Sneak Critique

The Most Important Feedback I Ever (Almost) Missed

“To avoid criticism, say nothing, do nothing, be nothing.”

—Elbert Hubbard

Welcome back to your regularly scheduled Tuesday Shelf Life. Now that my life’s work is out of the way I’ll get back to writing the garbage content you have come to expect and maybe even look forward to.

This is the paragraph in which I tell you what today’s article is about. Let me state it clearly, in no uncertain terms: Today’s article is about to throw my bestie under a bus. Sorry, my dear. It has to be done. The people can learn from this fail, and learning from Catherine’s many fails is really what Shelf Life is all about.

A neat thing I have found about writing, and not even just recently, is that if you put it out there you’ll get feedback—whether you’re looking for feedback or not. I think this is great. I love getting feedback. Some people don’t love it as much as I do. Your mileage may vary. I’ve got a lot of topics on feedback in the editorial calendar—how to request it, how to give it, how to use it when you get it—but today is all about how to recognize the sneaky feedback that doesn’t always sound like feedback when you hear it.

In March 2015, I gave up on trying to make Los Angeles happen and returned to my home state of Maryland. Before leaving LA, boosted by the prospect of leaving and getting back in closer proximity to my robust social support network, I experienced a burst of good mental health and productivity and used it to draft a novel.

At this point in the story, someone usually interjects to say: “Hey let me read your thing, I want to read the thing.”

Look, you don’t want to read the thing. It’s not very good. That’s not me being hard on myself. It’s a carefully considered assessment backed up by several facts.

Still, I’m glad I had the experience of writing it, which taught me several things like:

• What it takes to sit down and knock out a 70,000-word draft in a short period of time.

• How to prevent myself from editing as I go so I don’t destroy my progress.

• Strategies for tracking progress to keep myself motivated without burning out.

Anyway, writing a bad novel was a good experience. I think a lot of writers’ first novels—if not all first novels—are pretty bad. In which case, I’m in good company.

So I wrote it and I put it in a virtual drawer and I forgot about it for a while. I moved back to Maryland. I had a lot of other stuff going on.

Moving back to Maryland was great and gave me the opportunity to reconnect with a lot of people I had missed terribly, including my East Coast bestie, who for the purposes of this article I will call “Jess,” because her name is Jess. Mental health situation shaky, employment situation shaky, social situation rock solid.

After I got into the swing of things—the swing of Maryland things being much as you would expect, putting Old Bay on all my food, sporting Maryland flag apparel on every body part, collecting Big Boyz Bail Bonds ballpoint pens in the bottom of my purse—I started thinking about that novel tucked away in its hiding place. I dusted it off and read through it myself. I’m an editor first of all, so I could see right away that it needed a lot of work. Still, the bones were there and the story was compelling enough to keep me interested all the way through. I thought, maybe I’ll seek some feedback on it. Why not?

Jess had said several times that she wanted to read it if I ever wanted to share so one day I mustered all my courage and granted her access to the file. I knew that Jess had a busy job and a young child to care for so I didn’t expect a quick turnaround. Low priority. Just when you have the time.

She dug into the file pretty quick and made a few comments in the first thousand words or so and then . . . nothing.

I waited awhile, a week or a few weeks, and then casually asked her if she’d had time to look at it. She complained of being super busy with work, social and family obligations, and her son. Totally understandable. I let it go. Over time I began to suspect she wasn’t really going to get around to it. When she eventually recommended that I check out an Imogen Binnie novel she had just finished reading, I accepted that she wasn’t going to get around to it.

I thought I was never going to get feedback on this project from Jess. What I didn’t understand yet is that Jess had actually given me the most valuable feedback possible, which was this: If my biggest cheerleader, the person who has more incentive to read my work than anyone else, can’t get into it—then no one is ever going to be able to get into it.

Jess turned me on to a totally rad realization that had never occurred to me before: Every response to your writing, whatever that response may be, is feedback for you. Even the lack of a response is feedback.

Herewith, I have assembled for you a few of the common sneaky critiques I’ve seen in the wild that you might get, and some advice on how to address the issues that you’re actually being told about.

“I didn’t finish reading it.”

Harsh, I know. If your reader didn’t read you, that’s a huge takeaway. I’m sure everyone has had the experience of reading a book that you couldn’t put down, that you stayed up way too late reading and ruined your next morning because you were so engrossed. And I’m sure many or most people have also had the experience of reading a book you struggle to finish because it just didn’t grab you. Everyone wants to be the writer of that first kind of book.

Everyone is busy, no question. Nobody’s not busy. But most people find time to take in the media that they want to consume. If your reader tells you they’re too busy to read you, they’re not being deceitful. They really are too busy to get to your writing. If they didn’t even start it, then you have to consider whether this person is too busy to help you out right now. But you also should consider how you pitched it to them. If your pitch isn’t solid, doesn’t get the prospective reader excited about diving in, then you have some work to do. If you can’t successfully pitch your story to friends and family so that they’re excited to start reading, then you are nowhere near ready to pitch to an agent or publisher. 

