Getting feedback is by far my least favorite part of writing. It’s not because criticism hurts; I accepted that fact many years ago and have a few tricks for mitigating it – more on that in a future post. No, it’s my least favorite because we must have feedback to improve, but good feedback is hard to come by.
Here’s what I mean. At its core, writing is using written language to convey an idea from one person’s mind to another. If the writing successfully conveys the idea and does it in a way that’s simple and intuitive for the reader, it’s good writing. If the writing fails to convey the idea, or does it so awkwardly the idea is damaged, it’s bad writing. It doesn’t matter if the idea is an emotion, an experience, a story or simply data – the quality of the writing is measured by how well it passes that idea to the reader.
The problem is that this leaves us with no objective metrics for measuring success (besides a few basic rules like grammar and spelling.) It makes writing much trickier than, say, competitive games, which have a defined winner and loser. The loser might not know exactly why they lost, but the moment a game ends they know that whatever they were doing didn’t work. It’s the same for any skill that’s easily measured; a runner can track their time, and a bodybuilder knows they’re getting better because they can lift heavier weights. But conveying an idea is inherently subjective, so the only sure way to know if a piece of writing succeeded is by giving it to readers and asking them.
So that’s what authors do. From grade students working on their first short story to New York Times bestsellers, every author I know of relies heavily on beta readers and editors, often with a writer’s circle thrown in for good measure. The author edits the work as much as they can on their own, then gives it to others for critique.
This approach clearly can work – pretty much all successful authors developed their skills this way – but I have two major concerns about relying solely on other people for feedback.
My first concern is about the quality of the feedback. This problem is this: can our readers give us the detailed and prescriptive criticism we need to improve? After fifteen years of soliciting critiques from anyone I could convince to read my work, I’ll argue that most readers can’t.
I’m certainly not saying their feedback is worthless, or that we should be ungrateful of the time and energy they spent reviewing our writing. But it’s like a person trying to give advice about a chess game when they only know the basic rules. They can tell us if we won or lost and maybe point to a few obviously bad plays, but they simply don’t have the expertise to explain our mistakes and tell us what we need to change to get better. Feedback from readers is still invaluable and I’m in no way suggesting we should forgo it, but unless we have the tremendous good fortune of having our work critiqued by someone who’s really studied writing and story, I think it’s a mistake to believe their advice alone can guide us to success.
My second concern is the social aspect. As I mentioned a moment ago, until our writing is good enough that people are genuinely eager to look at it (meaning we’re most of the way to success already), we have to recognize that anyone who reads and gives us feedback is doing us a tremendous favor. I, for one, would like to abuse their generosity as little as possible, and only ask them to read a project when it’s as refined as possible. This probably seems obvious and I imagine most everyone will agree, but I mention it because I believe we can do far, far more to refine our writing on our own than most aspiring authors realize (including myself in years gone by).
Before I start discussing my proposed solutions I want to make one final point, and it’s that feedback is non-optional. No matter how difficult it is there’s no cheat, hack, or way of avoiding it: to improve a skill, the practitioner must have some way to track how they’re doing. There’s a quote I like: “Practice doesn’t make perfect. Practice makes permanent.” The warning is clear – without criticism the most likely outcomes of practice are either no progress, or ingraining bad habits so that we actually get worse.
So, we must have feedback. But there aren’t easy metrics for measuring good writing, and we’re not going to rely entirely on feedback from others. Is there another method to know if we’re improving?
Fortunately there is. Two ways in fact, and they’re both things we all have access to. The first is the work of expert writers, and the second is mental representations.
The Genius of Benjamin Franklin
In the post on practice I explained the techniques that Benjamin Franklin used to improve his writing. Since he didn’t give them names, I’m calling them the hints exercise and the structure exercise.
For anyone who skipped that post (don’t skip that post) the exercises involve finding an excellent piece of writing, then making short notes about what happens in it. After a few days we use those notes to rewrite the piece as best we can, or scramble the notes and try to reconstruct the order.
The genius of these techniques is that they let us use an expert’s writing as a form of feedback. We take a piece of writing that we know is successful, and with repeated cycles of emulation and correction try to mimic that success. Every time we finish we get instant feedback on how we did just by comparing our work to the original. There’s also no doubt about whether the feedback is reliable; the piece we’ve chosen has already proven it’s successful, so we just need to figure out how to make our work as good as it is.
