I don’t feel like I’m connecting to your story; I can’t seem to find anything good or bad about it.” Because then you know this story isn’t causing people to react. But otherwise, you have to guess at what‘s wrong and what works. 

And that requires a lot of trust in yourself. 

The key to balancing feedback is knowing yourself, knowing your own writing, and having a balanced view on your own faults and strengths.

Withstanding criticism isn’t about having blind faith in yourself. Learning how to deal with praise without becoming egotistical or vulnerable isn’t about thinking your work sucks. The very best way to balance feedback is to already have honestly evaluated your skills—which is an ongoing process anyway. When you receive unbalanced criticism, you measure it against your own self-evaluation, your own instincts and hunches. 

This guy said the mystery plotline is boring and unnecessary. I know it sags in a few areas, but it creates heightened tension and stakes in a lot of other places. And I know I can make mystery work because other betas have liked my mysteries in the past—I know that’s something I’m good at. So what’s making this mystery feel unnecessary? How could I make the search even more vital? What do my other betas think?

And that’s what it comes down to. Although you want to have a rock-solid sense for your own writing skills, and while you may need to fall back on that someday, you still want to seek feedback and let it shape your decisions. No single beta or reader or slough of feedback should be able to shift that rock-solid sense so badly that you decide to give up on a story you believed in. But they should be able to convince you of mistakes when they actually exist, of good spots when those are good, of a bad writing habit that you do in fact have.

The more balanced you become as a writer, and the more professional readers you bring into your own personal circle, the more they’ll confirm your own hunches in their feedback. They more attuned you’ll all become with each other. The better you’ll be. 

One of the final most important things I can say about handling feedback?

Find yourself some teammates you can trust./

Truly and always,
-Creative A

Oh the Silly Fears We Have

Once upon a time, there was a little girl, and she was afraid.

Of movies. Of sleep. Of thunderstorms. Of the river in winter, swollen, waiting to suck little children beneath the ice.

She got older.

Her fears grew more complex. She began to doubt she would ever have friends; she realized people could change, and she couldn’t stop them; she feared depression, loneliness, inadequacy. She wondered if her writing would ever be Good Enough.

She got even a little older. She won contests. She got articles published. She wrote and read and learned about the publishing industry and wrote; she went to school, gained confidence, got some attention, discovered you could have more than one dream, discovered you could pursue them all. She kept writing.

She stopped being afraid publication would never happen and began to cherish those daily routines, the seasons and cycles that made up life, the romances and lessons learned afterward, the moving away, moving back. She learned to enjoy things as they were. She fine-tuned the dream. Despite all her fears, it seemed she was turning out mostly OK.

Also, she interviewed debut authors.

She watched (but did not participate in; smart girl) the rise and rise and fame and fallout of Twilight. She watched the rise of Alyson Noel. She watched The Hunger Games happen; she watched the end of the Harry Potter books, and saw J.K Rowling step down; she watched Chris Paolini's ascension. Maggie Stiefvater. Kristin Cashore. Lauren Oliver. Beth Revis. Laini Taylor. Veronica Roth…

Rising and falling, rising and falling, some making it. Some just barely treading water. Some of them were just beginning, and she crossed her fingers, and hoped.

They were living the dream, she thought. But if they were living the dream, why, for so many of them--particularly those biggest hitters Meyer and Rowling--did the dream seem to kill them?

The world of publishing is like a happy dog who, in midlife, gets stuck with the new puppy. It's grumpy. It has to share. It rolls over, loses a few bones, growls, goes back to sleep. It learns to adapt.

Writers adapt. They write trilogies whether or not the story deserves it. They write love-triangles that leave nobody happy. Writers get shuffled back to the midlist and off Barnes & Noble shelves. They are forgotten. They write some amazing breakouts; they struggle not to drown in the waves of ensuing fame. On their blogs they cry, "I'm so sorry, I've been so busy. I'm trying. I'll be better. Sorry. Thanks."

She looks at them. She looks at her little writing dream.

She wants, very simply, to write. To get published, stay published. To have the mild success that allows her to keep playing, keep exploring, to become a name, not an icon. Just write and sell books and be happy.

She never wants to write a cliffhanger ending just so people will buy the sequel. She never wants to become so famous in one trilogy that the fame of it crushes her. She never wants to get pinned into just the fantasy genre, just the paranormal romance genre. She wants...she wants...