If they started to read and they stopped then what they are telling you is that something about your work isn’t allowing them to take it to the top of their priority list. They started reading and it just didn’t grab them. Maybe there was too much exposition right at the start. Maybe you dropped the reader into your story in medias res (a great strategy) but it was too confusing off the break for them to get invested. Maybe you opened with an unappealing character. Whatever you started them off with, it didn’t inspire them to continue.

You might be tempted to say: “Well if they just gave it a chance, it really starts picking up in Chapter 2.” Listen, it needs to start picking up in Chapter 1. On page one. A friend or family member—someone you personally know—already has a greater incentive to keep going than any other reader of your book will ever have. If Chapter 1 didn’t draw them in enough to get them to Chapter 2 where the action picks up, then I respectfully submit that Chapter 1 needs to be removed.

“I didn’t understand it.”

This one is a doozy. Maybe you’ve heard it: “I liked it but I just didn’t understand this part right here.” Your reader got through the whole thing, however long it was, but there was some part or aspect—maybe even multiple things—that they didn’t understand.

Your first impulse might be to assume that this is a reader problem. The reader didn’t try hard enough to understand, or the reader wasn’t smart enough to understand, your clever writing. Whatever they’re telling you they didn’t understand—well you wrote it that way on purpose. It’s supposed to require careful thought and analysis! It’s supposed to throw the reader for a little loop! Right?

No way. When your reader doesn’t understand something about your story, plot, or writing, that’s a writing problem. That means that you, as a writer, didn’t do a good enough job making things clear. If someone says to you “I did not understand X” and you lean forward to explain “X” to them so they can understand—listen to yourself very carefully. Seriously, turn on your smartphone’s recording app so you can listen to yourself again later. The things you are saying need to go into your story. They need to be worked in somehow.

There’s a range of “I didn’t understand it” issues. Consider “I couldn’t follow who was speaking in a rapid dialogue exchange”—that one is really common and pretty easy to fix by throwing in some more dialogue tags and maybe examining whether the characters in the exchange have voices that are too similar.

But what about something more fundamental, like “I didn’t understand how the characters got from point A to point B” or “I couldn’t figure out what the relationship was between these two people”? Those might take more work and careful thought to get right without beating your reader over the head with exposition. Start by figuring out exactly what you wanted your reader to know that they didn’t pick up (“they got in a car and drove to the new location after the murder and before the body was found” or “these two women are estranged half-sisters”). Then look for ways to make it more explicit with your writing. You don’t have to come straight out and say “Marybeth and Sue Ellen are half-sisters.” One of them might say or think about “our dad” instead of “my dad.” You can include the necessary details in a way that still challenges your reader to put the puzzle pieces together. But you have to put all the pieces in there.

This calls back to some of the thoughts from the recent article on worldbuilding: You’re writing from a place of knowing everything about your world and its characters. They’re reading from a place of knowing nothing. You might want the reader to infer, extrapolate, or guess something—and that’s fine!—but you need to give them all the information they need to make that mental leap.

“I love it. No notes!”

The most insidious feedback. What does it mean? Get out your tarot deck, tea leaves, and runes—this one is wide open to interpretation. It could mean:

• I didn’t finish reading it and I don’t want to admit it.

• I didn’t like it at all and I don’t know how to tell you.

• I didn’t like parts of it but I’m not sure why I didn’t like them.

• I liked it but didn’t put a lot of thought into what parts I liked and why.

And last but not least, it could truly mean:

• I loved it and would not change anything.

This is the feedback that feels great on first blush—yay, whatever I wrote is so amazing it can’t be improved in any way!—but it doesn’t provide you with anything useful other than a boost of confidence. It can even be harmful to your writing if it sets you on the path to thinking your work can’t or doesn’t need to improve.

If you get this feedback, consider the source. Are they someone who normally speaks their opinion boldly or someone who avoids confrontation? Are they someone who considers media critically or someone who generally enjoys all the media they consume? You may still be able to coax useful details out of some of these folks if you ask the right way.

If your editor friend gave you this feedback—“Perfect, no comments!”—there’s an excellent chance they didn’t read it and don’t want to admit that. I’ve never seen an editor have no feedback on a piece of writing. Conversely, if your doting grandma gave you this feedback, there’s an excellent chance that she really does think it is perfect in every way and has nothing specific to offer. 

In other situations, you may be able to probe a bit to get something actionable. Try questions like “What did you like best?” that segue into questions like “What wasn’t working quite as well?” The eagerness or resistance with which your reader will engage you in talking about your writing is feedback. Enthusiasm is feedback. Lack of enthusiasm is definitely feedback.

If you’ve gotten other sneak critiques and non-feedback feedback like the stuff described today, drop a comment or send me an email to let me know. I would love to add it to my arsenal of things to look out for when I put writing out there into the world for consumption. Got some puzzling feedback that you’re not sure how to interpret or implement? More on these subjects in the days ahead.

TL;DR: Every response to your writing is feedback. Every single response. Every single nonresponse.

I hope you’ll come by again on Thursday to engage in a little conversation about my favorite dramatic principle. You know it best as a gun, but I like to call it the Rule of Ripley’s Exosuit Cargo Loader. Sure you’ve heard it before, but not like this. Hit that subscribe button to make sure you don’t miss out!

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