Let it Go! How to Really Receive Feedback

Pain. Suffering. Disillusionment. Here’s a piece of candy! Doom. 

Receiving feedback can be a lot like an intense deep-tissue massage. Nearly every moment of attention can make authors want to weep, and we cling to those tiny pop rock candy sparks that tell us we’re doing well. Yet, we know that the pain also leads to gain, even the satisfaction of improving our work.  

I’m a battleground-tested and tempered-steel-hardened warrior in the kiln of many workshops. Being in my sixth decade of life and my fifth as a writer, I was putting my writing into the hands of people back in the dark days of silent authors and cutting critiques as the central guiding principles of writing workshops. This personal gutting experience means that my first bit of advice for receiving feedback is knowing where to seek it and who to trust. If pain is also your pleasure, there are opportunities for abrupt and unsubtle writing advice to ransack you. I don’t know where those places are because my recommendation is to find the people who will “Tell all the truth but tell it slant,” as Emily Dickinson offers us in her poem “1263”. In other words, seek out those people who are invested in your vision as an author and who are willing to use constructive criticism to help you reach your goals. Even with people who have your best interests at heart, feedback can hurt. After all, we pour our hearts and souls into the words we write, and discovering our prose doesn’t achieve the profound impact on our readers that it made on us can be devastating.  How can we gird ourselves to receive feedback so that we can move past what hurts to discover what helps? 

Here are some tips for brushing off our defensiveness and soothing the sting that any feedback can give:

  • Begin with gratitude. Think how busy you are. Another busy person took the time to read your work and offer you suggestions. They wouldn’t do that work if they weren’t trying to help. Time is a gift.
  • Be sympathetic. When we give feedback, we are supposed to inhabit the author’s intent. When you receive feedback, understand that the critic is trying to help. (And, if you decide they are not trying to help, then just let it go. Ignore the feedback and move on to someone else. If they are intentionally cruel, they are not worth your time.)
  • Pay attention to where. Maybe you don’t agree with the feedback you’re so grateful you received from a sympathetic critic. You know they are trying to help, but you’re certain they are wrong. Critics nearly always succeed in noting a place in our writing that isn’t working, even if they aren’t always successful in describing exactly what isn’t working. Now it’s up to you to figure it out.

The amazing Tiffany Yates Martin, author of Intuitive Editing, writes about mistaken feedback, instructing us to “See if you can look beyond the reader’s actual advice and winnow out the core of what prompted it.” Martin also notes, “Knowing when to kill and when to stand your ground and develop a problem area is some of the hardest work of revision.” 

I couldn’t agree more. First, with gratitude and sympathy, let’s be open to figuring out when to kill and when to stand our ground and fight. Our next moving might be asking how to combat desires to preserve work, just because we wrote it, and knowing when it’s time to remain true to a manuscript instead of just true our hearts. Ask these questions:

  • Does the work work? Take a good hard look at the moment you’re particularly invested in and ask yourself, does this move my writing toward the big “so what”? In other words, does the material on the page help the scene or paragraph or chapter push your reader in the direction of the insight and wisdom you’re creating?
  • Have I defined my darlings and killed them anyway? Much the same as the first bullet, ask yourself if the writing is on the page because it’s precious to you rather than precious to the meaning. Have you captured the wolf-light glow of the harvest moon so perfectly that you can’t stand to cut your beautiful figurative language? Put on your ruthless britches and especially pay attention to the parts you love. Everything is up for the chopping block.
  • Do I need time to cool off? If you need some distance, try putting away the feedback for a little while. When you pull it back out, try to remain neutral and ask yourself if it improves the manuscript. Does the advice nourish your goals as an author? And can you be honest enough to let down that ego-wall and see that you need to change?

All these suggestions on the presumption that you’re responding to good feedback from a knowledgeable workshop partner. Never feel obligated to respond to or make changes based off of emotional language such as “I hated this” or “I loved that.” Make sure you’re tangling your guts into a knot over constructive feedback aimed at improving your vision for your work.

When someone has given you amazing feedback, let them know. Never forget that this kind of engagement is a two-way street. If someone is helping us with our work, we should always be willing to return the favor with the same level of attentiveness and generosity.

The most important thing about receiving feedback is moving past our emotional response where we struggle against everything our critic offers us so that we can engage in guidance that can improve our writing. Better prose is all any of us want from critiques.

In the end, remain committed to my 98-year-old Grandma Liz’s advice: “Let it go.” 

When you ask, “But, Grandma, how do you let it go?” 

She’ll tell you, “You just do.”

Works Cited

Dickinson, Emily. “Tell all the truth but tell it slant.” Poetry Foundation. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/56824/tell-all-the-truth-but-tell-it-slant-1263. Accessed 31 October 2024.

Martin, Tiffany Yates. “How to Utilize Critique and Incorporate It into Your Story.” FoxPrint Editorial. https://foxprinteditorial.com/2021/07/29/how-to-utilize-critique-and-incorporate-it-into-your-story/. Accessed 31 October 2024.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

MaxieJane Frazier, Mighty Mule Editing, is a writer, editor, and educator. An instructor for Southern New Hampshire University’s MA in English creative writing program, an author, and a full-time editor, coach, and educator, she engages in the practice of writing and editing every day. Her MFA is from the Bennington Writing Seminars. She earned her Book Development certificate from Queens University of Charlotte, her MFA in Fiction and Nonfiction from the Bennington Writing Seminars, and her Ph.D. in Literature from the University of Delaware. Max’s super power is maintaining an author’s voice and vision while helping develop thematic threads, consistent plot, character development, and readability.

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