I’ve been enlisting more people to give feedback on my writing lately, as well as giving feedback to more writers myself, and realized that the feedback I was giving was kind of scattershot. This post is a reminder to myself on how I want to give feedback, as well as the topics I want to give (or get) feedback on.

How to Give Feedback

Use Cause-and-Effect Statements

Feedback is easier both to give and to receive when you phrase it as a cause-and-effect statement, like this:

“When I read X, I felt Y.”

Examples:

When I read this sentence, I felt confused.

When I saw this happen, I felt excited.

Notice a few things about that format:

• It’s not judgmental. It’s not talking about good or bad, or right or wrong. It’s just causes and effects.
• It works for both positive and negative feedback.
• It’s feedback that anyone can give. You don’t need an MFA in creative writing to talk about how something made you feel.
• If it’s pointing out a problem, it’s not dictating to the writer how they should fix it.

There are lots of variations on how to phrase feedback like this, but as long as you focus on how specific text created specific feelings you are likely to be giving helpful feedback.

Care Personally, and Challenge Directly

Feedback tends to go wrong in a couple common ways:

• Some people, especially friends and family, are all positivity and hold back talking about anything that doesn’t work. This is good for my ego and bad for helping me get better.
• Other people seem to think it’s their job as a feedback partner to be an asshole.

A good feedback partner is someone who cares personally about you and about helping you to get better. They avoid overwhelming you with negativity, but will also be honest if you tell them “don’t hold back.”

Things to Give Feedback On

These are the things I look for when reviewing my own writing.

• Is there tension and conflict in the scene? Do I care about the outcome?
• Do the characters feel believable? Do I want to spend more time with them and learn more about them? Are their actions consistent with what we know about them so far? If there are surprises, are they justified in believable ways?
• Setting: Is there enough description of the people and place that I can picture the scene? Is there too much description, to the point that it dilutes the action and conflict?
• What emotions are the characters feeling? Am I showing those emotions (via dialogue, body language, and other physical reactions) or telling them?
• Does the language flow smoothly? Is there any clunky or repetitive phrasing that pulls the reader out of the story? (My over-fondness, for commas, is a frequent offender, here.)
• If the text uses words that will be unfamiliar to the reader, is it worth it? (Sometimes, especially when doing world building, I want to make the reader stop and think “what does that mean?” Other times it’s better to sacrifice that cool obscure word I love if readers are going to trip over it more than get value from it.)
• Has the text been run through a spelling and grammar checker? (Don’t waste humans’ time catching these things when machines can do most of it so much faster.)

If someone is reviewing multiple scenes at once, or is a regular feedback partner who has seen your earlier scenes of the same work, or you’ve shared your outline with them, you could add this question too:

• How does this scene progress at least one of my plots?

One more thing to keep in mind: Often, the best writing is unnoticeable. When a writer is able to sneak in some cool world-building facts with natural dialogue or contextual clues instead of an info dump monologue, it’s easy to miss that the writer just dodged a bullet and the skill that it took to do so. Consciously look for these hidden successes while reading and call them out when giving feedback.

What To Avoid

Avoid making it about your taste.

• “I don’t like stories set in space.”
• “I don’t like that kind of sex.”
• “I don’t like first-person point of view.”

Especially avoid turning your tastes into universal rules.

• “Space stories are boring.”
• “That kind of sex is gross.”
• “First person point of view sounds silly.”

If you do feel compelled to give feedback about how the text interacts with your tastes, it will go down easier as a cause-and-effect statement.

Avoid expressing feedback as rules or “shoulds”. A “should” is the opposite of a cause-and-effect statement. A cause-and-effect statement encourages the writer to decide if the tradeoff is worth it. A “should” puts them in a box.

At all costs, avoid writing the writer’s story for them. Avoid pushing solutions unless the writer has asked for such suggestions. Let them be the writer.

Where to Give Feedback

If you’re giving feedback on a specific word, phrase, or paragraph, it’s easiest to put it in the margins. Google Docs makes this easy. If you’ve made a copy of the text for your feedback specifically, you can also put the checklist questions at the top or bottom of that document.

How to Receive Feedback

Remember that it’s not personal. The most popular books on Goodreads have threads where readers disagree on basically everything. Scenes and characters are loved by some people and hated by others.

Pretend that you’re a scientist. When you ask for feedback, you’re running an experiment to see whether your writing has the effect that you wanted. The results you get back are useful data whether they’re positive or negative. In that scientist mode, the appropriate reaction to negative feedback is “Hmm. That’s interesting.” If you’re unsure whether the feedback represents the readers you care about, ask more people and get more data points.

Questions to ask yourself when you get negative feedback:

• Is this feedback pointing out one of my blind spots? It could be a writing skill that I haven’t developed enough, or a distracting habit that I didn’t know I had, or some kind of bias. Turn to people you trust to help you know whether the blind spot is real and how to address it.
• Is this feedback telling me more about the tastes of the reader than the quality of my writing? If it is a question of taste, then is this something I’m willing to lose some readers over?

Remember that you’re in control. You don’t need to please everyone.