#taking feedback

This has just been on my mind after some feedback I had recently. I feel like the feedback didn't take into consideration my writing style and the character voice. The feedback seemed heavily based on their own style and what/how they would write and was black and white on rules.

I keep thinking that I'm just being full of myself if I think they just didn't "get" my writing. But in the end I don't really know their reading comprehension level, if they read at all, or if they do actually have years of experience in making writing edits and critique (which is something I've learned to vet for in critique partners in future).

But how do I determine if the feedback is valid vs being ignorable? At what point is it okay to disregard feedback and not think of yourself as being bad at taking constructive criticism if you don't like or agree with it?

Hello!

This can be a really tricky question and will always look different for every piece you do. The good news is, you've already done the most important step of getting feedback by asking this question.

Ultimately, deciding whether feedback is helping or hindering comes back to one consideration:

What is the goal/intention of this writing?

By that, I mean what are you trying to convey, teach, demonstrate, etc. What are you trying to do? Whenever writers reach out for feedback, I always recommend that they have a very solid idea of their intention first.

Knowing what your intention is helps to contextualize all of your feedback. For example, say I had this line in a scene:

He slithered towards her.

And my beta reader commented like, "this word choice is really gross? Consider using a different word"

If my intention is to make the reader leave the scene thinking that this character is really gross, I would know I was about halfway to that goal.

Because even though my beta reader is picking up that the word choice I used gave them a gross feeling--I didn't properly convey enough that this was intentional. If they leave the scene feeling that this guy is overall okay but there was one confusing word choice, I've failed my intention.

If my intention was to make him likeable, I have also failed my goal, because I gave the reader an icky feeling.

That is a pretty obvious example, but it shows how you always come back to your goal when you're considering whether a piece of feedback is helpful or not. I rarely take the direct suggestions of beta readers--I choose people who love to read my specific genre, not necessarily other writers--but I always consider how their note reflects on what I'm trying to do in that piece.

Another important point I like to make about taking feedback is that the beta reader is always right. By that, I mean, they always tell you how they truly feel, and it's your job to determine whether that's concerning enough to make an edit or not.

For example, if a beta reader says a part of your novel is confusing, it doesn't matter that you think it's not--or that you swear you've explained it plenty already, they still found it confusing.

This doesn't necessarily mean you have to change anything--if 1 out of 6 people find a part confusing, I wouldn't say that ratio is high enough to warrant an edit. But it's important to think about your beta readers as individual readers, and just as important to remember that you can't please everyone, and you will rarely (if ever) get a 100% accord between all your beta readers no matter how hard you try.

Here's some additional posts I have about taking feedback:

Writing With Folklore — Your Beta Readers are Always Right

Writing With Folklore — Questions from Beta Readers are Rhetorical

Writing With Folklore — How to Translate Feedback

Writing With Folklore — Taking Notes from Editors (getting professional feedback)

Writing With Folklore — When to Reject Feedback

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