As we do this practice over and over, working on different pieces from different authors, we’re building mental representations of how to express ideas in writing. As I explained in the post of mental representations, saying someone is good at a skill and saying they have high quality mental representations of that skill mean the exact same thing. But mental representations have another benefit. When your mental representations are good enough, they give you a chance to catch your own mistakes. That brings us to the other way I’m going to work on solo feedback:
Editing as a Skill
In the post on mental representations, I mentioned how strong representations help expert performers critique their own work. As Anders Ericsson explains it on page 77 of Peak:
Several researchers have examined what differentiates the best musicians from lesser ones, and one of the major differences lies in the quality of the mental representations the best ones create. When practicing a new piece, beginning and intermediate musicians generally lack a good, clear idea of how the music should sound, while advanced musicians have a very detailed mental representation of the music they use to guide their practice and, ultimately, their performance of a piece. In particular, they use their mental representations to provide their own feedback so that they know how close they are to getting the piece right and what they need to do differently to improve.
Every author spends a good amount of time editing their own work, but before I encountered the idea of mental representations I never thought of it as a skill I could improve. When I edited I just read over what I wrote and changed things that didn’t sound right. Now I understand what I was doing; I had a mental representation of what the writing should sound like, and I was comparing my work to that representation.
But that representation wasn’t very good. It was mostly just a haphazard amalgamation of books I enjoyed, habitual phrasing, and bits of feedback I’d gotten from teachers and family. It was too poorly constructed to consistently find and correct mistakes. However, there’s no reason it has to stay that way. As I build more complete and higher quality mental representations, I’ll not only learn to do better work on the first attempt, but also improve my skill at catching my own mistakes.
But there’s a big problem with self-editing, and it’s that our brains will try to trick us. When we review our work we already know what we meant to say, so our minds will often gloss over even the most severe errors. To combat this, we need to detach from what we wrote and come back to it as much like a new reader as possible. Obviously we can never fully detach, but here are some techniques that I’m going to try:
- Waiting before editing. This is an obvious strategy and one most authors already apply, so I’m mostly just mentioning it because it’s a classic. By waiting a few days, weeks or even months before editing, we can forget enough details that when we re-read we’re looking at the words which are actually on the screen, rather than the words our brains know should be there. If I could give my past self advice, one of the first things I’d explain is that it’s fine to wait a few months before editing a piece.
- Reading aloud. This is a time consuming process, so while I’ve heard it advised a number of times I’ve known plenty of aspiring authors (my past self included) who just couldn’t be bothered. But just like waiting before editing, forcing ourselves to say each word aloud gives us another chance to read what’s on the page rather than what’s in our head.
- Listening to a recording of reading aloud. This is one I haven’t heard recommended much, but given how easy it is to make a recording these days I’m going to give it a try. I listen to audiobooks constantly, so when I read a piece aloud I’ll also record it and put it on my phone. Then I can listen to the story like someone else is telling it to me (especially if I wait for a bit before listening to the recording), and try to evaluate it as though the story was not my own.
These three techniques are a good start, but I’m sure there are other ways to detach from our work. If I discover new methods I’ll come back and edit this post, so if you have any great ways of stepping back before editing a project send them my way through the contact page.
No, we can’t do it alone:
While the two methods above should allow for considerable improvement, there’s no escaping that we’re eventually going to need feedback from others. So far my most valuable feedback has come from my family, who are all experienced readers and have built solid mental representations of what a good story looks like. I’m going to continue to rely on their feedback in the future, and will ask any friends who may be interested in a story to take a look and tell me what they think.
But what if I need something beyond that? What if I hit a plateau that I can’t overcome on my own, and my current readers can’t tell me what to do differently?
The answer is simple, but not good: I have no idea.
I know, that’s probably not what you were hoping for. There are options, of course. To name just a few, I could join a master’s degree program in creative writing, go to a writer’s workshop, or find a writer’s circle. But I have serious concerns about the expense and efficacy of these organizations. Even a cursory google search reveals that many master’s students don’t believe their degree in creative writing was helpful. Writer’s workshops are similarly unreliable, and would require several thousand dollars and up to six weeks away from work. Unfortunately, that’s not really an option.
A writer’s circle is more practical, but has its own problems. When Dr. Ericsson discusses social organizations like chess clubs and community theaters on page 176 of Peak, he says,
One thing to be careful about, however, is to make sure that the other members of the group have similar goals for improvement. If you join a bowling team because you are trying to improve your bowling scores and the rest of your team is mainly interested in having a good time, with little concern about whether they win the league title, you’re going to be frustrated, not motivated.
By and large, this has been my experience with amateur writer’s circles. The people were kind and often interesting, but they generally spent more time talking about their ideas or how difficult writing can be than improving. If I found a professional writer’s circle I’d jump on the opportunity, but until I have something published I’ll probably need to pursue other options.
But all that’s far in the future. For now we’ve got a ton of work to do, and have defined our initial methods for measuring progress. Now we need to take the last and hardest step: build the discipline to put everything we’ve learned to use. See you in the next post.