On giving and receiving critique
I was recently given the opportunity to become a co-host for my writer’s group, a monthly meeting organized by BSFW, the Brooklyn Speculative Fiction Writers, and I thought I’d take this opportunity to lay out what I’ve learned about giving feedback. I’ve been part of the group for over three years and have received a fair amount of critique for my own work, including individual chapters, short stories, and eventually a full-length beta read of my novel.
I’ve also contributed to a sizable number of critique sessions for other writers, including over ten full-length novel reads (some external to BSFW), and although I don’t have the privilege of watching from inside someone else’s head, I have observed how some critiques are taken or ignored. To that end, I’d like to discuss when I think critique works and when it doesn’t, how to give better critique, and what to do with critique when you receive it.
The goal of critique
What is the goal of critique? This may seem obvious: the goal of critique is to make a work of writing better, right?
But I disagree. What is good? Good by whose standards? If you are sure the author is aiming for traditional publication, you could argue that the goal of critique is to make the work capable of getting an agent via the query process (or to get an acceptance from a reputable short fiction market). And indeed, as readers of published works, we do have some inherent sense of what that sort of “good writing” looks like, and it is tempting to tell writers where their work falls short. Nevertheless, I would argue that that’s not the goal of critique.
Rather, I believe that the goal of critique is to help the author achieve their vision. “But Aya,” I hear you saying, “The writer came to your group because they want to become a better writer. Isn’t their vision to be good?”
Sure. But what is good to you might not be good to them, and that’s why it’s important to maintain in your mind, as you give the critique, that the light you’re guiding them toward is not in your heart, it’s in theirs
As readers and critique partners, we are guests in the psyche of the writer. It is our job to tell them how being there makes us feel and what we see while we’re there. We can even tell them that we love it there and want to stay longer, or that we would rather scurry on home, sorry – or even that something there offends us and we won’t be coming back again – but it’s not our job to tell them where to place a supporting beam or what color the carpet should be.
Good, honest critique reflects the state of the work back to the author in such a way that the next steps are firmly in the author’s hands. It’s a description of what is, not a set of directions for what to do. (And if someone does tell you what to do, look for the ‘note beneath the note.’ More on that later!)
Relaying the work back to the author
So how do we help an author achieve their vision?
The most helpful thing we can do is to honestly relay what the writing accomplished back to them. How do we do that?
Speak from your experience of the work
As readers, it is our job to explain our own experience of the work back to the author.
I’ve seen readers attempt to be objective about things – the market is not good for this right now, this is generic, this writing style doesn’t work for this genre – and I’ve also seen these statements slide right off the author. This can probably be partly explained as a matter of authority: who are you, as just one reader, to say something objective about the work?*
But this also comes back to my first principle. An objective statement doesn’t really help the author determine if they’re accomplishing their own goals or not. I’m going to delve into an example here. When I had just written my “first draft” of my novel in 2019, I joined a discord server full of other writers and received the following feedback:
You need to introduce this character much earlier
I rejected this advice out of hand, even though I (much) later came to agree with it. The reason why was simple: I had a good reason for waiting to introduce that character, and this advice didn’t align with my goals.
Looking back on that draft, though, I think that what the reader was trying to tell me was this:
I didn’t understand the main character’s relationship to this character, and I wish I’d gotten to see more of it on the page, because it felt like the meaningful parts were all happening off-stage somewhere. This left me feeling unengaged by the narrative.
Had I read this feedback instead, I would have been able to ask myself: how do I want to fix the fact that readers aren’t seeing the most exciting part of the story? Do I want to introduce this character earlier? Or do I still want some of those bits to be “held,” so to speak, and find a different way to accomplish what I’m trying to do?
You could argue that the initial feedback given isn’t problematic because it’s objective, it’s problematic because it was attempting to solve the problem for me. I think both are true.
Here’s another example: Once, during a beta read, a reader told the author that the book wasn’t ready to be beta read. Hopefully I don’t need to spend very long explaining why that isn’t helpful, but a number of questions sprang to mind during that incident.** Why do you think it isn’t ready to be beta read? What about the book makes you think that? Is it possible this book just wasn’t for you?
With a lot of feedback, even feedback that isn’t that great, the author can discern something by looking deeper, but with feedback that attempts to be objective or to appeal to authority (so-and-so famous author says to do it this way), the reader may instead find that the author simply decides, as I did with that reader, that the book wasn’t for them and that they don’t have to listen to anything the reader said.
Better, then, for the reader to attempt to relay exactly what they experienced and let the author decide what to do with that information. Here are some tools I’ve found helpful in this regard.
State what you think the work meant or what the author was trying to do
One of the most validating things a reader has ever done for me was mirror my own goal back to me after reading my book. When readers do this, they establish trust between themselves and the author: that as readers they’re going to try to make the work stronger, to move it closer to its own goals. Thereafter, any critique can be understood as being in service of that mutually understood theme.
