How To Handle Writing Critique

A couple years ago, my wife encouraged me to write a book about a specific topic. “You could do it,” she urged me on despite my initial reluctance. “You have some valuable insight on this topic.”

Her encouragement got me excited about the idea and over the next few weeks, I spent every night working on that book and hit that magic spot where everything is just flowing, one line after the other. I even found time to design what I felt was a kick-ass cover. In record time, I churned out about 45,000 words in just under three months. And while I knew it was a first draft and needed work, I was also pretty proud of what I had done.

But now it was time for feedback before I started rewriting.

Since she had been so encouraging and is one of my regular sounding boards, I asked if she would read the first couple of chapters and give me some notes. A few days later, I asked if she had read anything or had any thoughts yet.

“I have and I do,” she said. And then she hit me with a maelstrom of one terrible thing after another. But to spare you that long, difficult conversation, I’ll boil it down for you — basically, my book was garbage and I had just wasted three months that I could’ve been using to develop other ideas.

“You’re the one who told me I should write this!” I countered in the middle of her critique.

“I told you to write a book on [this topic],” she stated, arms crossed. “I didn’t tell you to write this. If you release this, you’ll be torn apart.”

Then I defended my choices, saying I was focused on my ideal reader, not the fringe people she thought would hate it. But my defense fell apart as I realized that the person I was writing for was probably the least likely to pick up the book anyway. If she was right about that, she was probably right about a lot of the others things too.

Ouch.

She now admits that her critique was maybe a bit too harsh and highly influenced by a ton of negativity she had been wallowing in via social media. She’s since quit most of social media for that reason. But she still stands by most of her critique, saying, “My negativity was a reflection of what you would’ve faced from the [X] community if you had gone forward with publishing it.”

Needless to say, I never released the book even though I technically have an entire second draft finished after incorporating her feedback. Sometimes I run across the file while working on other projects and it mocks me: “Remember me? The book you wrote and can’t release?” [Insert maniacal laughter here.]

I’m not going to lie — at the time, her feedback really hurt my pride. I thought I had evolved past personal offense and hurt when getting critique on my writing, but this moment had unraveled that.

But I also learned a lot from the experience that I want to pass on.

Because the first step in how to handle critique is to…

RECOGNIZE YOUR OWN SENSITIVITIES

We writers can be a sensitive lot. Our works are like our babies, so when someone calls it an ugly baby, we take it very personally. But I believe this is one of the biggest reasons most writers don’t make strides in their career — they don’t recognize they might be sensitive about getting critiqued. Therefore, they just shut down and don’t accept any criticism whatsoever and assume that if someone doesn’t like their work then that person “just doesn’t get it.”

But if you can first admit, “Hey, I’m a bit touchy about this project,” then it helps you know how to…

DEFINE THE FEEDBACK YOU’RE LOOKING FOR

If I could rewrite the scene where I ask for my wife’s thoughts, here’s how it would go:

Me: “Hey, have you had a chance to read those chapters?”

Her: “I have.”

Me: “I’d love your thought on them, but it’s been kind of a hard week and also, this topic hits so close to home for me, I probably need to hear positive feedback first and then tackle the areas for improvement in a later conversation.”

Her: “Okay, that’s fine. But to be honest, that means this will be a short conversation.”

Me: “Good to know. Lay it on me.”

My wife knows me well enough to know I usually prefer hearing the “bad news” first, so of course she was going to share that first. It wasn’t her fault for not being able to read my mind the one time I really needed to hear the positives first.

So when you are presenting something for critique, you need to define what kind of feedback you’re looking for from your sounding board. You might be looking for different things from different people. 

For example, let’s say you’ve written a grounded sci-fi piece where a guy finds out his grandfather was part of the Roswell UFO coverup (dibs) — you might go to one friend and say, “Hey, I need you to give me feedback about the dialogue, that’s it for now.” And then another friend, “Hey, can you tell me if the science stuff sounds good or does it all read like BS? Am I getting too technical? Not technical enough? Don’t worry about anything else for now.” And still someone else, “Hey, how is the flow and pacing of the story?”

I know what you’re saying, “But I don’t have a massive team of people to critique my work.” No problem. Neither do I.

But the key thing is that you don’t have to ask for all the feedback all at once. You can define what you need and break it up into manageable chunks so you’re brain (and feelings) don’t get turned to mush.

A note on this that almost deserves it’s own heading is to assume good intentions from your sounding boards. They probably want what’s best for you and your writing and aren’t trying to intentionally hurt you. The only people I ask for feedback are people I am certain care about me and want me to succeed, so I’m able to interpret their feedback from a place of good intentions, not attack.

But since we’re already on the topic of people…

Assume good intentions from your sounding boards. They probably want what’s best for you and your writing.

WHO YOU GET FEEDBACK FROM IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN THE FEEDBACK

When I ask my manager in Hollywood for his thoughts on a new script, that means something. If I asked him to read the book from the beginning of this story, he would be lost because the topic isn’t in his area of expertise. My wife, on the other hand, had lots of expertise in the topic. The source of the critique is 1000% relevant to how you receive it.

