Unstuck: Feedback That Stops You Cold By Martha Conway
This blog series, Unstuck, explores some of the ways fiction writers find themselves stuck and offers tips from successful writers for getting unstuck.
Unstuck is a six-month series published the first Monday of the month.
Read the previous installments:
WRITING THE BEGINNING OVER AND OVER
“Here’s what I would do instead …”
“You should change your story to something like this …”
“I didn’t believe [the premise] in the first place.”
“I didn’t care for your character’s first name.”
The above are examples of feedback I’ve gotten over the years for my novels-in-progress. So okay, maybe I haven’t quoted the comments absolutely verbatim (except for the last one), but I have gotten these responses in one form or another all my creative life.
Every writer has gotten negative feedback, except maybe those writers who don’t ask for feedback in the first place (and even then they might get some), or those who take thirty years to finish a novel, relying only on their own judgement and ability to be objective.
I’ve gotten a lot of helpful feedback, too. I’m enormously grateful for that. But what do you do when you get feedback that stops you cold— that impedes rather than inspires? Do you attempt to put it out of your mind (after you’ve egged their house)? Or do you buck up, take a deep breath, and try to act on it anyway? Or do something in between?
How do you decide?
There are several ways to evaluate the value of feedback. Ask yourself:
Either reaction might be a signal there’s something there. Your job is to find what, exactly, that something is. That’s your job, not the feedback-giver’s job, although they’ll probably offer up their opinion. If they do, thank them as politely as possible and say, “I’ll take it from here.”
In The Secret Miracle: A Novelist’s Handbook, Curtis Sittenfield states:
I follow feedback from my early readers when it feels true – it echoes something I already suspected, or I didn’t see it as I wrote it but when the reader points it out, I immediately know the person is right.
Author and creative writing instructor Malena Watrous likes to sit with feedback after she’s gotten it, especially negative feedback:
A lot of times, when I was in a workshop, there would be one person whose feedback seemed extra-critical, and who didn’t seem to “get” my writing at all, based on their advice. My initial reaction was often to dismiss it/them, and not use it at all. But I often found that later, after sitting with it for a while, I would start to understand what they were trying to say to me. Maybe I didn’t agree wholeheartedly, but I often found at least a kernel of wisdom that I could put to use. (In fact, maybe it bothered me initially because some part of me knew that they were right but they were calling my attention to a problem I didn’t feel like fixing—but a problem nonetheless).
When I asked playwright Evelyn Jean Pine about negative feedback, she said that in her experience other people can tell you when something isn’t working, but rarely can they offer the correct prescription for how to make it work.
She told me a story about a staged reading of one of her plays that featured a “talk back” component—when audience members offer their opinions after the performance. One woman spoke of slackness during an exchange between two characters. “It should be funnier,” the woman said. Evelyn agreed the dialogue wasn’t working and tried to rework it for laughs. Nothing felt right until she realized the problem wasn’t that it needed to be funnier, it needed to be faster. She made one of the characters more forceful and aggressive. And voila! The exchange worked.
I once found myself with a problematic scene; there were elements of it I liked, but as a whole it wasn’t working. After working it to the bone, I sent it to a couple of writer friends, hoping they could pinpoint the problem. They offered various solutions which seemed likely, and yet nothing seemed to work. Finally, I decided to step back and look at the scene in context of the entire novel, and I realized it didn’t belong. That was the problem. And so I deleted it.
Sometimes a scene or a chapter is out of step with the whole. That’s something that feedback cannot fix. Maybe it’s just in the wrong place; it needs to come earlier in the story, or later. Maybe it needs to be cut. And this leads me to my final bit of advice:
Being the supreme ruler of your work-in-progress is great. It also sucks. But I have to believe that the mysterious part of me that is spinning out my story, creating characters and imagining what happens to them as well as their reactions, knows how to fix most things if given enough time (and maybe some clues from well-meaning feedback givers). It’s frustrating to be in the middle of a problem, but in my experience the problem is usually solved.
It also helps to remember that no novel is perfect. There are times I just move on and have faith it will get fixed in the next revision.
Novelist Rebecca Rosenberg had this to say about negative feedback:
In my novel Champagne Widows a top-notch professional cautioned that I resolved conflict too easily and quickly. I did another read-through and highlighted every time I resolved conflicts too quickly; and in my next revision I focused on how to make each conflict harder, raise its stakes, or make it unresolvable.
I felt great about the result! However after publication one reviewer said: “Don’t expect a pleasant read. There is much darkness in this tale: insanity, suicide, gore of war, lice and typhus, the demon coach driver, riots, starvation, arsenic poisoning, and so on…”
Which only goes to prove, you cannot please everyone!
That is certainly is true.
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Martha Conway’s latest novel The Underground River was a New York Times Book Editor’s Choice. She teaches creative writing for Stanford University’s Continuing Studies Program. Her novel The Physician’s Daughter will be published this spring. See her new Books We Love for latest reading recommendations! https://marthaconway.com/
Stegner Fellow Malena Watrous is the Program Lead and Creative Writing Coordinator for the Online Writing Certificate Program at Stanford University. She is the author of If You Follow Me and the co-author of Sparked.
Evelyn Jean Pine’s short play, Oakland, 1982: You, Me and Rickey is the first drama ever published in the online baseball journal, The Twin Bill this January. Her short opera about interruption, nada, written with Norwegian composer, Tze Yeung, will premiere at Strange Trace Opera’s Stencils Festival in June 2022.
http://www.evelynjeanpine.com/
Rebecca Rosenberg is a lavender farmer, champagne historian, and triple-gold award-winning author of historical fiction. Her latest novel, Champagne Widows, garnered an Editor’s Choice from the Historical Novel Society. www.rebecca-rosenberg.com
Category: Contemporary Women Writers, How To and Tips
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