What to do with input

From British author Neil Gaiman: “When people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.”

I concur 100 percent. When readers or listeners to my work have a sense that something is off in a passage or a chapter but they’re not sure what, I listen carefully and make a note. Most often, I’ve had the same sensation myself, and their perception is a good confirmation. Other times, it alerts me to something that is landing wrong or is unclear or “clunky” and when I go back, I find that that is so. Seldom is that advice wrong.

However, when readers land on a word or phrase they don’t like and want to suggest a remedy, I listen politely, give it a moment’s consideration, and then, most often, I just let it go. I assume they have some other idea in mind for that character or that bit of a dialog, and they can use that in their own book if they want to. A good friend heard me read a chapter from my current work-in-progress and she got absolutely stuck on the word “duvet” in this sentence: “Out the window, a duvet of fog had moved into the garden.” She thought the word jangled with the simpler language I’d been using earlier in the chapter. So I gave it some thought, took it out, rewrote the sentence. But then it nagged at me. Fog is a central image of this book, and its “duvetness” was important to me. So I put it back.

I’ve gotten more and more savvy about taking feedback. I take notes when people talk to me about my manuscript or respond to a reading I’ve done in a support group. I love their praise and I also love their ideas. That’s really what I want—ideas I can spark off of, not minute changes I can make to wording. I need to trust my own word choices but other people’s ideas, they can send me into a reverie of imaginative creativity that I wouldn’t have gone to otherwise.

Giving feedback

Yesterday I wrote about getting input on your writing. Here’s the flip side: giving input, especially to friends and writing colleagues, the most likely people to ask you.

There are few things more fraught with tension in the writing world than to be asked to read a friend’s manuscript—and it turns out to be awful. In my post of March 11, I wrote about non-writers trying to tell their often fascinating stories in poorly written books. You may well know some of these folks who’ve had amazing lives, amazing experiences, and have no clue how to create a book about them and are doing it anyway. And sometimes they want you to read those no-clue-how-to-do-it books. You want to help, you want to be kind, and you don’t want to lie. What’s a friend to do?

First, be sure you are a good reader for the story. Just because you’re a writer doesn’t mean you’d ever pick this book up off a bookstore table. Is this genre, this story something that would interest you? If not, say so. “You know, I never read memoir. Just doesn’t really interest me. You’ll do better with a reader who is into that genre.”

Second, are you distanced enough from the friend to be able to provide feedback? If no, again excuse yourself. “I’m just too close to you and this story. I can’t bring any objectivity to the reading.”

But if you are the right kind of reader and your friendship won’t get in the way, ask for specific questions. What exactly does the writer want in terms of feedback? Is she interested in a sentence-level text edit? If that’s an area of expertise for you and you’re willing to volunteer your time, go for it; if not, suggest she hire a professional editor. Is she interested in what could improve the story or argument, the exercises or characters, the activities or dialog? You can make a list of gentle suggestions. But I don’t advise going into it without clarifying with the author what would be most helpful.

The most delicate issue is around encouragement. Each of us has a right to use our ability with words and ideas to express ourselves. Writing is a wonderful exercise in self-expression and many stories deserve to be recorded and told for the sake of family and friends. But not every story is well enough crafted to make it independently in the world. There’s no harm in suggesting that the author might benefit from a workshop in fiction writing or a tutorial with someone successful. Craft and skill can always be improved.

Most of us, new in the game or old-times, want our readers to think this is terrific, fabulous, sure to hit the NY Times bestseller list. If you can’t say that, then focus on the positive encouragement you can give—“you really captured the description of a ranch house in the 1970s” or “I loved the character of the little boy; you really seemed to get inside him” and then add, “I’d love to see you bring the rest of the book up to that level of intensity/detail/completion.”

Choosing the right listeners

I belong to a lovely group of writers. Three of us have been meeting once a month to read for nearly a decade off and on. The two newer members are great people and good writers. It's always a pleasure to hear their stories and spend time with them. And I realized last Wednesday, with a twinge of sadness, that they are not the right listeners for the drafts of my current novel.

Our group, Wacky Women Writers, wrote brief personal essays for the first years of our gathering. We were using a book called Spiritual Rx by Frederick and Maryann Brussat and we'd pick a topic, like kindness or silence, and write a little piece about it. Each of our essays was relatively brief and we delighted at the variety of takes on a single topic. Then we began to branch out, and three of the four of us started writing books. But they were all still memoir-related and so the little essays continued, although the subjects varied.

Now those books are long done and the group has reconfigured; three of us are writing fiction and two are writing personal essays still. My first novel, about painters and witches and growing up, worked okay in that group. The chapters, while clearly interconnected, had a stand-alone feel to them and the subject matter was gently emotional, gently transformational. The characters were loveable and the listeners could identify.

My new novel is dark and intricate; two stories run parallel, there are lots of small clues hidden in the chapters, and some of the characters are awful human beings. So when I read two chapters (Chapters 12 and 13) the other night at our meeting, the reading went flat, or rather the listening seemed to. One group member, who'd lived through her own difficult experience, was plainly uncomfortable. The others were polite. They didn't get the point of some of the details; they couldn't remember what the earlier chapters were about or what had happened--it had clearly been too long since they'd heard them. They were complimentary about my style, word choices, turns of phrase, but I could see they weren't intrigued and their comments weren't able to be helpful. I was clearly reading to the wrong group.

So I can see where the need comes in for a weekly writing group or class where members follow the story as it evolves, who share knowledge of the genre, who are looking for more than a shared personal experience.

I think I'll go back to writing short pieces for WWW and sharing bits of my life. That's what they're best at responding to and there's a place in my writing for that too. And I can look for the right listeners for my novel as it progresses.