Evaluating Reader Feedback
And Other Metaphors About Fish
“Remember: When people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.”
—Neil Gaiman
I want to talk about fonts again momentarily because a couple of funny things happened after I wrote the article the other day in Cambria font. First, one of my friends said that if any “C” font is on the table, then they were going to read in Comic Sans and there was just nothing I could do to stop them. Second, and pursuant to the first, someone sent me an opinion article on drafting using Comic Sans, as there some belief going around that it helps one write faster. (Note: The article also says that Comic Sans is dyslexia-friendly, something I’ve heard but have not been able to verify any research on.)
Long story short if there’s a chance I can write these faster using Comic Sans then I am simply going to do that. I will use any hack I can to write faster, except for closing down my social media windows while I write. That is one hack too far. Again, all this font stuff happens on the backend in my writing suite and you do not see the font I used when you look at Substack unless you change your web browser settings. I do not advise you change your browser settings to read Shelf Life in Comic Sans, Tim.
If you want my advice on how to write faster, I have some. Make yourself write two 2,000-word essays each week for a year or so and you will get much faster at writing.
Speaking of making yourself et cetera, I’ve written numerous articles now on the importance of seeking feedback on and applying it to your writing. I’ve written about why you should seek feedback, who you should seek it from, how you should ask for it, and how to manage your emotional response when confronted with feedback. Today’s article, in this same vein, is on how to evaluate the feedback you receive should you be brave enough to seek it.
All feedback is good to get. Meaning, when you request and receive feedback or critique, the more you get, and the more detailed it is, the better. Not all of what you get will be actionable or usable, though. Figuring out which feedback to use, which to discard, and how to use what you’ve chosen to use, is a whole skill in itself that is invaluable during the revision process.
This is also one of my areas of expertise as an editor, because I’ve done a lot of back-and-forth work with authors on a lot of different manuscripts and I’ve seen reactions to editorial feedback run the gamut from “reject all” to “accept all” and everything between. You may think that as an editor my preference would be for an author to accept all of my suggested edits and move right along to the next production phase—I mean, if authors don’t like getting rejections surely editors don’t like getting rejections either?
But my goal as an editor is not to get the highest possible percentage of my edits accepted into manuscript. My goal is to work with the author to produce the best possible version of the manuscript in front of me, a version of the manuscript that neither can produce without the other’s expertise.
Ultimately, you’re the author of your work. Only you know for sure what you intended to convey. Any reader who provides feedback—an editor, a peer critiquer, or a beta reader—provides their feedback based on the interpretation they take from your writing. This is the value they add. They will misunderstand things you thought were crystal clear, they will not understand things you thought you had sufficiently explained, and they will make suggestions sometimes that would change or alter your intent for the work.
Those types of comments are still useful to get. When I, as an editor, make a suggestion and say “hey you wrote X but I think you meant Y here. Did you mean Y?” Maybe the author didn’t mean Y. But if they indeed meant X, there’s a problem elsewhere that’s confusing the reader (me). Otherwise, I wouldn’t have suggested an edit to make it more clear. Perhaps the edit I suggested only leads the text further away from the intended meaning. That’s okay. That means the author will reject my edit, but hopefully they will internalize both pieces of the feedback I gave:
Did you mean Y instead of X?
If not, what the heck did you mean?
I haven’t gone fishing in a couple of years. I was about to tell you I haven’t fished since childhood, but that’s not true. I’ve been fishing in the last five years or so. I went fishing, I caught fish, and then I consumed those fish for sustenance. I’m actually afraid of fish, at least when they are alive. Also our boat almost sank. It was a very interesting experience all around.
When you request feedback on your writing, that’s like going fishing. You’re casting a net to see what you get back. If you catch something, that’s good. Your goal is to pull something up out of the deep. When you pull something up you have to decide whether you keep it or whether you throw it back. But even if you throw the fish back, pulling it up in the first place gives you information. It tells you there’s something in that water.
This was actually the only metaphor about fish, subtitle notwithstanding. There will be no more fish metaphors forthcoming today. Consider your fish metaphor expectations managed.
You don’t need to accept and address every comment you get from the people from whom you solicit feedback. I don’t. I find there are generally two ways I reject reader feedback. The first is to reject the feedback wholesale, that is, “I do not agree that anything needs to be changed here.” The second is to reject the specific feedback, that is to say, “I see that something needs to be changed here but I disagree with what.”
