How-I-Dos: The Stages of Creation Part 4 - Feedback

You wrote your ideas, plans, and disciplined yourself to complete your story. So now what?
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Given how saturated the creative market is in the local, regional, and international playing field, you would want your work to be the best it can be while still retaining your voice. And that’s when you enter the stage of Editing and Feedback - possibly one of the most important stages in your journey to creating and putting your work out there.

Just a note before we start: Note that I’ve said that this is one of the most important stages in your creative journey - that means there’s no guarantee that this will be the easiest or most enjoyable stage.  

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From personal experience, many questions on feedback lie with two main categories - Asking for feedback, and Receiving feedback.

Asking for Feedback

Perhaps one of the most important lessons I’ve received from asking for feedback is the fact that you have to work for your feedback. More specifically, people cannot give you good feedback if you don’t know what you’re getting feedback for.

So before asking for feedback, here are some questions or points to consider:


When do you want or need the feedback?

This is crucial - you don’t want to waste time, but you don’t want to waste anyone else’s time either. Thus, you’ll need to figure out the right time to ask for feedback.

Usually, I start asking for feedback during two major instances:

• After the first round of rewrites
• When I need to submit a short story within the week and I’m done with my draft.

This helps so that I don’t fall into the “perfectionist” trap of never ever finishing because “it’s not good enough” - it won’t be until you decide that you’re done. Set a limit for yourself - one rewrite, then you’ll ask for edits or feedback, or I’ll consider this done and ask for feedback two weeks before submission deadline.

Also, give your feedback group a reasonable deadline - depending on how much detail you need and how long your piece is, usually I give about 1 week to 1 month for people to get back to me.

That way, you can get the help you need.

​What do you want feedback for?

As mentioned earlier, you won’t know if people are giving you good feedback or feedback to consider if you don’t even know what you want feedback for in the first place.

“But Jo, this is ridiculous,” you may say, “I just want feedback on my story and the feedback I get is all over the place!”

Therein lies the rub - you want feedback on your story, yes. However, there are many aspects of storytelling that can be critique. Therefore, it is in your best interest to weed out maybe 2-3 main questions you’d like to ask your feedback group before sending your manuscripts to them for feedback.

Here are some examples you can consider:

• Is the story easy to follow? Were you often confused? Or was it so easy that you could tell the story before reading the entire piece?
• Please tell me what you think about this character - are their motivations clear? Do you think the story could still work with or without them?
• After the first few chapters, do you have an inkling on how the system in this world works? What are you still unsure about?

 Who are you asking for feedback from?

Not your parents or grandparents. Unless they are professional editors. LOL.

Try to have a diverse group of people who you can ask for feedback from - teachers, mentors, friends, writer’s group mates, fandom mates, etc… - one of the best things you can do is to include people from your target audience into your feedback group.

An important thing to note - DO NOT pester your editor or proofreader friend to have a look through for free. Editors, copyeditors, proofreaders, or people in the publishing industry in general are very busy people, regardless of whether or not they’re your friends or you’re just a student.

Personally, if you’re just looking for a person to give you comments or answer your questions on how your piece reads, ask your friends or a mentor (However, like editors, do not expect them to comply all the time).

But if you’d like a professional opinion or a major upheaval of a long piece of yours, and you have no idea how to go about it - put aside some cash and hire a professional editor. Singapore-wise, you can take a look at the Book Council for a registry of possible partners or editors.

Receiving Feedback

Before you start, please also note that not everyone in your feedback group is obligated to return to you with feedback, especially if you’re not paying them to beta read your work. So the first thing you’d need to do is to decide when to take feedback into account and start edits.

Personally, these are my criteria before I start my revisions base on critique:

• The people who I MUST get feedback from have returned with their feedback
• At least 50% of the people who I’ve asked for feedback from have returned to me with their comments.

Again, your criteria is up to you to decide.

Now, with all the comments coming in, the next question would be how to deal with them and apply them to your work.

First and foremost, here’s just a quick rundown on what criticism is vs. what critiques are - many tend to think they are interchangeable, but knowing the difference can help smoothen your editing journey.

One of the easiest ways to differentiate the two would be as follows: Criticism is negative connotation or comments which contribute nothing to the betterment of your piece. Critique is negative comments that help you better your creation, usually with suggestions from the critic.

• Examples of criticism can be: “What is this?! What nonsense am I reading here?” | “So confusing! Make this better.” | “Read this again and tell me what’s wrong, you should know.”
• Examples of critiques can be: “I don’t understand this line. Could you be more concise here?” | “This is too sudden, I was not expecting Character A to act like this in such a situation.” | “It’s okay to use words other than ‘said’, like in this instance here.”

As you go through more editing processes, you’ll have a better feel of which comments help the story, and which you can ignore. Note: For those starting out, it’ll be good for you to take at least 90-95% of feedback into consideration, especially if they are from your target audience or professionals. Remember, feedback is to help you tell the best story, not to affirm or stroke your ego.

After sifting through the comments, you can now start to organize them. A good hierarchy to sort them under can look like this:
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• Comments about  the story as a whole / How the critic felt when they read your story
• Comments about plot or story flow
• Comments about characters
• Grammatical and typo-related comments

And like all professionals - remember to follow-up with your critics or beta-readers: Thank them, clarify feedback, ask questions, and if they’re amenable, send them your edited version. Regardless, remember to thank the people who have helped you with your work!

BONUS: Giving Feedback

While this entire post is about working with feedback, it’s a little weird not to share a few tips on how to give feedback - just to give other creators an easier time with their works.

Tips for giving feedback are a little more straightforward. From a generic point-of-view, these have worked so far:

• Ask for any specific areas which the author requires feedback for, especially if they didn’t specify any objective.
• Approach the work as a reader, not a creator - this is not an avenue to bash competition or other creators.
• Do not use “but” in your feedback - it negates all the positive comments. Be more concise with your feedback - this is what you like, this is what you dislike.

And before I go, here’s a technique I seem to find myself living by, especially after many sessions of this technique for feedback and workshopping working so well for me.

So far, I only know it to be called the “Workshopping” technique - a process introduced to me by Miguel Syjuco, while I was doing my Mentor Access Programme in 2014/15. It’s used in Creative Writing workshops in professional groups, including Columbia University (where Miguel learnt it).

Here’s how it goes:

1. All members of the group send the work they like to be “workshopped” to the rest of the group.
2. Before meeting, all group members must have read all pieces that were sent to be workshopped.
3. During the meeting, the group picks a creator to have their work critiqued first.
4. The chosen creator reads their piece for the group.
5. The rest of the group critiques the creator’s piece. The creator CANNOT explain or defend their work at this point - this is to simulate how readers view the creator’s work.
   1. Usually good critiques start by summarizing the story they heard, then talking about what the reader liked, then the areas that the readers disliked or were confused by.
6. After all the members have given their critiques, the creator can now have a Question and Answer session.
7. Move on to the next creator and repeat steps 4 to 6.

It ensures that all participants are committed to helping each other out (if you didn’t bother reading the pieces, you won’t be able to help anyway), so whether you’re a veteran or are just starting out - you will benefit from it.

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And that’s it for this month’s Stage of Creation post. See you all next month!