And if you get it wrong? That’s also really good for the author to know. I’ve misunderstood themes and intentions before, and have watched an author’s face betray their dismay – but I’ve also watched them then ask themself, How do I get my point across more clearly? Which is an important thing for them to do.
Summarize the events as you understood them
Okay, this is a tool in the toolbox you may not always reach for, but it can be really helpful. If you’re tempted to give the feedback, “This is just so confusing,” consider instead attempting to summarize what you understood to have happened, on a scene-by-scene level. Don’t worry about being perfect. Say why you thought what you thought and also why you weren’t sure. There’s no clearer way to communicate to an author that they aren’t delivering their information than to tell them you received something completely different than what they intended.
Summarizing can also be really helpful when the work is working, or working in places, because it gives the author a sense of what events had the most importance to the reader. It also conveys what the pacing felt like to the reader, something that can be very hard to communicate from the reader’s side. We can say, “This part felt slow to me,” but that doesn’t pack as powerful a punch as having 100 pages of exposition boiled down to, “We learn that the witches and the warlocks are at war.”
The good, the bad and the ugly
If you can’t figure out how to relay the work back to the author via either of the tools above, it’s not wrong to say what worked for you and why – and what didn’t work for you and why. I’m not saying to tell them what’s good and bad – despite the title of the section. Rather, it’s never wrong to tell an author how something moves you and makes you feel, even if you don’t know exactly what happened or what the theme is. Eg, “I found this really moving,” or, “I had a hard time relating to the main character.” Even though these don’t reflect the work back precisely, they still give a lot of information.
I also wanted to speak briefly to the experience of finding something offensive in a work (ah yes, the ugly). If you critique for long enough, you are going to encounter works that run counter to your values. It’s important to be honest when you give this feedback, but as with everything else, attempts at objectivity or direct instruction for “how to fix it” often won’t work.
Here’s a great example of a critique I sometimes want to give: this is sexist! Stop it!
But I’ll be honest, giving that feedback in that way probably won’t achieve the desired result. At this point, I do think it’s fair to ask yourself, especially if you are speaking from a historically marginalized position, whether it’s worth your time and emotional effort to help them make their writing less offensive.
Personally, if you decide it isn’t worth your time, I think it’s perfectly fair to say so: “As a queer person, I found the portrayal of gay men in this book upsetting, and I’ve decided to refrain from reading further” sends a pretty loud message on its own.
But sometimes the author is someone you care about, or you don’t think the offensive material was intentional, and you want them to know that. If you choose to give constructive feedback on the matter, I encourage you to continue to express that critique from within your own experience of the work. Here’s a (paraphrased) example I heard someone give once that I thought was quite persuasive:
I think you were trying to be funny here (statement of perceived goal) but instead of making me laugh, I felt like I was being laughed at. I felt alienated, and if this was a published book I wouldn’t have wanted to read further.
I thought this was powerful because it let the author know that the work wasn’t working as intended — and more importantly, it told them why.
But what about if the offending statement isn’t something that directly affects you, or you can’t use your own lived experience to explain how you felt? As a white person, for example, I don’t experience the negative effects of racism in our society, but I still find racist works offensive. I can still speak to my experience of being perturbed while reading the work. “I found this passage upsetting, because it implies something I don’t think is true,” is still my honest experience of the work.
From the author’s side
So you’ve received a critique. Maybe it’s good and maybe it isn’t, but regardless, you’ll next have to answer the question of what to do with what they’ve told you.
Sometimes, you receive critique that feels like wind in your wings – you’re borne upwards and are excited for the work ahead. I was once told, “Good critique feels like an ‘ah-ha!’ moment,” which means that the reader has helped you see what’s already there and how to bring it to the surface better.
Sadly this can’t always be the case. And yet, someone has taken the time to read your work and to try to help you, and even if it doesn’t feel helpful, you now have information you didn’t have before. What’s an author to do?
The note beneath the note
Sometimes feedback needs to go through a bit of a transformation process before it becomes useful. I once received feedback that, essentially, said that my character’s behavior was irrational and upsetting to that reader. It took me some time to find the “note beneath the note” for this one, but I eventually understood that my character’s motivations were unclear and that I needed to do a better job bringing the reader into her mind.
I also later understood that some of my character’s actions weren’t serving the story and were not providing the forward momentum I thought they were. When a reader is upset, it could be because the author has successfully induced the intended emotion in them. But it could also be that they feel betrayed by the narrative in some way, or feel that the book and characters aren’t living up to their full potential. Teasing out why that is and what needs to happen instead can be challenging, but ultimately anything that forces you as a writer to ask, “What am I really accomplishing here? Is that what I want?” is probably good, even if the critique-giver could have phrased it better.
So when feedback feels like it’s just not telling you anything helpful, try looking deeper into why they would feel that way. What made them have that reaction? Why is that reaction bad or different from what you intended? Try to find some reason that doesn’t involve them being “not your intended reader,” and you may find useful feedback hidden inside.