She wants to write the books that she loves to read. Books like Graceling and The Hunger Games and first Twilight and the very first Harry Potter and If I Stay; Shiver and Lament, the first Artemis Fowl, Warped, Blackbringer, Brightly Woven.

Books that were good because they were good, not because the series was famous, or because someone played tricks.

But she’s not sure anymore. She doubts. She fears.

Maybe it’s not possible, this little writing dream of hers. She fears she'll have to change. That her beloved writing will get stuffed into a niche, or lost in the midlist; she's afraid of plummeting, afraid of fame, afraid of becoming someone who only publishes once every six years, afraid...

This goes on until she reads a book.

A new book. An unknown. A rising star.

It is brilliant, breathtaking; it shatters genres, it defies stereotypes. It uses funky paragraph breaks like Across the Universe, it’s a 400 page debut like Before I Fall, a crossover with descriptions like...

These are the books that make their own waves. They shouldn’t work. But they do. These are the books that stand up and say, "I am something special. I am not a gimmick. Read me, and I'll prove it."

So everyone reads them. And they are awesome. The writers are dedicated. The quality, stunning. They don't "get away with it", because there's nothing to get away with--it is something new, something invented. By them.

It can be done.

Slowly, she puts the book down. Raises her chin. Turns to her laptop.

It can be done.

Take heart, my writer friends! Don't be afraid :)

Truly and always,
-Creative A

Protecting the dream, part 2: When You're Ready

Publishing is a very mysterious world to people. I know, because when I was a teenager interested in publication for the very first time, it was a mystery I couldn't seem to solve. No one had a clue how it worked. All anyone could tell me was: Writers are people with books in bookstores who get paid money to keep writing.

The problem with this is, it doesn't account for all the people who aren't yet published. Still, this is how people tend to think. So if you introduce yourself as a writer, but your books aren't published, and you're not making money, well--what are they supposed to think? You're the girl who wishes she were a writer?

This makes me feel just a teensy bit insecure.

Writing is one big dream. You have to fight for the dream, of course. But you also have to repress it, stuff it back into that drawer; you have to plug away and keep working before letting that dream out into the world. I love the way Erma Bombeck put it:

“There are people who put their dreams in a little box and say, ‘Yes, I’ve got dreams, of course I’ve got dreams.’ Then they put the box away and bring it out once in awhile to look in it, and yep, they’re still there.”

You need to keep this dream safe. And sometimes the people you have to protect it from are the very people telling you to pursue it--because you're not ready to pursue it. Not yet. It's not ready.

So I have my caveats. My little layer of perspective. I will happily give anyone my work to read, so long as I get to explain myself first.

Of course, there are situations where you can't do this, such as when sending it out to betas. Or when your book reading gets played before the whole class, like mine did.

Or when your book gets published.

You know Tahereh Mafi, the debut author of Shatter Me? It's new and it's making big waves, and Tahereh's humorous blog was making waves before she was ever even published. Which is why I love it when she says things like this:

"i meet people and they say things like "omg i just googled you!"
i say goodbye to people and they say things like "omg i'm going to google you!"

i'm not exactly sure what people hope to impart when they say these things to me; no doubt they think they're complimenting me in some way, and so i try to be cool about it and manage to nod and smile and before pulling a paper bag over my head. because in truth, these exclamations make me want to go home and hide all my google-bits and build a blanket-fort under my desk and live there for the next 10 years.

but then (!)

just as i've put the finishing touches on my hermit-nest (!)

i'll get a really wonderful email from a reader that makes me so happy that for a moment, i don't even mind that my google is showing. i'll put pants on that day and actually leave my house...and haul myself to a bookstore...there, i will inevitably find myself in front of the Young Adult section, standing there in my unbearably self-conscious skin, wild-eyed and crazed, suddenly acutely aware of just how much my google is showing." -- (full post here.)

In my audio class, I felt exactly like my Google was showing. I felt like I hadn't dressed modestly enough or that I had a physical deformity, or possibly, that I reeked of BO and they could all smell it. I didn't feel ready. Listening to them listen to my production was torture--measuring every awkward line of dialogue, every over-dramatic word choice, every time I didn't get to the point--I died a thousand little deaths.

Faintly, I thought to myself, why is this so hard?

When will it be ready?