If you put something you’ve written online for the whole wide world to read, then don’t be surprised when not everyone loves it. Welcome to life. Or as my wife likes to say, “You can’t be everyone’s Chick-fil-A sauce.” Social media has trained us to go after likes, though, so when we put something out on the web and it doesn’t register positive attention, our brains can easily translate that as a failure.

But getting feedback from someone I know and trust is always more valuable than feedback from the rando online. I know that should be obvious but it’s not — and I think a lot of writers give up way too early because of a couple of negative comments from trolls who probably aren’t even trying to do anything with their life.

Now, if it’s Stephen King giving you the feedback then, yeah, you might want to pay attention. Which leads us to a major SPOILER ALERT…

YOU’RE NOT RIGHT ABOUT EVERYTHING

I know I just made several brains explode with that one. It was a wakeup call for me too.

Here’s the deal, writers… If you find yourself defending everything your trusted sounding board is critiquing you about, then that should be a red flag. You’ve asked for feedback and now you’re not taking any of it. Which means you’re wasting both your time and the time of your sounding board who generously agreed to look things over.

That’s exactly what I did when my wife gave me her critique — instead of being receptive, I went on the defense, convinced I was right. But I wasn’t.

This goes back to what I said in the beginning about writers being too sensitive. If you can’t acknowledge that something in your writing can improve, that you might be too close to the work to be objective, then there’s really no reason for you to even be reading this blog, honestly.

But still, this has to be balanced with…

YOU’RE NOT WRONG ABOUT EVERYTHING

At the end of the day, you’re the writer. It’s your work. You get to choose which feedback to accept and which to reject, which makes the whole process a bit easier. There are times you should push back. But there are times where, even if you disagree with the feedback, it can still be really helpful.

For example, I was recently doing a rewrite of a spec script and sent it to my manager for review. One piece of his feedback hit hard: “I don’t feel like the protagonist has much of a personality.”

This is a huge problem. Your protagonist really needs a personality. That’s not even Fiction Writing 101, that’s just common sense. But here’s the thing…I didn’t completely agree with him on this. In my head, the character very much had a personality and I couldn’t understand why that wasn’t coming across the page.

After sitting with it for a while, I realized something. While I disagreed that my protagonist had no personality, I realized I hadn’t done a good enough job translating his personality out of my head onto the page. A few pretty simple tweaks to the script fixed it, just by making it a tad more obvious what I wanted the audience to know about the character. Even though I hadn’t made any major changes to him, the little tonal adjustments and notations I made brought my manager around to saying, “Yes, I can see who he’s supposed to be now.”

So even if you’re taking someone’s feedback with a grain of salt, that grain might be enough to add more flavor to your work, bringing in some nuance it was lacking before.

Which brings us to…

REMEMBER WHO YOU’RE WRITING FOR

It’s not uncommon for writers to start writing for our own enjoyment. Nothing wrong with that at all. But at a certain point, if you’re moving beyond hobby to professional, your writing has to be directed at other people — and you have to shift from writing for yourself to writing for others.

Any feedback you get should be filtered through this lens — Does this feedback reveal who I’m writing for? If it reveals you’re writing only for yourself, then plant a red flag there and do the hard work to figure out how to fix it. After all, you’re writing for your ideal reader…not for yourself. A lesson I wish I’d learned sooner.

But if the feedback reveals you’re writing it for others, then you need to ask the follow-up question “Who?” You could be speaking to the wrong audience — and that’s almost as bad as only writing for yourself. That’s exactly what I had done wrong with the book in question — I basically wrote it for the most hostile reader imaginable, not the most receptive. So it came across more as a sarcastic lecture rather than as helpful advice.

To keep this from happening to you, it’s a good exercise to create an avatar for your ideal reader. How old are they? What problem do they have? What topics interest them?

Don’t hear me wrong — it’s not a choice between writing something for yourself or writing something for others. You can do both — write something you enjoy but that will also be enjoyed by others. It’s a challenge, but it’s possible.

If you say, “Well, it’s for everyone,” then no amount of feedback will help you. You can’t write for everyone. In fact, that’s why we have genres. I even know people who hate The Lion King, for crying out loud. They’re wrong, but there it is.

When you remember who you’re writing for, who your ideal reader is, it helps guide you through the feedback you receive and approach it in service to your reader rather than in service to your own ego. That Ego guy can be really loud, but that doesn’t mean you have to listen.

And so you may have noticed that kind of brings us back to recognizing your own sensitivities. The more you practice this loop, the better you’ll get at it. Over time, your ego will get quieter and you’ll learn who to listen to and what part of their critique to give your attention to. Do it enough times and you’ll become better at self-critique, which is incredibly hard to master.

If this has been valuable for you, share with someone else who needs to hear it. And I’d love to send you my next newsletter where I include additional thoughts and writing advice. If that sounds like it would float your boat, you can sign up below.