Receiving feedback is an essential part of the creative process and improving as a writer, but it’s often one of the most cited things that writers struggle with. It’s a vulnerable position to put yourself into, and often getting feedback can be hard on the confidence.

Here are a few steps you can take for approaching feedback in a way that preserves your sanity while maximizing its usefulness.

1. Receiving Your Critique: Whether it’s comments on the document, a feedback letter, or IRL responses, when you first get feedback, keep an open mind. Focus on collecting the feedback in one place, but don’t do anything with it. Regardless of how you feel about it, thank the reader for their time and ask if they are open to possible follow-up questions.
2. Take Time to React: It can be hard to deal with criticism, especially negative critique. As much as most critique advice and formal critique format encouraged a logical approach that ignores the feelings that may come up, I think it’s important to give yourself the space to react, so it doesn’t affect your ability to approach it in later stages. Complain to your friends about it, journal about it, whatever you need to do to let yourself feel your feelings in private.
3. Get into the Feedback.
   • Now that you’ve felt your feelings about it, let it all go and go back to the feedback with an open mind, but remember that at the end of the day, you’re the author. The feedback may be right, the suggestions may be good ones, but if they don’t work for your vision, you don’t have to incorporate every bit of feedback into your story.
   • Be Realistic for your Draft Stage. If you were happy with your overall story before receiving feedback, and didn’t plan to make any major plot changes, don’t feel you have to because of one reader’s feedback. If it’s an early draft that you are open to major changes in, that’s the time to consider major changes.
   • Go through the feedback piece by piece and sort them into categories: Accepted Feedback (will be incorporated into the next draft), Maybe/Partial (good feedback, but for some reason or another may not be fully incorporated), Rejected Feedback (not useful for your next draft)
     • I recommend keeping a record of all feedback, even if you decide not to incorporate some of it. I’ve had feedback that initially I could not find a way to work in but after receiving feedback from another reader or making a different change, I found the opportunity to make it work. There’s also a chance that we reject feedback because it’s hard to incorporate or conflicts with the vision, but that can change.
     • For feedback in the maybe or rejection category: Consider if the critique is getting at issues with your story, but in a way different to the reader’s interpretation. If the reader doesn’t like a scene because it doesn’t make sense for the characters, maybe the scene in question is not the problem, but the characters need more fleshing out to support their behavior in the scene making sense. This is what I mean about keeping an open mind. Treat everything as an opportunity, even if you end up rejecting the suggestion itself. Always ask yourself: What can I gain from this?
   • Write out any questions you have regarding the feedback that you would like to ask your reader.
4. Ask Your Questions: Does any of the feedback confuse you? Is there anything that the reader may have missed that may change their understanding?
   • This can be a good test for what feedback might be worth discounting vs what might need some work.
   • Examples of a good follow up question:
     • You mentioned that you weren’t convinced by the relationship between Character A and Character B, can you tell me more about that?You mentioned that you didn’t like the X scene, but my goal for including it is [Reason]. Does that come through? Do you have any suggestions for how I might improve this scene while keeping [Reason]?
     • Once you get some clarification from your reader, thank them again for their time and add the info to your feedback record. I’ve had mixed success with follow up questions, but even a bad justification for not responding well to a story element can be useful. It can reveal what feedback may not be getting at the core of the issue, as well as reveal areas where the reader is commenting based on personal taste, which is up to your discretion on how much you consider that feedback in your work.
5. Plan of attack. How do you implement feedback?
   • Go through your Accepted and Maybe Feedback and brainstorm ideas for addressing them. This may include reader suggestions or not.
   • Reread your draft and identify the best places to implement your ideas, as well as what else may change to include it.
   • Get back to writing babe! You got this!

Writing is hard enough, without getting caught up in the feedback weeds. Using this method, you can approach feedback without fear and stay focused on how all critique can help you improve, even if the feedback itself doesn’t give you all the answers.

What Methods Do You Use to Address Feedback?
Any Success Stories of Great Feedback? Any Horror Stories?

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