This is the most important thing anyone will ever tell you about the feedback process. Because feedback from readers is the only way you’ll ever know if you hit what you were aiming at, this is also the most important thing anyone will ever tell you about being a writer:
You have to have enough ego to take the crap,
but not so much that you can’t listen.
Nothing else is more important to your overall success. Not your natural talent, not your connections, not luck. Nothing.
— Mark Barrett
I was out and about conducting business today, when I happened past a storefront that had some interesting art in the front window. On closer inspection the images turned out to be part of a work-in-progress graphic novel, and I was taken by what I saw.
I didn’t have time to loiter, however, so I looked around until I found a URL for the artist. Unfortunately, while I had a pad of paper, I’d forgotten a pen so I couldn’t write it down. Because I don’t use a cell phone or PDA or electronic placenta of any kind I had to rely on memory to remember as much as I could, and I did my best.
Five hours later, when I finally got around to trying to look up the URL, the ol’ memory banks were pretty much empty. But here’s the thing. In less that three minutes I was still able to locate the artist’s site with this basic search.
But enough about me. Here’s Laura Lee’s site.
Enjoy.
— Mark Barrett
By Mark 2 Comments
Readers are hard to come by, and good, trusted readers are almost impossible to find. If you disrespect your readers or trivialize the effort they put in, they may not want to read your work again. Worse, if they do read for you again they may not give you their honest opinion — either subconsciously, out of a desire to avoid another bad experience, or on purpose, to punish you for being a jerk.
Trusted readers are people who show a consistent capacity for providing useful feedback. Maybe they simply have a good batting average; maybe their batting average isn’t great, but they’re particularly sharp about plot logic or character development. Such readers are rare, and should be treated accordingly.
Trusted readers come in two flavors: people who can reliably respond about the effect a story had on them, and people who can articulate why something in a story didn’t work. The difference between the two is that the people in the second group are almost always writers themselves. While honest readers are valuable, professional-grade writers who are willing to give you feedback are worth their weight in gold.
If you have the choice, get feedback from as many readers as you can before asking for feedback from writers. If you’re confused about any reader reactions, the writers might be able to help you solve those problems, but the reverse will probably not be the case.
— Mark Barrett
A few days ago I posted this on Twitter:
Is this too simple? Bookstore + foot traffic (location, location, location) = survival? Bookstore + mall parking lot = death?
Yesterday, Barnes and Noble announced that they were looking for a buyer:
The retailer said its board decided to explore a possible sale and other strategic alternatives because its stock was “significantly undervalued.”
I don’t think brick-and-mortar bookstores are going to disappear, now matter how easy the internet makes the book-buying process. I also don’t think independent bookstores will die out, while corporate bookstores will survive. Rather, I think select independents in prime foot-traffic locations will remain viable, while everyone else will either die a slow death or be subsumed into other outlets. (Imagining B&N as three aisles of a Sears, K-Mark or Wal-Mart store is not hard to do.)
At the macro level the internet continues to replace the interstate and all of its tributaries. Where before we drove to destinations to purchase products, now we search and click online.
As a generalization, then, if your business success is tied to a parking lot, you’re probably going to be hurting in the future. To the extent that some malls and shopping centers will always be attractions in themselves, the great majority of ganged brick-and-mortar retailers will be continue to be bled by the internet, in the same way that most content mediums have already been afflicted.
I don’t see anything turning this trend around. Not even a sharp drop in fuel prices.
— Mark Barrett
As you grow in craft knowledge you will probably need fewer readers in order to get the same information from your feedback. Where before you may have needed the weight of opinion to convince you that a problem needed addressing, long experience will tell you almost immediately which reader concerns are important — either because they are outright mistakes, or because the resulting effect was not what you intended.
Too, as your craft knowledge grows, you may be able to get as much out of a one-on-one response as you do from a workshop. Part of this is that you won’t need to learn the basics, and part of it is that you will know how to ask focused, craft-based questions of your readers.
