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.