The first kind of rejection is dangerous and, in my experience, is often a defensive reflex. That’s my own hubris saying “nah, they’re wrong, the way I wrote it is fine. I know better.” This type of reaction is an excellent shortcut to a poor finished product. To make sure I’m not rejecting feedback from an emotional standpoint, I read all feedback I receive through once without making any notes or changes in my document. I open the feedback, I read all of it, and then I close it again and don’t come back to it for a few days. By then I’ve gotten over any emotional reaction I was going to have to the feedback—plus, my mind’s been processing it even if I’ve been focusing on other things—and I’m ready to sit down and get to work.
There will still be some feedback that I choose, after consideration, to reject and to leave the original text in that place. Those, however, should be few and far between.
When a reader makes a comment somewhere in your manuscript, pay attention. It might be a positive comment about something they liked, it might be a suggested change, or it might be a question about something they didn’t understand. Regardless, they’re giving you important information. The place where they inserted that comment in your document or picked up their pencil and scribbled a note is where something made an impact on them enough that they paused in their reading.
If the comment is positive, that’s information that however many revisions you go through you want to be cognizant that you don’t lose sight of something that made a reader stop to tell you how great it was.
If the comment is a question about something, resist the urge to explain to the reader what you meant. Like, hard squash that impulse. I will explain why.
Unless you chose someone with reading comprehension that is considerably more poor than you expect your average reader to have, then that reader telling you they didn’t understand something is almost certainly a writing problem and not a reading comprehension problem. Does this mean that no reader will ever understand it? No. But it means that some readers are likely to misunderstand. If the reader you chose for this task, who is reading carefully and trying to understand, needs clarification, then it’s a likely bet that many readers will.
In my opinion the best thing you can do in this case is try to revise in such a way that you eliminate the possibility of confusion and then ask the reader to consider the revision. If you squashed your impulse to explain to the reader exactly what was going on there and what you intended, then you have a golden opportunity to see if your fix resolved the issue.
I usually have more than one early reader take a look at my writing before I undertake a major revision. I follow up on their reads with targeted questions, and I may incorporate the feedback of one early reader into the questions I ask another early reader. I do my best to avoid leading questions and instead leave them open-ended for the reader to give as much information as they want. For example, instead of asking, “Do you understand why Cindy smashed the teacup?” I might ask, “What was Cindy’s motivation during the kitchen scene?”
Readers will tell you all sorts of things they understood from your text that you didn’t intend to put in. This is a feature, not a bug. If something can be interpreted three different ways, then three readers will each interpret it a different way and a fourth reader will come along and find a fourth way to interpret it that you didn’t realize was on the table.
The flip side of this is belaboring your points or overexplaining your meaning to the reader. There’s a fine line between explaining enough to make sure your readers can’t mistake you and explaining so much that they feel they’re being lectured or hit over the head. If a reader tells you there’s too much explaining, don’t breeze past their comment. Especially in adult fiction, overexplaining to your reader can be just as off-putting as underexplaining and confusing them.
In short, anywhere a reader says they liked something, or they didn’t like something, or that there’s too much or too little to convey your meaning, plant a red flag and make sure you’re confident any issues in that area are resolved before you call your manuscript done.
The way you resolve issues that readers identify, though, should really come from you as the author. If it’s a simple change (spelling, grammar, usage, mechanics, verb tense, et cetera), that can come from anyone and you’ll get the same result. Larger problems, though, require the author to resolve.
As an editor, when I suggest a rewrite to an author, I don’t just rewrite the text myself—although I may give a few examples of ways I think it could be rewritten to resolve the issue. I also explain why I believe the sentence or paragraph needs a rewrite: What is confusing about it? What is ambiguous? What is poorly organized? I don’t just want to slap a solution on the text and move on, but I want to make sure the author has the tools in hand to prepare a solution in their own voice and certify it as the best possible solution to whatever I identified.
If a reader identifies a problem and gives you an exact solution, don’t take this as an all-or-nothing proposition. You can accept that they’ve identified an issue without taking their suggested solution. You need not throw out the baby with the bathwater.
Voice is an important aspect of narrative writing, maybe one of the most important. Check out how many people tweeting to the #mswl hashtag are asking for “voicey” fiction. Even if someone has offered you an excellent solution to a problem in your manuscript, make sure you take a step back and consider the substance of it apart from the style. Whatever solution you implement, make sure you use the same voice that you’ve used for the rest of the piece—or you’ll may create another problem (maybe a smaller problem) where you just fixed one.
By the way: If you find yourself with a critique partner, editor, or beta reader that you just don’t mesh with, it’s okay to throw them back and cast your line again. There are always more fish in the sea.
Surprise, that’s it, that’s your “[and] other metaphor[s] about fish.” Have a nice Thursday.
A friend and I were talking the other day about major revisions and the surgical scars these leave on a manuscript and I’ve been doing some thinking as I undertake a major revision this week about how to minimize and disguise those scars so look for an article on plastic manuscript surgery sometime soon.
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