Getting Feedback Never Gets Easier

Readers' feedback is absolutely invaluable to the overall quality of a story. Receiving this feedback is inevitable if a writer is serious about creating a completed product, and considering this feedback—whether or not we ultimately choose to incorporate it into the work—does improve our writing, especially when the feedback includes criticisms and not only compliments.

Knowing this intellectually does not, unfortunately, change the trepidation we feel when giving our book to a reader for the first time, the anxiety we feel as we wait for a response, and the insecurity we feel when reading critiques and comments. I've written before about receiving reader feedback—from a friend!—for my first novel, Mending Heartstrings. Still now, 5 published books and uncounted critique rounds later, receiving reader notes hasn't gotten any easier.

The anxiety starts when I send the story off, but invariably gets so much worse when an email with notes pops into my inbox. What if the reader hated it? What if the work I thought was almost done actually needs months of more revising? Or worse, what if it's actually a worthless waste of time, storage space, and (occasionally) paper?

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Contest Critiques

September has so far been saturated with all manner of contests, and several more results are still forthcoming.  The contests I have entered can be split into two categories: brief, online contests, such as Pitch Madness, and those hosted by chapters of the Romance Writers of America.  

One of the benefits of online contests is quite frankly the speed of the turnaround.  On the one hand, because these contests include live teasers through Twitter or comments from blog readers, the amount of stress is exponentially higher.  On the other hand, such contests are an ideal example of the strength and support of the writing community.  People get together beforehand, with some offering their sites as forums, to perfect their submissions; words of encouragement are generously exchanged throughout; and new connections are forged.  In my case, these contests really pushed me to focus on my pitch and first page (which has been revised many times this month).

Though RWA chapter contests tend to have a turnaround time between 6 and 10 weeks, they deal with larger portions of text and, unlike other contests of which I know, many provide detailed judges' feedback on each entry.

The juxtaposition of these many contests in such a short period of time has crystalized for me the importance of evaluating the source of a critique as much as its content.  Not all criticisms are created equal.  Same goes for judges, and even for the contests themselves.

Respect Your Editor!

So, yes, I am a writer, and I understand that as writers—especially incipient ones—we generally have very limited financial resources. However, this is absolutely not a reason to expect qualified professionals to work for ridiculously low amounts of money. Publishing independently comes at a cost—the costs traditional publishers usually front are the responsibility of the author; they are not dispensable.  

Real examples I've recently seen: 

• A 275,000-word manuscript seeking proofreading, with a budget of $150.  If a proofreader read about 10 manuscript pages (250 words / manuscript page) per hour, that would mean s/he would earn $1.36 per hour, or about 14 cents a page. (On writer.ly)
• A 90,000-word manuscript, seeking developmental editing, with a budget of $500.  Developmental editing takes more time than proofreading, so let's say the editor goes through 5 manuscript pages per hour: $6.94 per hour, or about $1.39 per page. (On Bibliocrunch.com)

Feedback Fears

Jody Hedlund has a wonderful post about how writers do react to feedback—and how they should. Intellectually, I agree with many of her points, and I've even stated some before on this blog. Readers' feedback is absolutely invaluable and crucial to the overall quality of the book.  Receiving this feedback is inevitable if a writer is serious about creating a completed product, and considering this feedback—whether or not we ultimately choose to incorporate it into the work—will improve our writing.

Knowing this intellectually does not, unfortunately, change the trepidation we feel when giving our book to a reader for the first time, the anxiety we feel as we wait for a response, and the insecurity we feel when reading critiques and comments.  I was about to write that I had only, so far, received a few general comments from one reader when a new email popped up in my inbox—with in-depth critiques from that reader.  

Stacks of Paper

It may be impossible for me to stress sufficiently the necessity of printing out a manuscript (or short story, or essay, etc.) and editing a version on paper. An invaluable, artificial distance is created by taking your work from the screen to the page, allowing for a wholly different experience of the text.  This in turn creates the opportunity to notice problems our eyes may have otherwise skipped and frees us to make corrections we wouldn't have otherwise made.  I can't begin to count the times I noticed issues in essays I wrote while in University only when I was about to hand in the printed version, and, unsurprisingly, the same holds true for my new novel.

Reaching a Milestone

At the beginning of this year, I had hoped to have my manuscript edited by March 1st. Life, as it tends to, interfered, and writing doesn't particularly like following a plan either, so that didn't happen.

In search of a new, reasonable time frame, I decided I wanted to finish revising before my balloons—the ones celebrating the completion of my first draft—fully deflated. This did happen. 

At 76,276 words, my manuscript is now ready to progress to its next stage: being printed for a round of editing on paper. Five standard balloons lay listless on the floor, but two foil balloons remain as an unflinching reminder of accomplishment and the motivation to continue following this path through.

The Bumpy Road of Revision

As I've mentioned before, I began revising long before I finished my first draft, an approach which, for me, actually helped the writing. Once I had a completed draft, I moved on to official revising, which I, despite the previous revisions, began at the first word of my manuscript. So, as I made some changes, polishing my work, I was almost encountering an artificially buffered experience of revising, which I only realized when, suddenly, I was horrified by a scene. 

Revising That Precious Draft

Once a completed draft of a novel finally exists, revisions begin. Revising is a long, demanding, and inescapable process. According to Nora Zelevansky:

"No matter where you are in your journey as a writer, the editing and notes process remains arduous and stressful. It will always test you . . . Ultimately, rewriting is hard. Maybe even harder than staring at a blank page."

Thanks to the internet, many articles and posts discussing tips for revision are readily available, so rather than also describing basic methods for improving writing, I have included links to several quality examples. This post will focus instead on the overall process – not how to revise, but rather what steps revising in itself requires.

Don't You Dare Revise!

Some of the most popular advice floating around for those interested in attempting the NaNoWriMo challenge is: "Turn off your inner editor!" —closely followed by: "Don't revise until after NaNo." At some point during the month, there also comes a warning: the novel you'll have written through this process will need to be completely rewritten, possibly many times. 

• For instance, Jody Casella—a successful NaNo winner and soon-to-be-published author—writes on her blog: 

"Doing NaNo will kill (or at the very least, muffle) that pesky internal editor voice that streams along in your head as you write, telling you that what you write is crappy and stupid and pointless. You don't have time for that voice during NaNo. If you want to finish, you are going to have to keep writing those crappy words. NaNo is about quantity not quality. Repeat that after me: quantity not quality. Write it on a sign and tape it to your computer screen. No, you are not writing the word Bluh over and over, but some days it will feel like it. Whatever. Keep writing anyway –"

I have seen many variations of this admonishment, and I haven't seen any contradictions.  People in my writing group swear by this process: "Don't even think about revising until you have the first draft down!" they advise. Hopefully, such an approach works for them—maybe it even works for the vast majority of writers and specifically of NaNoWriMo winners.  But I didn't do that.