As always, the goal in doing so is never a defense of your work, but rather trying to determine whether and why an intended effect failed, or why a reader was brought up short by something you wrote. Unless the issue is one of editing (typos, syntax, grammar, etc.) the issues readers report are almost invariably sourced not at the location of the confusion, but somewhere else in the story. Learning how to identify the source of a problem from feedback about the effect of a problem is the goal, and being able to do so consistently is a practical definition of mastery.
When you have reached this level of expertise you will still need readers, but you will probably not need a formal or large workshop in order to gauge your own work.
— Mark Barrett
Whether you’re in a workshop or not, giving feedback on other people’s stories helps you as a writer. A key question involves the formality of the response you give, and here my views are decidedly aligned with writers and others who focus on craft, and decidedly against critics and others who focus on meaning or worth.
For example, here’s a blog comment I wrote on a site a few months ago, on the subject of ‘critiquing’:
I don’t disagree with anything you say here. It’s a good introduction, and particularly so because you guard against giving the reviewer authority. Every writer will define themselves by their ability to listen to and sift responses. And of course that’s one of the benefits of a workshop: you can have confidence that issues that affected the majority are substantive simply because of the number of people agreeing on a point.
The one thing I might add here is that over my writing life I’ve de-emphasized the formality of the critiquing process to the point that I no longer even use that word. Why? Because the word is both formal and critical, and I find that both of those aspects of the reviewing process tend to goad the reviewer into responding as a critical authority.
When I respond to something, or offer to respond, I simply promise feedback. It’s a useful descriptor that imposes no weight of responsibility or attitude on the process. Too, because almost all feedback is useful, it allows for anyone to contribute — and there is always a shortage of readers. (To say nothing of trusted readers.)
If you’re a beginning writer and you have the opportunity to respond to someone else’s work, take it. Don’t worry about formal responses, don’t try to explain the author’s story to them and don’t try to write it for them. Just read the story, note your own reactions to what’s happening, and report those reactions.
Why is this important? Because what a writer is trying to do is create specific effects in your mind. Only by reliably reporting your experience with a story will the writer know if those effects were achieved. The job of the writer is to figure out why the intended effect may have failed in your particular case. Your job as a reader is to tell the truth of your reading experience.
This is one area where workshops tend to complicate the feedback process because of the social dynamics involved. Nobody wants to come off like an idiot in a roomful of their peers, and more than a few people will be determined to come off like geniuses. Not only does having the floor lead to words like ‘verisimilitude’ and ‘anthropomorphism’ being used more in a twenty-minute span than you will ever hear them used during the rest of your life, it prompts readers to pontificate about everything from the comma to the meaning of life, none of which ever really helps fix the story.
As a reader, if you genuinely believe you know why you had trouble with a work, go ahead and give your reasoning. But remember: the most important thing you have to give to any writer is your honest reaction. If a writer doesn’t have the craft knowledge to judge and act on what you’re saying, the complexity and detail of your analysis probably won’t matter.
— Mark Barrett
Here’s a quote from my initial post on the subject of workshops:
The reason a fiction workshop works, and generally works better than any other method of settling the question of authorial intent and accuracy, is the same reason that any broad-based sampling works. By providing more responses to the author, outliers are marginalized and there is at least the possibility that an informative consensus may emerge.
(Note: when I used the word ‘consensus’ here I meant a consensus about points large and small, not simply an overall judgment.)
Everything I’ve said about feedback so far applies to any feedback you get. You might be more comfortable getting or giving feedback in a one-on-one setting, then again you might not. Sitting down with someone who tells you what you wrote is death is not fun. In a workshop, even if others generally agree you came up short, there will also be people who point out some bright spots, or at least keep you from reaching for a bottle of pills.
For writers new to the craft of storytelling, however, a fiction workshop provides benefits that cannot be acquired in any other way. In fact, when it comes to learning how to give and receive feedback about stories, a workshop advances the cause by orders of magnitude over and above any other approach.
Consider the benefits:
When it comes to learning the craft of storytelling, nothing speeds the process like giving and receiving feedback. When it comes to learning how to give and receive feedback, nothing speeds the process like being in a workshop. Nothing.
— Mark Barrett
