How to ask for and receive feedback on your writing
and get to know your many 'writing-selves.' May I introduce you to Mavis and Charlotte?
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Saturday 11 May 4-5pm (British Summer Time)
The process of giving and receiving feedback on our writing can bring us face-to-face with everything that we feel most vulnerable and uncomfortable about in ourselves.
Like eating your greens or doing daily exercise, feedback is generally acknowledged as something that is ‘good for us’ and good for the development of our creative work. It can be embarrassing to admit when feedback has caused us pain or self-doubt or reduced us to a quivering blancmange of emotions.
One response to these feelings is to tell ourselves that we should just ‘grow up,’ ‘pull ourselves together,’ and ‘deal with it like a pro.’ Another is to tell ourselves that the feedback is useless and the person providing it is an idiot and has no idea what they’re talking about.
Or maybe we just give up. I’ve met talented people who never wrote another word after someone told them that their work was ‘too dark,’ or ‘too sad,’ or ‘too much,’ or just somehow not ‘good enough.’
Of course, we can also choose not to share our writing. I would argue passionately for the value in that. Some writing is just not meant for sharing. We wrote it to work something through, to get some ragged or raw bit of feeling 'out there’ onto the page.
I’m a huge advocate for private writing practice. Many of the people I work with will probably never choose to share their writing with anyone else. They’re just not interested in writing for publication. They may occasionally entrust their writing to a few carefully chosen people but, really, that’s not what the process of writing is about for them.
For others, learning to take those first pieces of unedited feeling and then craft, redraft and shape them is an important part of a restorative writing process. Rewriting can help us to find a sense of agency over the feelings or memories that we’re writing about. It can help us to see things from a different perspective.
When we ask someone to help us with this process through feedback, it can be transformative. In a Restorative Writing context, feedback can be:
A way of listening deeply, of being present for and witnessing someone’s experience. Feedback delivered well helps us to feel fully heard, understood or witnessed by someone else.
A way of gaining fresh insight into both our own experiences – the felt material that we’re working with when we create – and our creative process, techniques, skills and approaches.
A way of sharing and celebrating success and progress – our own and other people’s – in supportive community.
A way of tracking and recording our own process and progress over time.
An act of generosity and an exchange of creative gifts. (If you’re not familiar with Lewis Hyde’s The Gift: How the Creative Spirit Transforms the World, I highly recommend it.)
However, offering feedback to others can be just as challenging as receiving it. We may feel anxious: does this person really want our honest opinion? To avoid embarrassment, we often retreat into making polite noises rather than sharing the thoughts that might have been helpful.
Feedback is an art, a delicate skill, one to be learned and practised, so that we can find a way to sit with and move through our vulnerability and discomfort and help others to find the courage to do the same.
Inviting feedback
If you’ve decided that yes, you’re ready to ask for feedback on this piece of work, from this particular person or group (be selective!), here are my suggestions.
First, ask yourself these two questions:
How am I feeling about this piece of writing? How do I feel about it in my body?
What kind of feedback would be most useful to me right now in developing this piece further?
These questions may sound obvious but, in my experience, we often skip this part. We are very often so close to the writing that we expect people to intuit what it is that we’re feeling, or the kind of feedback that we want or need. Maybe we haven’t taken a breath to pause and investigate these things ourselves.
Write down your answers to these questions. Get as clear and specific as you can about them and then write one or two sentences that describe – as clearly as possible for someone else – the kind of feedback that you’re going to ask for.
Here are some examples:
I’m really struggling with this scene. It doesn’t feel quite right to me. I’m curious to know if you can relate to the character of the mother. Does her voice sound convincing? Do you get a sense of what she’s thinking and feeling inside her own mind?
I feel like I might be a bit too close to this passage at the moment because it’s based on my own experience. I’d like to know if you think it’s a good opening to my novel – does it grab your attention and leave you wanting to know more?
By taking responsibility for what we’re feeling and for the kind of feedback that would be most helpful to us, we give our readers some guidance and context about how to frame their feedback. It doesn’t mean that they will only tell us the things we ask about, but it creates a strong starting point for a conversation.
We’ve also already done some of the inner work of beginning to engage with our own emotions about this piece, so we’re less likely to get side-swiped by the feedback that we receive.
Name and befriend your ‘writing-selves’
One valuable thing that I’ve learned about feedback over the years is that it can help us to explore the relationships between the different selves or parts of ourselves that get involved in our writing process.
For example, I have a writer-self who just wants to write and then a reader-self, who is always imagining how my writer-self will be read – even when I’m not consciously aware of it. On some days, this reader-self is mean, nasty and critical. (I call her Mavis, a name that always makes me smile, in an attempt to take away her power.)
Then there is the tough-but-fair, bespectacled editor-self who likes to get to work with her red pen, at every opportunity. I need to make sure she stays in the background until much later in my writing process so that my joyous-self, who is about seven years old, can roll around in delicious words and rush about, tasting and prodding and picking up everything that she wants to write about.
There is a very anxious self who is lonely and sad and often feels not good-enough. She lives in my old student flat and worries about a lot of things. She is absolutely terrified about the whole idea of feedback because she lives in fear of being found out as a massive fraud.
There is also the self I call Charlotte (Brontë), she who is wont to emerge with italic pen in hand, and is rather too fond of inverted syntax and relentless rain. I love Charlotte with all my heart.
Over the years, I’ve learned to get to know and work with all of these selves. They each have an important function in my writing. Some of these selves have learned to be that way in order to keep me safe, but I don’t have to listen to them all the time anymore.
As I write this, I’m wondering if my lovely friend
would recognise this as a form of Internal Family Systems? I should ask her about it – she’s an excellent writer.I hope you’ve found this helpful. Do remember that you never have to share your writing if that doesn’t feel right for you. At the end of our Writing Together sessions on Zoom, for example, I invite everyone to share a reflection about the writing process, rather than the writing itself. This can be a very enriching and helpful experience. We have some intriguing writing conversations.
There’s also a Writing Experiment below, for paid members, that is designed to help you to play around with this idea of befriending your different writing-selves.