Then it smacked me in the face. Never. It will never feel perfect or ready or covered up enough, or safe. I will never be able to write in such a way that I don't need caveats, because everyone is different and you can't make them all happy, and even published writers like Tahereh Mafi with all her big waves are still afraid of their google-bits showing.

And what I realized is this. You have to recognize that some people won’t get it, this dream of yours. Some will never understand. That doesn’t make your dream any less valid. And, on the other hand, some people will get it. Even before you’re published; even if they don’t know about the publishing world. For no reason other than your raw potential, they will appreciate what you’re trying to do.

I will be forever grateful to my classmates for the way they reacted. Like they were professionals. Like they could judge quality, and I had wowed them, and they were interested in knowing more--because somehow, they had been hooked by whatever good bits were shining through the bad bits of my production. They asked me intelligent questions about the publishing industry, and my plans; they wished me luck. They said, "hey, what was your bloggy thing called again? I want to check it out."

I never got to thank them.

So if you guys are reading this?

Thanks a million.


Truly and always,
-Creative A

Protecting the dream, part 1: The Caveat

Before I even begin this post, I should tell you I am a recovering perfectionist. There's guilt in perfectionism. Your sense of worth is stored in whether you got it perfect or not. You always doubt other people's compliments. It's absolutely nutty, and you know it's nutty, but you just. can't. help it.

After a while I made a compromise with myself. I hoped I could learn to achieve the quality that perfectionism often brings, without the feelings of guilt for "failing" so often. I needed to learn perspective.

Keep this in mind when I tell you the following story from two weeks ago.

It's the end of my first semester at my new school, codename: College By the Sea, which means all the final projects are rolling in and being peer reviewed. I should explain this has been a strange semester for me. To quote Knotting Hill, "It was nice. Surreal, but nice." I have been extremely creative. People have been recognizing my creativity. In fact, they seem to think I know more than I actually do. Quite out of the niceness of their hearts, they've been getting me into situations I'm not sure I can handle--moments where I feel like I've run off the cliff and I'm trying to backpedal, wailing, "Wait! I'm really not sure I have the experience for this!"

I've been very insecure. Almost as if the more people compliment me and assure me I'm good, the less I believe them.

So you can imagine how I felt--all nervous and susceptible--when I chose to turn my Intro to Audio assignment into a book reading of MIRRORPASS. I almost didn't decide to do it. I waffled for days. And then, when I went ahead and did it, creating an audio production around the 10-minute reading--it was torture. The scene I had chosen was horrible. (The whole book felt horrible.) It needed severe editing. (Maybe I should just scrap the book?) It was too dramatic, had too many references, it was just--ugh!

But I slogged through the assignment and submitted it, hoping beyond hope that was the end of it.

It wasn't the end.

Our teacher wanted to play some of the assignments during class, before all our peers. For days I tortured myself. He won't play mine, I decided. I would love to know what my classmates think. But, shudder! I would die if they heard.

And in the middle of this, I was a little baffled at my lack of self control, my complete plunge into insecurity. Where was my perspective? Why couldn't I handle this like a professional? Someday, people were going to read this. (At least I hoped.) I needed to get used to the idea.

I raised my chin and went on with life.

Until class this morning. When my teacher pulled my CD out of the box and popped it into the computer, asking me to introduce it for the class.

Oh. Crap.

Let's stop here.

Remember when I talked about my compromise, my efforts to control my perfectionism? I developed some funny habits as a result of that compromise. I don't like to show people my work until it's finished--all edited and polished and shiny--and if I have to show them my work before it's ready, I like to give caveats. I give caveats like crazy. This isn't finished, I say. It has mistakes here and here and here, and I'm working on that. But now that you know about those mistakes, if you could just ignore them, I would love to know what you think of the story itself.

And I feel much better. Because by doing this, I have protected myself from the two most common reactions people have, both of which shatter my perspective and suck me back into the HIGH! low HIGH! low drama of perfectionism.

You see, first, I have successfully skirted around the issue wherein loyal friends and family start saying bogus things like, "It's amazing! You should be published! I loved it! Because it was perfect!" And you want to believe them, but there's a tiny suspicious part of yourself wonders why they didn't find something wrong. They are missing their grains of salt, and you cannot quite get your hopes up by believing them.

But with my caveats, ah! I have salted their feedback beforehand.

