Seeking honest feedback
Writing August 23rd. 2008, 1:03pmOne of the hardest things I find about writing is that sometimes it’s very difficult to distance yourself from your idea about the story you are writing, and to look objectively at what is written. This is why it is important to have people around you that will read your work and give you honest feedback – crtiticism, praise, or otherwise – about your writing’s quality.
I have a few different people in my life who provide this for me: my girlfriend (yes, I let my partner read my work – I know many who wouldn’t), my writing group and other various friends. My experience is that other writers and people that read a lot give the best feedback. Particularly with other writers, they constantly have the same concerns on their mind as you: structure, characterisation, plot, imagery, etc. They are more likely to be able to point out what you’ve done right or wrong than other readers. They might tell you “The character lacks motivation in the first chapter” rather than a more vague “I just couldn’t get into it.”
Joining a writing group is one of the best things I’ve done for my writing. If you meet regularly – we meet about once a month – you can workshop short stories and improve them quickly. If you are working on a longer piece, it takes much longer to turn around changes, and for the group to read them too, but this is invaluable for getting varied feedback from people with (potentially) different reading interests. And everyone has skills and areas of study outside of writing – we had a doctor in our group who picked up many flaws regarding injuries that occurred in my first novel.
If you don’t have any friends that are writers, I highly recommend making some. It’s really not that hard to do. Many cities have writers’ centres, and they often maintain contact details of writing groups you could join. Or go to a writing course – the writing group I’m in came about by through meeting a few writers at a short story course. We were all interested in meeting regularly to discuss writing, and it just came together from there.
You’ve got to be prepared to give the kind of feedback you would want for yourself – this often means spending time reading other people’s work. I’ve found that you’ll easily see the same problems in other’s work that is plaguing your own writing, but you’re too close to it to see. It will make a better reader of your own work by teaching you to read with a critical eye.
October 8th, 2008 at 7:29 am
This whole criticism stuff is really important to me too. Until I really started to practice writing I’d hoped I was a undiscovered genius because I have the capacity to amuse myself with my thoughts and engage others by storytelling. Unfortunately I am also easily distracted, easily moved by the human condition and fearful of failure, especially public failure which is an unfortunate mix.
1. Easily distracted means no discipline at all and I now know that to get anything finished, even a short story takes a considerable ammount of time and the willingness to go back over it time and again. I have all kinds of skills and am in demand to participate in music, acting, volunteer work, helping others and work activities, I also want to complete a Masters degree and have found that if I am going to do any consistent writing I have to say NOOOOOO!!!! Very difficult.
2. I am easily moved by a good story about real life and forget that it needs to be written well to be taken seriously. I am a sucker for “Hallmark” moments and have the tendency to want to get the whole story down on the page as clearly as possible so that any reader will understand the situation. This is a huge mistake, especially in post modern time. I now know that the modern reader wants more than just a good story, in fact they will reject a damn good story, in favour of something quirky, self referential and gabby.
3.The big one – fear of public failure. As a result of my education experiences I confused good criticism with school room humiliation and would find myself rejecting anything that was less than absolute praise, clenching my teeth and hands as I received the feedback to create some weird kind of physical protection and waiting until it was over. Then I would come back to general consciousness and try to remember what had been said and consider whether it was useful. Very UN-useful behaviour I might say. After some extremely helpful rejections of my clearly written stories I was forced to consider a number of things including whether the stories were in fact any good at all which meant listening to feedback, whether they could be better written which required reading succesful stories and listening and using feedback and considering the suggestions of others! What? Hearing ideas as useful suggestions rather than public humiliation? What a concept?
The writing group has been an absolute gift to me. I have been able to request the level of criticism that I wanted which at the beginning was not much more than the opportunity to have others read my stuff, then offer suggestions and now I want rigorous criticism, within the usual limits of social behaviour ie “I found this difficult to understand.” rather than “This is absolute shit!”
Anyhow I just wanted to participate in the new Chris Kirkby blog empire but need to remember that time spend on my own or other people’s blogs might be just another way to avoid getting back into the novel after a great 3 week holiday in Europe!