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:

• In a workshop setting the weight of consensus can help break the subjective-opinion deadlock between writer and reader. As I also noted in the earlier post linked to above: “If ten people (out a workshop-normal fifteen or sixteen) agree on a particular concern, it’s probably something you should take a look at.”
• This appeal to consensus cuts both ways. If you blew it, you can be convinced by sheer weight of numbers to look at your work rather than argue your cause. If you were successful, however, it’s a pretty heady thing to have a group of people say, “This is good,” and it’s hard to walk away thinking the group reacted positively for any other reason than the work itself.
• As noted in an earlier post, you’ll learn as much or more (probably a lot more) by giving feedback than by getting feedback on your own work. There are two reasons for this in a workshop, neither of which can be replicated in one-on-one feedback sessions. First, you get to see how your take compares with the feedback of others. Did you miss something? Did you see a character one way, maybe as a result of your life experience or bias, while others had a different response? Second, you get to see how other members of the workshop and the writer interact. Believe me, all you need to do is watch a few people go through the workshop process and you’ll have a much better idea how to approach the process yourself.

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

There is no more difficult question for a writer to address than the balancing of their intended communication. Readers are not clones. Logical ReaderG may be very smart about plot nuances, while empathetic ReaderT may be intuitive about character motives.

Whether you’re writing genre fiction or literary fiction, how do you accommodate varying levels of audience taste and sophistication? There’s no easy answer here because the problem is not simply one of revelation. If you’ve written a murder mystery, and at the end of the story none of your readers knows who the murderer is, then yes, you failed. On the other hand, if you’ve written a literary piece that attempts to describe torture by means of a subtle metaphor, yet nobody has any idea that your story is about torture, then maybe you’re not showing your work to the right people.

What’s critical in both of these examples is calibration, which you should think of as an intrinsic part of your authorial intent. (It can be tempting to talk about markets in such instances, but I don’t think you should do that. Markets speak to money, not craft.) Your job as a writer is to meet your craft responsibilities, and calibrating your stories for your intended audience is one such obligation.

Again, if you’re writing a murder mystery, you want every single reader at the end of the book to know who the murderer was. To achieve that goal, you will — regardless how oblique or subtle you’ve been in other ways — write something like this: “The murderer is none other than…Mr. Blithers!” And in the mystery genre you pretty much have an obligation to be that bald in your explanation.

On the other hand, if you’re writing a literary work, you don’t want to bludgeon your readers with literal metaphors. Writing, “Each day passed like a day on the rack,” is not simply inelegant, it’s going to turn off readers who appreciate subtlety, which is a de facto definition of the literary audience. Unfortunately, calibrating your story for the sophistication of a literary audience is not only difficult, it may distort your intention as an author. Balancing these two needs — your own, and the needs of your readers — never gets easy, no matter how much experience you have.

How much should you do to explain your work to readers? How determined should you be to make sure your message gets through? There’s no easy answer. Again, you have to take feedback on a case-by-case basis, and you have to ask yourself whether any particular confused or oblivious reader is a reader you intended to speak to.

Please note, however, that this is not a license to dismiss feedback you do not like. In my experience, writers who dismiss feedback because they think a reader doesn’t understand their genius are more common than truly oblivious readers.

— Mark Barrett

Apprehending Feedback
At any level of authorial skill, but particularly when you’re just learning how to write and respond to other writers, there are three critical things you can do to help yourself and your readers. (I’ll come back to this in a moment, but if there’s anything you want to do during the feedback process, it’s take care of your readers. Why? Because you’re the one tapping the cane on the sidewalk, and they’re your dog.)

• Focus on Learning
  Just between us, you and I both know you’re an undiscovered literary genius. But even literary geniuses need to know if they hit or missed their visionary target. If you give yourself over to listening and learning during the feedback process, rather than enduring and defending, you’ll not only learn whether you hit your target, you’ll speed your ability to understand the craft of storytelling. On the other hand, the more defensive or competitive you are, the longer it will take you to grow as a writer.
• Acknowledge Your Own Control
  Consider this, from an earlier post about workshops:

  It can be hard for an author to listen without objecting or interjecting comments, but a workshop is not a debate. The members giving feedback know their suggestions and observation can always be dismissed by the author, so no debate is necessary.

  Even if everyone in a workshop thinks you should strengthen Sally’s motivation for murder, you still have total control and everyone knows it. It’s your story and you do not have to do anything you do not want to do. More to the point, most of the people who read your work couldn’t care less whether you listen to them or not. (And anyone who does probably has more invested in a personal relationship with you than they do in the quality of your work.)

  Again: you do not have to change something if you do not want to change it. Acknowledging that you have complete control over your own work will make you less defensive. (As an aside, there are nefarious situations where workshop leaders may try to impose control over your work. I’ll deal with this more in a subsequent post, but for now remember that you have the absolute right to control your work, up to and including making a blithering idiot out of yourself. No one who knows anything about how the craft of storytelling is taught or learned would tell you otherwise.)

• Listen for Specifics
  If you don’t know much (or any) craft it’s admittedly hard to focus on craft while having a story workshopped. A more helpful approach for beginning writers is to practice listening to comments on a case-by-case basis, rather than waiting for a consensus to emerge about the entire work.

