One of the hardest parts of being a writer is receiving negative feedback on a piece of work you’ve poured your heart and soul into.
But in today’s article, I’m going to let you in on a little secret that’ll help you turn that negative feedback into positive growth. That’ll help you use said feedback to improve your craft, and better your writing.
Let’s dive straight in, shall we?
The first time I received feedback on a piece I’d written was in my Master’s degree. We’d send out the piece we were working on a few days prior, and then everyone would come prepared with their notes to class. Your job, then, was to sit and listen to what everyone had to say, and try and digest it in real-time.
Which is… uncomfortable.
Now, I think the reason why a lot of writing classes, courses, and programmes do this sort of roundtable feedback is to teach two important lessons.
Firstly, it’s trying to teach us to be less precious about our first drafts. To see them not as final pieces, but as the first hunk of roughly hewn stone in your sculpture. You’ve given the stone some form, and the feedback is meant to help you rework and refine until your piece starts to resemble a real sculpture.
The second reason I think this method is so frequently employed is because it teaches us to listen. In our feedback sessions, the author couldn’t rebut feedback, or provide any counter-defence. Whilst this may feel uncomfortable, it’s actually quite a good trick to circumvent one of the first emotions that rears its ugly head when someone tells you that actually, they hated your main character and you need to make them more likeable.
Defensiveness.
You’ve spent hours working on this! And they’re going to come along and rip it apart in the span of a few minutes? How dare they!
Well, that’s defensiveness talking. And defensiveness isn’t thinking about the future possibilities of your work, or how this feedback could make it even better. All defensiveness wants to do is defend. So, by forcing us to sit and listen to all the feedback before offering any counter ideas or arguments, we learnt to try and silence the defensive voice in our minds (or at least quieten it. I’m not sure it ever goes away entirely).
Now, the reason I wouldn’t recommend this type of feedback for your writing if you are not in a formal programme is because it’s quite uncomfortable, and actually – you can learn these lessons without running the gauntlet of group feedback. In fact, that’s what we’re going to talk about today! How to take “negative” writing feedback and turn it into positive growth for your writing. Starting with my first and most important writing tip:
1. Separate yourself from your writing
Writers pour a lot of themselves into their writing. It’s a solitary art, and it’s also a labour of love, so it’s no surprise that you might see negative feedback on your writing as negative feedback on you. But there’s a trick to learning how to separate yourself from your writing – and you already have it within you. You just have to engage another side of your brain.
In a much earlier post, I talk about how each writer has two sides to them. We have our creative side, which nurtures ideas and helps us turn the images into our heads onto words on paper. And then we have our analytical side, which comes in midway through a sentence and starts saying all sorts of unhelpful things like: are you sure that’s the right word to use? Is this sentence bad? I think it’s bad.
Now, the strength of our creative side is that it’s excellent in the writing process. Our creative side is what likes to work with description, symbolism, sub-text. The weakness of our creative side is that it doesn’t want to kill its darlings. That’s when the strength of your analytical side comes in. Your analytical side is crucial in the editing process – because you can use it to try and approach your piece from a third-party perspective.
So when it comes to receiving feedback, switch off your slightly squishier creative side, and bring your analytical side to the conversation. It’ll put more distance between you and your work, and hopefully allow you to view the feedback with a bit more objectivity.
2. Try and reframe what “negative” means in your mind
When I first started sharing my work with other writers, I would have defined “negative” feedback as any kind of feedback that could be construed as criticism. Which of course meant I took a look at my first drafts and saw them littered with negative feedback.
Fast forward to today, and my definition of negative feedback is very different. In fact, I can say I haven’t received a single piece of negative feedback on any of my writing. Not because I’m suddenly a perfect writer (far from it – I think our craft is something we constantly work at and improve) but because I’ve reworked my mental picture of what “negative” is.
For me, feedback is only negative if it’s not able to push me, or my writing, to do better. So someone writing “this is awful!” on my piece would fall under this definition. This is negative feedback obviously, but worse than that – it’s not something I can do anything with. Why is it awful? How is it awful? I have no way of knowing from that comment alone. However, someone writing “This is awful, because it’s breaking the characterisation you’ve worked so hard to set up earlier. Would this character really do this?” is very helpful feedback. It still might feel uncomfortable receiving it, but it forces you to go back and think: is this action / reaction consistent with the character I am trying to build?
It pushes your writing to be better.
3. Take time to reflect on feedback
One of my biggest piece of advice for writers is to try and take some time to reflect on feedback before responding to it. That’s another reason why I think the writer’s room format isn’t helpful for newer writers (as I was at the time) because it forces you to process and react in the span of about an hour. Nowadays, if I find myself reacting to a piece of feedback, I put it away. I step away from my desk, and go for a walk – and I’ll think about it.
This helps me create a bit of space between the work and the comment, so that I can think about both of them a bit more objectively. Sometimes it takes me a few days to come around to the idea that perhaps this is a better direction for my story, after all – and then comes the fun part of brainstorming how it can be applied. But it’s very hard to go from being in love with your story to agreeing you’ll change a core part of it – that’s why it’s good to try and create a bit of thinking space in between.
There are also plenty of instances where you might not agree to change what has been suggested – and that’s OK. You don’t have to action all of the feedback you’re given, but I do recommend you listen to it. Is there a pattern to this feedback? Is there something you’ve missed? For example, if someone is telling me on page 50 that it feels a bit sudden for my main characters to fall in love, and I’m sitting there thinking: “but it has to be page 150! That’s the midpoint! That’s the hinge of the story!” then what this actually means is I need to go back, and seed their burgeoning relationship a bit better so that by the time we reach page 150, the reader goes: “finally!”.
4. View feedback as an educational tool to improve your writing
I work with a fantastic group of writers at my day job, and we all have our own strengths when it comes to writing. That’s why I love receiving feedback from each of them on my articles, because I know that their feedback is going to help me lean on their strengths, and improve my writing.
If you can view receiving and accepting feedback as a way to learn from other writers, rather than as something negative and unwanted, then it can actually help you push your craft to the next level. I discovered quickly I’m an over-user of commas. Commas everywhere! And thanks to my colleagues I’ve started to get a little better. And that brings me to my fifth and I think most important tip:
5. Share your writing with other writers, and keep the group very small
I share my work with one other writer regularly, aside from my agent and editor. And that works very well for both of us, because we’ve known each other for a number of years, and we trust each other. When Dan tells me an opening scene isn’t working, we have a conversation about what I am trying to achieve, and then I go back to the drawing board.
It’s really important you find a writer that you trust to share your work with because then you know that their feedback is coming from a good place, and also from a position of knowledge. A reader might be able to tell you that something isn’t working, but a writer can tell you why it’s not working. A reader might be able to tell you the book feels slow, but a writer will be able to help you work out why the pacing is off. And that is going to help you push your craft just that step further.
How do you share your writing with others? And do you have any more tips for handling feedback? Let me know in the comments!
Until next time – happy writing, writers!
The Lamplighter’s Bookshop – coming February 2025!
Scheduled for February 2025, The Lamplighter’s Bookshop is my debut novel, a historical romance set in 1899 telling the story of Evelyn Seaton, the aristocratic daughter of a gambling father. The synopsis reads: “After she and her mother are made destitute, Evelyn secretly answers an advertisement for a bookshop assistant at the shambling yet captivating Lamplighter’s Bookshop in York, but she is not the only candidate … competition comes in the person of William, a charming yet enigmatic writer hiding secrets of his own.”
Sophie Writes 