Reacting to Criticism

You’ve just finished your manuscript.

The countless hours in front of your computer, manual typewriter, or (God forbid) Blackberry has finally paid off!  The crisp pages the teenager at Kinko’s handed you are still warm from the monstrous copier that only moments before spit them out, page by beautiful page.

Your next step is to send your creation—your child—off into the world to be read by someone else.  After all, this is what you penned it for, right?

Palms sweaty and nerves on edge, you hand the pristine cardboard box housing your work off into the unknown.

After what seems like an eternity, the reviewer contacts you.  He’s finished with your book.  You stomach sours slightly as you sit down to hear the feedback, not quite sure what to expect, but hoping for the best.

After everything you’ve been through in creating your masterpiece, how do you react to criticism?  How should you react?

I’ve recently been through this very process.  Some of the feedback has been great…some, not so much.  Suggestions have ranged from killing my main character at the end of the story (mind you, it’s the first in a trilogy), to adding raw, gritty details that would make a porn star blush.

So, how do you weed through the mass of information that you are inundated with?  I’m not sure, but here’s how I’m approaching it.

 

Negative Feedback
Negative feedback is still feedback.  It’s just not what we want to hear (hence, that nasty little word “negative” in front of it.)  For me, it’s important to realize that you’re going to get the good with the bad and it all needs to be absorbed and processed in order to grow.  Sure, you may have had a perfectly good reason for your main character to flip-off an elderly lady trying to cross the street.  But if your reader didn’t understand it, then maybe something didn’t quite click like you thought it did.

Imagine for a moment a magical place where everyone loved everything you wrote and never said anything was wrong or needed improvement.  How would you ever grow as a writer?  As painful as it may seem at the time, it’s our failures that make us stronger—not our successes.

At the same time, keep in mind that it’s only one person’s opinion.  I recently had someone comment that she was so horrified that my story involved the death of a child, that she wouldn’t even consider reading the rest of the book.  Sure, the comment stung a bit, but I later learned that she works with troubled children and abuse victims, which added context to her objection (which is why it’s important to follow-up and get details!)

I revisited the scene in question and asked myself if I could have worded it differently so it was less offensive to her while still maintaining the plot’s integrity.  I couldn’t.  Considering the ghost of the boy haunts the main character throughout the book, his death is a necessary evil.  Since the scene wasn’t overly graphic, I opted to leave it as-is.

And that’s a difficult decision to make.  Of course we want our work to appeal to everyone—but common sense tells us that goal simply isn’t possible.  First and foremost it is your work, it is your story.  If you lose your authentic voice, then it becomes something else, something less.  It’s a challenging lesson to learn, but one that all writers must face at some time or another in their career.

 

Suggestions
Suggestions are interesting in the sense that they force us to see our work in a way we’d never considered—thinking outside the box, so to speak.

It’s a funny thing:  when you write a book, everyone seems to have suggestions about what should stay, change, or be added to make it better.

Some of the suggestions I’ve heard for my manuscript, “The Veil”, are pretty mild while others are downright outlandish!  They vary from killing my main character at the end of the first book to ending the book in the middle of the climax to making it so the ‘good guys’ are really ‘bad guys’ (and vice-versus.)

Here’s the thing: some of those ideas are cool and all, but they don’t necessarily fit into the overall story being told.  A plot really needs to be designed around large-scale decisions like that.  Throwing them in at the end just to add a splash of drama feels like nothing more than a cheap parlor trick—and I can’t help but feel that the average reader above the age of twelve will see right through that and be insulted.  Tackier yet is a shameless hook into your next book.  Will I consider crafting a future project around one of those ideas?  Absolutely!  But it will be something that I plan from day one—not something thrown in at the last minute.

Not all suggestions should be discarded, though.  The best, in my opinion, are the vague ones.  Ones that suggest that you’re missing something that would make the work more interesting or somehow better but allows you to incorporate it in a way that still works for the piece as a whole.

 

Making Sense of it All
So, what do you do with all the feedback you’ve amassed?  How do you organize it and digest it so you can tackle it without losing your mind?

Good question!  …I don’t know.  But here’s what I’m doing:

• Try to break down suggestions and feedback to what doesn’t work.  Oftentimes people are ‘fixers’.  Instead of telling you what is wrong, they try to tell you what to do.  There’s a reason they suggested that the main character should cut off his right arm in a fit of rage.  Perhaps they feel the plot needs more action or drama.  Whatever the case may be, there’s probably something at the root, driving the reaction.
• Look for common themes.  If you have several people saying essentially the same thing, then it’s probably something that you should take a closer look at.  Provided your readers enjoy reading the style of book you wrote, it’s probably valuable information and should be taken seriously.
• Ask follow-up questions.  If you can keep in contact with the people who’ve reviewed your book, you can ask them clarifying questions to help you narrow down any vague responses they gave.
• Don’t settle for “it sucked” or “it was awesome”.  Follow up with your reviewers for more detail.  What did they like about it?  What did they hate?  Was there anything they had a hard time understanding or reading?  How did they feel about the characters?  The setting?  Most people don’t understand why they don’t like something…they just don’t until you force them to analyze it.

 

Loose Ends
Finally, there’s some things that should be taken into consideration.

• How will the changes you’re making impact other chapters in the book?  The plot in general?
• Do all the changes you’re planning support the work you envisioned or detract from it?  Do you lose your authentic voice if you make them?
• Will you end up pleasing a few readers only to alienate the rest?
• And most importantly, how do you feel about the changes and the way they will impact your work?  Do you feel it makes the work stronger, or weaker?  Will it still feel like your story?

 

What do you think?
I’d love to hear your opinion on this subject!  What do you do with feedback and criticism?  How do you manage the changes and edits that are thrown at you constantly?  How do you weed out the good/appropriate from the bad/ludicrous?

Add comments to today’s entry and let’s see how many ideas we come up with!