Feedback & Critique

A three part series

Part 1: Why people who love you are the worst readers

Writing is a solitary pursuit. We work alone, wrestling with the words until we manage to pin some to the mat. What then? Unfortunately, genius is rarely born in a vacuum. At some point, most of us are compelled to lift our bum from our chair and seek an opinion.

When starting out, we often turn to friends and family. We tentatively ask them if they’d like to read our manuscript. They say YES, they’d love to! We are naturally thrilled. We sit down to compose the email. We enter the addresses of our loved ones. Then we babble a bit about the story, and why it’s so great. We warn for extreme profanity or sexy times. We tell them to be brutally honest. Then we wait.

As the days pass, we worry about standard stuff. They won’t get our quirky wordplay. They won’t fall in love with our characters. They’ll think the entire yarn is an abomination and we should kill it with lava.

We also have secret, shall we say, yearnings. We long to see the awestruck looks on their faces when they read a certain descriptive passage, or their astonishment when the plot jackknifes in the most original way the world has ever seen. We practice our bashful reactions to their praise. Aw, shucks. We put together our defense for the things they might criticize. Yeah but, yeah but, yeah but…

Weeks pass. A few comments trickle in. They love the characters, especially that guy whose name they can’t remember. Those fancy words that required a readily available dictionary were a gas. And the twist at the end? Totally didn’t see it coming. No one clutches their pearls at the profanity or the sexy times. No one mentions lava.

In the end, we get a sprinkling of largely positive feedback that is vague, uninspired and frankly disappointing.

This isn’t to dismiss the opinions of our loved ones. The problem isn’t a lack of honesty or interest. It’s simply that a close friend or parent or sibling, usually can’t separate the writing from the writer. Those that read our story will probably love it because they want to love it. Because they love us. They want us to succeed and want to be supportive and therefore, are about the worst source of objective feedback there is.

Of course this isn’t a hard and fast rule Your sister might be a grammar and punctuation despot who proofreads professionally. Feel free then to ask her to attack your work with a red pen and a fistful of commas. It’s a judgment call.

In the end, our nearest and dearest might enjoy reading our stories, but they can’t be counted on to give us what we need to make them better. That’s not their job anyway. Stories are written in solitude, to be shared with a multitude. It’s why we do what we do. So let your family read, let them enjoy, let them make you feel good about what you’re doing. Then thank them. Be grateful for their support, and never take it for granted. You can go elsewhere for brutal honesty.

Next week…Part 2: Writing Groups