Secondly, I have protected myself from liabilities. Now they know I am a professional. I am not blind; I can clearly see some mistakes exists. In fact, look, I am already in the process of fixing them! How businesslike of me. Take notice, world, this writer is not suffering from any dreamlike delusions of publication. Other writers you have met may be frauds, but her dreams have credibility.

Because the world simply doesn't take much stock in writers who are unpublished. Tahereh Mafi just wrote a great post about this. It got me thinking about my little protective system. I am always prepared for, even expecting, the worst. I can easily handle criticism.

But praise is scary.

Praise means I might be making progress. When it comes to praise, I am most vulnerable, for there--in my little heart of hearts--I might start to believe that when people say I'm good, I'm actually good. That I'm Ready For More.

If they said that, and if I believed it, and if it turned out not to be true after all, well, it would be impossible to continue plodding along patiently as I had been before.

The hardest part of this all, you see, is patience. Learning how to keep the dream before achieving the dream. Learning how to protect it even from my own impatience.

I'll tell you the rest of the story in part 2 (next Wednesday), but for now, let me ask this: How do you guys protect the dream? Everyone in this long enough has to find a way to deal with the idea of "getting better" before "getting published." So how do all of you do it? Does community help? Or do you simply never intend to pace yourself, but anticipate that each new novel will be "the one" that makes it? I doubt any one answer will fix me, but I'd love if you all shared.


Truly and always,
-Creative A

Emergence, in Honor of Writers Everywhere

It has been a long time, she thinks to herself, a long time. She flexes a moment. Runs a finger across those fresh, new voices. They have so much to say. So much for her to absorb. Seeing them now, she remembers how difficult it was to pull away before, how much she's missed them since. She feels older and wiser, and simultaneously, outdated and frumpy.

Does she really belong with this crowd? These avant-garde's, these professionals? They Twitter and Facebook and blog, they write and read and review, they create book trailers, word clouds, playlists.

But she has a novel.

It will be different this time around, because she's different this time around. The old memories still hurt and the old mistakes still chafe. She feels like some of the glamour has come off and she got a real good look at the awkwardness underneath. And yet--

She watches them a little while, dipping her toes in, throwing out a comment, a laugh.

Somehow, it's just like she remembered. It's a world of voices and stories that make her skin tingle and fill her with passion. Its a group of people who are both dreamers and realists, artists and comedians. They take themselves seriously, and they know when to laugh at how silly they are. She loves them all. Craves this world.

The isolation was good for a while, even though the process often felt so futile and basic. And now that she stepped over that hurdle, reached that stage, she's almost surprised to find the dance is still going, girlishly awed that she gets to jump in.

She has a novel.

Finally.

And reaching down, she picks up those pages. Reaching up, she brushes back the errant bangs. She strikes an authorly pose--very artsy, off center, with gritty concrete walls in the background--and then laughs and lets it go and is herself again, just like all the other writers in the room.

"Shall we dance?" she whispers into the book.

It rifles with memories. And finally, they dance.

Writing is and always has been a personal effort, something that everyone can't do together. You're left on your own the form the words inside your imagination. I think the World Wide Web has done a lot to change this process of isolation, across all sorts of arts. It's so much easier for us to create a group mindset and find people with whom we can share our experiences with as we go through them. This is an amazing, magical thing.

But sometimes it's too much. Sometimes being around other writers makes us think too hard and analyze too long the work we've only just started. Sometimes, we try to perfect something that hasn't even had a chance to grow.

Which is where isolation comes in. When I write, I imagine it's like a flower growing in a dark room. One shaft of light glows way up in the ceiling. There are no distractions, no other voices. No other pretty things to compare my story against. There's one flower and one light. I take my time. I let things develop as they may. A lot of the time, what I expected isn't what I get, but that's okay--because this is better.

The isolation is important. But it can't, and shouldn't, last forever. You've got to come back out. And so the period of emergence is scary. Or at least, it is for me. Old muscles have to be stretched and used again. New standards have to be met. The flower that grew in darkness is finally ready to stand on it's own in the light, next to other flowers that are probably more beautiful than mine.

Really, it's incredible how prolific, professional, and enthusiastic some of you writers are. You've got your act together. Everyone can tell that you're making things happen. Our blogs want to be your blogs when they grow up. It's really refreshing to find myself back with this awesome group of people; to dip my toe in, hang around the pool, and have you all yell to jump in.

So anyway, here's to writers. And emergence. And flowers that grow in the dark.

Truly and always,

-Creative A