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