  Why is this important? Because the things that will help make your story better are almost always specific. Generalities such as, “I liked it,” or, “Your main character could be more sympathetic,” are not very useful. What you want are specific examples of things that did and did not work, because those things are evidence of faulty craft. If you ignore specifics in the hope that you’ll get a thumbs-up from 51% of the group you’re only hurting your authorial education.

  Too, listening on a case-by-case basis is important because not all feedback is good feedback. Some comments are going to be misplaced, and some are going to be loony. Your job is to sort through everything that’s said in order to find a few useful nuggets, and you can’t do that if you’re not paying attention to what’s said by everyone.

  Finally, focusing on specifics calms personality issues. If you’re getting feedback from a workshop, chances are there’s a least one person you don’t like. They may be objectively offensive, or they may grate only on your nerves, but they may also be right in what they’re saying to you. If their every word drips with insincerity or condescension it can be hell to listen, but you need to learn how to listen anyway.

Any feedback on your work, whether given privately or in a workshop, is potentially risky. Trying to understand what people are saying about your work when you yourself may not fully understand what you wrote or how you wrote it, is a trial by fire. The only way to get through it is to get through it. Following the above advice will make the process easier.

— Mark Barrett

Here’s the nightmare in a nutshell. You kill yourself writing a story. It’s the best you can do. You have your opinions about it, but you need to know what others think so you solicit responses from a few readers, and invariably some of them disagree with your own assessment of the work.

Now what? If there’s no objective way to determine who’s subjective opinion is correct, your tendency will probably be to think you’re right, which puts you back where you started. Alternatively, if you’re have little self-esteem or self-confidence, you may assume your readers are right about everything, but that’s just blindness in another guise.

To make matters much worse, if you’re a beginning writer, all of this uncertainty gets magnified by a bazillion. Why? Because you and your readers have no craft knowledge in common which you can use to discuss your opinions. Whatever your ability as a nascent writer, the work you produce will necessarily be driven by a mix of native gifts and capacity for mimicry, rather than by craft-based decisions. If your readers are also new to the craft of storytelling, their responses will also be devoid of craft: “I didn’t like it,” or “I didn’t get it,” or “I wanted more,” etc. And even if you’re lucky enough to have experienced readers, how are you going to know how to respond to or judge their feedback if you don’t share their level of craft knowledge?

— Mark Barrett

Learning how to approach and navigate the feedback process is so critical to being a writer I cannot overstate the case. You may be the most talented author in the world but if you cannot hear what others are saying about your work then you are writing blind. As an example of how emotionally charged the feedback process can be, some of you reading this post are already having a hard time hearing what I’m saying because you think I’m suggesting some sort of implicit collaboration between author and reader. Worse, some of you may think I’m advocating creative capitulation, in which authors pander to their audience or limit their own literary intentions and aspirations for the sake of more reliable communication.

To be clear, learning how to give and take feedback has nothing to do with giving the audience control of your work. If you want to write for a particular market that’s your business and there’s nothing wrong with that. If you like writing mysteries, you know you’re going to have to have a body show up sooner or later — and preferably sooner. On the other hand, if what you want to write is almost pure experimentation, for which there may be, at most, a world-wide audience of ten people, then by all means go for it.

What I am talking about here is the inescapable fact that feedback from others is the only way you can reliably know whether you are or are not on course toward your creative objective, regardless what that objective is. Authors listen to feedback for the same reason that sailors listen to fog horns. The problem for authors, however, is that you have to figure out which fog horns are telling the truth.

— Mark Barrett

You’re a writer. You’ve written a story. You’ve rewritten. You’ve agonized. You’ve edited ruthlessly. You’ve proofread until you’re blind. Your story is as good as you can make it.

Assuming you intend your story to be read, and regardless of your established level of skill, the next step is to find out if you hit the literary target you were aiming at. If you wrote a comic novel, you need to find out if your story makes people laugh. If you wrote a thriller, you need to know if readers are thrilled. If it’s a literary piece, you need to find out if you walked the knife edge of current trends, cultural commentary and authorial style without cutting yourself to pretentious pieces.

That you cannot know these things without in some way appealing to others is what drives authors to drink themselves to death. Whatever level of skill you have, you will always have doubts and convictions about any story you write, and as you grow in skill those judgments will tend to be more reliable. It will never be the case, however, that you will know for certain what you have accomplished until others read your work.

This is the inherent nightmare of storytelling, particularly as compared with art that can be apprehended by the eye. Not only is the creative process entirely subjective, but because writing is a form of intended communication, confirmation of one’s literary accuracy can only come from a reader’s own subjective response.

Despite an abundance of rules governing spelling, usage, grammar, syntax, structure and style, in the end there are no rules. If what you want to accomplish in your story means ‘aardvark’ needs to be spelled ‘advak’, then you do it. You have the freedom — even the responsibility — to do so. This plasticity, however, means that there are no objective standards by which fiction can be judged. If your main character’s name is Wanda in Chapter 1, and Wendy in Chapter 2, you’ve probably made a mistake — and that probability rises dramatically if you’re still learning your craft. But as your authorial talents and aspirations grow in complexity, the low-hanging fruit that can be easily spotted by any reader falls away, leaving complex and inherently murky subjective issues that need to be wrestled with.

In an upcoming series of posts about feedback and workshops, I’ll get into the complexities of the process, and how any writer can make the most of what is an inherently difficult situation.

— Mark Barrett