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

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

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