Another time that the “note beneath the note” is important is when someone gives you a specific instruction for how to fix something. “You should add some romance! These two characters should get together!” is probably not the feedback you want to hear for your thriller-drama about a killer pigeon, but hey, someone saw the potential there that you didn’t and they wanted the two characters to get together. Why did they feel that way? Is there some other important “development” missing in the characters life that could be solved by romance, but is even better explored by something completely different? Maybe these two have something important to teach each other, something you the author weren’t at first intending but which arose unconsciously. Sometimes a reader doesn’t know how to phrase that they’re craving something more, or that you’ve set something up perfectly and missed it. And to be honest, not all suggestions are inherently bad – I’ve heard writers ask for them from readers, I’ve asked for them at times, I’ve certainly given them even when I shouldn’t have. As the author, you don’t have to take these ideas directly, but it’s worth exploring why a reader thought of them.
You shouldn’t ignore most feedback
It’s very tempting to say, “This person didn’t like my work and therefore I can write off what they’ve said.” I would know, I’ve done it.
But while it’s true that your work won’t be for everyone – no one’s is! – I think it’s a rare time that feedback can be truly dismissed.
Consider the following situation: you have two readers, and they’ve both identified the same story problem, but they feel two completely different ways about it. Let’s make up an example for clarity – say a major character dies in the middle of the book, and you the author aren’t sure if the character's death is creating the effect you want. One reader says you absolutely can’t kill the character, it’s too tragic. The other says actually you should get rid of this character earlier, perhaps even consider not having them in the story.
Clearly they can’t both be right, right?
But I think they actually both can be, if you apply the “note beneath the note” transformation to both pieces of feedback. They are both saying that this plot event is not working in some way. The question is not, “who can I ignore / who is wrong?” but rather: “how can I make this character's death meaningful? How can I apply these conflicting pieces of data to make the story better?”
It would take a whole separate blog post to answer this kind of question directly (who is the character to the protagonist? What does their death cause the protagonist to do? Does the event act as the culmination of an act and the beginning of another? Why or why not? How is the arc of the story different without this character? How would it change if they didn’t die?) but regardless, the answer for how to interpret these dissenting points of feedback is clear: they both mean something, they’re just expressing it differently (and maybe they understand the goal of the story differently, too.)
This can be true even when it feels like someone just didn’t “get” your story and isn’t your reader. I’m not saying you need to change everything just because someone didn’t like your work, but I am saying that even bad critique (usually) has some merit.
Another thing to consider before writing off a piece of feedback is: how congruent is this feedback with the rest of the feedback received? Did everyone identify this as a problem, even if their suggestions were different? If you ask eight readers and all eight of them tell you something that you don’t want to hear, it doesn’t mean you have to change that exact thing – but it might mean you’re not reaching your readers the way you want to, or that you have to find a different way to do the thing you’re attached to.
They say to kill your darlings, but I want to clarify that statement. Don’t kill what makes you want to write. Don’t kill your reason for telling a story in the first place. But whatever that thing is – the most important thing, the raison d’etre for the story itself – kill anything that’s not serving it. And yes, sometimes that means killing a darling.
But every once in a while, you should ignore feedback
So if most feedback has something valuable to glean out of it, when can we really and truly ignore feedback?
This section is equally intended for anyone who never wants their feedback to be ignored. I spoke to a few fellow writers, and here are the things we came up with that we agreed made feedback worth throwing out completely:
If the feedback is mean-spirited to the point of making you not want to write any longer. If it makes you feel incapable of producing something good, it’s not leading you to your goal and should be discarded. Sometimes, people think they are being “brutally honest” when they’re really just being unkind. If it feels like they’re attacking you, you should step aside so you don’t get hurt. Don’t take that shit in.
If the reader openly admits that this “is not for them” in some way – they hate this genre, they hate this trope, they’re only reading this so you’ll read theirs – then they probably don’t have your best interests at heart. If they can’t conceive at all of where you’re trying to go, they probably don’t know how to help you get there. (But be careful. I once witnessed someone who hates horror read a couple of horror chapters and feel horrified by them — she suggested changing everything! But, well, that did tell the author it was working, didn’t it?)
Maybe this is just 1 and 2 mixed together in a cocktail, but: if it feels like the reader is only here to buff their own status by belittling other writers, they can go to hell and you should move on.
That’s all folks
Agree? Disagree? Think I should burn in writer’s hell? Ha! I’ve rewritten my book six times, your flames can’t hurt me! Just kidding. Leave your comments below. I’ll see you next time.
Footnotes:
* There are times when a reader should give a specific, objective suggestion. However, in my experience, these are best given when there is a long-term establishment of trust between reader and author, ie, when the reader deeply understands the themes and goals of the work and is not just guessing. In those cases, specific suggestions like, “This character needs to come in sooner (and here’s why in service of your goal)” can be very helpful.
** I maintain that a beta reader should always have the right to stop reading if a book isn’t for them – or for any other reason. Of course, beta reading for other people is a great way to build up a community of writers who can help you when it’s your turn, plus it teaches you a lot as a writer! But if the only feedback you can give on a book is that you didn’t like it, you’re wasting both your time and the author’s.