You don’t need to tell me it’s shit
The art of giving feedback
I wrote for The Critic about being glad to grow up without a phone; you can read it here.
People always underestimate how often artists get told what they’ve made is shit. Indeed, a lot of the experience, whether you’re producing great work or shit, is being told that you’re shit. Even if you make an absolute masterpiece, and it becomes over time recognized as a masterpiece, you will still have been told many times over that said masterpiece is shit.
In my writing life, I’ve been told countless times that pieces I’m working on are awful, that I should do something else, that someone needs to tell me this. Over time I’ve also come to realize that this kind of feedback is the kind that can be safely ignored; hatchet jobs are rarely performed in the best interests of their target. It is in fact much more usually an expression of confrontation and dominance and the ego of the giver who has taken themselves as being ‘prepared to give it you straight.’
I suppose being slated is better than being ignored. For the other big feedback you get as an artist is – well, nothing. I always find that the strangest thing doing the kind confessional writing which I do; I can be putting the most self-revealing stuff out there in the world and I meet someone who asks ‘What have you been up to?’ You know, I just published a 1500 word essay about my ongoing spiritual crisis, which you can read for free and… ‘Oh, this and that.’
So when you find someone prepared to give good feedback to you, treasure them. If someone gives their time to engage deeply with what you’ve done, and offer you honest and carefully chosen words on how it could be better too, they are showing great kindness. It’s worth saying to that you are offering them something special too, the chance to see work at a developing stage where, crucially, their impressions can still have an impact on a final form.
It’s also about working out who is the right person to give feedback at different stages of a piece’s evolution. Getting that wrong can really give you a false idea about the relative state of your work. Over time, I’ve evolved a system of feedback for my own writing which aims to gradually upgrade the severity of the feedback as the redrafting process continues.
Let me outline it to you below.
Sweethearts Tier
This is for the sweethearts, the people whose main role as readers is to encourage you. The principal occupant of this tier for me is one man, my friend Stephen, who has been an unerring and faithful reader of my writing for over a decade now. His main role is to ensure that I haven’t written complete gibberish; in terms of criticism, if Stephen points out there’s a problem, it’s always in the kindest way. In a way, the most important thing Stephen does here is to read the piece at all. He offers the first confirmation that my piece exists in the world.
The initial word from Stephen serves mainly to encourage me to continue redrafting. Once I have the approval from him, I put the piece through another draft. I can normally spot a lot of the big problems myself at this stage, and am often adding more material.
After that draft’s done, I send it onto the next tier.
Friends of the Show Tier
This is quite a flexible tier, which people drift in and out of; some of the readers will be those who’ve expressed a bit of interest in other things I’ve written of late. There might be five or six readers at this stage, as I need a slightly larger data sample at this point. I might also need to contact an expert reader about a specific scene or moment here, for example if I need help with a foreign language phrase or piece of cultural context. In that case I send them just the relevant section with a context note, rather than the whole text.
Generally, what I’m looking for now are recurring problems – Is more than one person saying the same thing? You’ll be surprised how often the exact same scene, moment or line of dialogue will crop up in reader feedback. Almost always that means something needs to be done. That might of course be nothing, but if you’re not changing something in the face of strong advice to, you also need to work out why.
At this stage you’ll also start getting contrary feedback on the text (‘I loved the beginning’, ‘The beginning dragged’). There is a certain degree of inevitable subjectivity in the reaction to anything you produce. But I think with a sample size of four or five readers you’ll get to know the outliers and, if the people have been kind enough to read things you’ve written before, you’ll also recognize to where your readers’ tastes incline. It’s only on the genuinely finished product that a consensus as to what works for most people emerges, so it’s simply not possible to attain a settled verdict at this stage.
As a point of order, if you’re sending out the text to several people, do try and make sure they all have the same version. Of course, may well have continued to work on the text in the meantime while waiting for the feedback; it’s often hard to stop fiddling, particularly as feedback comes in in dribs and drabs1. Yet be flexible and don’t respond to their feedback with ‘Oh, I’ve already changed that’ – just feel quietly validated if you have.
When I’ve finally cleared this tier - and it can take six months - I now put things through another draft or two and take particular care that there aren’t basic spelling errors. You need your text in a much better state to meet its sternest level of challenge.
Hard Cases Tier
These people are usually academics. They are pedantic. They are merciless. Even though your piece has already been much improved, they tear it to pieces. Inevitably, when they have a problem, it seems very big to them. When they praise something, you know it’s good.
But they take your work and indeed all work seriously, and deep attention always has a kindness to it. In terms of their actual criticism, they’re invariably right in 80% of what they say, and the remaining 20% helps you work out what parts of your text you really don’t want to compromise on. The crucial thing is not to put a text to this level before it’s ready, and also not to be devastated if they are harshly critical. This level will never truly praise you, only minimize their complaints. The reason to open yourself up to their shellacking is that almost inevitably you end up with a stronger text at the end.
You can, by the way, almost always ignore this tier’s views on politics; that’s their own thing which they’re bringing to the table from an academic and intellectual context, whereas your job is to create a text which works in a general one.
The crucial thing you require from all these readers, and the only thing which should disqualify someone from being part of your feedback team, is an understanding that they are not reviewing a finished work. They are reading a text in flux, which can be altered, restructured, a text where a small change in one paragraph can make a huge difference. I once received a criticism about the implausibility of a particular plot point from a Hard Case reader, who sent me a lengthy note on why this was a fundamental issue for the text, and I sent him back a paragraph with just three words changed but which resolved his question. He conceded that I had shown him that a lot could be improved with small changes.
Once I’ve run the Hard Cases gauntlet, I print out a copy of the document, mark it up with corrections and, after another draft, either follow it up with one of the earlier readers - if they have the energy to read again - or consider where I’ll be sending it.
The advice which is always useless, and again comes from our introductory hatchet job, is ‘Why did you write this?’ Namely when someone objects to you having picked a particular topic in the first place.
The thing is, it’s rather difficult in life to get the motivation to write anything. I’m unusually motivated in this regard, but even I need to find the spark, the little donnée or detail which Henry James used to claim inspired his stories, the sensation which gets me motivated to put pen on paper (and I do write first drafts in pen). I personally almost never write out of an idea but from an image or a scene, or as likely an emotional situation, which I feel compelled to explore and communicate. If it lacks that I can’t get it down in the first place! So often in discussion, even with people giving otherwise good feedback, the point comes up of ‘Why did you pick this particular topic?’ and relatedly ‘Why don’t you write this instead?’ At which the only real answer can be – You write that, then. You’re obviously interested in it.
There’s a certain delusion to making creative work but the process is inevitably sobering. Most artists, and particularly artists trying to break through, are not sitting around having smoke blown up their arse. It’s hard. Hard to get people to look at your stuff, hard to get people who want to take it forward, very hard to earn a cent. It’s difficult enough to get engagement with stuff that you’re literally giving away for free. So striding in to someone working hard on their art and issuing a firm ‘This is shit, and I’m the one to tell you’ is in fact an act of egotism. Even people who aren’t convinced of what you’re doing, if they want the best for you, will find a way of holding your hand and steering you towards their viewpoint rather than trashing it outright. Behind many a broadside, I suspect, is a silent outrage that you have the temerity to create work at all.
Finally, though holistic feedback is useful (‘This isn’t working for me’, ‘I dislike this character’), specifics are even better. ‘The character forgets their hat on page 75’ is a million times more helpful than ‘It need to be more exciting’. Such small changes always make a big impact on the pleasure of the reader as they are no longer being jolted out of the text for those small instants of things not working. A piece, like a messy room, doesn’t look messy and then suddenly become clean; a gradual process of individual acts of tidying results in a tip gradually becoming orderly. It’s just not that useful, when you’re busy cleaning up, for someone to offer the comment of ‘Well, look at all this mess.’ You need someone who’ll pick up a broom. That’s what feedback on writing is – enlisting the help of others to get your text in the best possible shape before you send it out to be, all being well, excellent and ignored.
Obviously, one basic issue you’ll have over time is that people will give you feedback at different times, and different tiers can feedback at once. This is unavoidable, but over time you can learn to plan your schedule about who is likely to take a while to feedback and who is a punt as to whether they feedback at all. It’s up to you if, when readers get in touch after a long time asking whether you still want something reading, you update them with a new version or not.
Thanks for the insights into the process you go through. Very thought-provoking, and very much not shit!
this is a great piece, but might i make a few suggestions?
(just kidding x)