Writing Advice: Getting Critique

Giving it is a whole other thing, perhaps that'll be next week.

From JD: “Have you covered working with others for critique and review recently? When to ask, how to ask, what you can expect, and what to do with feedback.”

Writing is by its nature a solitary activity. You don’t sit around with friends constructing each sentence and then writing down what the group recommends before going on to the next one. I guess you could, but then it feels like a novel would take your whole life. And you’d never fit everyone’s name on the spine.

But community is a really important part of the writing process in general. When I started taking writing workshop classes, I was astonished at how helpful they were, and at how much my writing improved. As I write this, I am in Kansas at an alumni retreat for my favorite novel workshop, among other writers who have gathered not only to have a couple weeks to focus on their own writing, but also to be available for each other for feedback and brainstorming. If there is no other measure of how important this kind of community is for writers, consider that I have voluntarily come to KANSAS. In JUNE. And this isn’t the first time.

If you don’t have a circle of trusted writing buddies, you could build one up online, or you could go to a workshop. There are a bunch of them out there, although only one for furry writers specifically (RAWR, where I teach—apply now!). These are sometimes designed around teaching, like RAWR; sometimes around bringing a work that everyone will read and give feedback on. But there’s limited space and they’re only offered every so often, so you can’t count on a workshop every time you want feedback on a story. They’re a great place to build the community you can then continue to work with afterwards, but they’re not necessarily a solution every time.

Online is a better place to look. There are a number of communities devoted to writing online. In the furry fandom, the Furry Writers Guild has a Discord server with a channel devoted to beta reading, and that’s a place specifically set up to ask people to review and critique your work (it is expected that you will provide feedback as well; we can go into that next month).

When you’re asking for feedback on a WIP (a “beta read,” named because in software development, the first iteration of a product, the “alpha,” is the one tested in-house, and the next iteration, the “beta,” is the one released for public testing), especially if you haven’t worked before with the people you’re asking, it’s important to be clear about how long the work is, when you want the feedback by, and what level of feedback you want. Usually in a beta read you don’t want people to do a close proofread for grammar and spelling (though please make sure your grammar and spelling are good, because it’s very distracting to some people (hi!) when they’re not), because you’re going to be rewriting and adding more words anyway. At the same time, you don’t want to be so vague that you don’t get the kind of feedback you want.

It can be hard if you’re not experienced to know what to ask for. Some common questions I use with my beta readers are things like:

• Does the plot hang together all the way through?

• Do the character motivations make sense?

• Are there any places where you’re bored?

• Did you get a good sense of the setting and the world?

• What did you really like about the story? (This one is important! It’s not something you are going to change, but knowing what people like about your story helps you understand what things you’re doing well. That’s good not only for your confidence as a writer, but so you can look at those aspects of your story and build on them.)

Then I usually leave them an open-ended “anything else that jumps out at you, please let me know.”

If I have a particular worry about a story, I will make sure to tell them so they can focus on it. Like: “Does the magic system make sense?” or “I’m worried that the mechanics of the heist aren’t clear or that I’ve messed up somehow, please pay close attention to that chapter.”

When you get your feedback, before you even read what they have to say, you should thank them. Even if they’ve given you nothing you can use, this person took time to read your story and tried to help you improve it, and maybe you don’t ask them for a beta read ever again, but you definitely still need to say “thanks so much for taking the time to help me out.”

But let’s assume you’re going to get something useful. My best practice with beta reads is to read the feedback by myself first, work through all my emotional reactions to it (“how dare they say that my precious fox boy ‘doesn’t seem believable as a person’???”*), and then consider it from a craft standpoint. Depending on the level of experience of your beta reader, you may have to do some translating into useful craft advice, but the important part is that they have given you what you can’t get anywhere else: someone else’s experience reading your story.

(* It is entirely possible, especially with novice beta readers, that the feedback will sometimes be indelicately phrased. The first thing you have to do is work through the phrasing to figure out what the useful feedback is. The next, if you want to work with that beta reader again, is to figure out how to help them improve their feedback. I usually try to phrase it as my issue, rather than saying “hey your phrasing sucks”; so I’ll say something like, “it’d be more helpful for me in the future if, instead of ‘I didn’t believe him as a person,’ you could say, ‘his motivations didn’t seem clear to me, especially here and here,’ or something like that,” and hopefully they will get the hint that they should do that for everyone and not just you. But at least they will give you better feedback in the future.)

As you’re reading the feedback you get, it’s important to remember that each beta read is one person’s experience of your story. No feedback or critique is ever wrong, because it’s that person’s opinion. You might not share that opinion, and in fact nobody else might share that opinion either. But it is that person’s true experience of your story.

It’s useful to get several beta reads, because that reduces the weight and importance of each person’s experience and allows you to get an idea of what experiences of your text were common. If one person says “I was bored during the whole amusement park chapter,” but the other six people all tell you the amusement park was the best part of the book, you can probably say “well, one in seven people will have a bad experience with that chapter, oh well.” If the one person who hated it has a simple fix that probably won’t affect everyone else’s enjoyment of the chapter, then consider that fix. But sometimes people have personal reactions to parts of your story, and there’s not a lot you can do about it.

(My beta readers sometimes say things like “I just hate amusement parks so I didn’t like that chapter, but that’s just me so take it with a grain of salt.”)

When you come to the point of implementing the feedback, there are going to be two main cases:

• This makes sense, obviously I have to change this. This is the easy one. Sometimes your beta readers will even have suggestions for how to change it, but a lot of times in critique we try to be careful about rewriting someone else’s story. In any case, if you knew that the chapter where nothing happens was a problem, and all your beta readers also said it was a problem, you just need to fix it. You’re a writer, and this is a problem you can solve.

  • You can also ask your beta readers for help with this. Having read the book, they may be able to toss you ideas for a fix. Or they may be able to give you an opinion about your proposed fixes. Only do this if they’ve agreed to do followups with you, though.

• I don’t want to change this! You will inevitably run into situations where someone has suggested a change that you don’t want to make. Good news: you don’t have to! Bad news: you have to at least think about it. Understand why your readers are suggesting the change (and again, if you can follow up with them, you can ask them to explain a little more in depth), and if you feel the benefits to the story outweigh that experience, leave it in.

  • I do always find that imagining the story if I did make the change is helpful. Sometimes when I imagine it, it feels wrong. But sometimes I’m surprised that it doesn’t. For one story, I had a beta reader tell me that I should cut the epilogue because it didn’t contribute anything. Now, I love me an epilogue, and so I thought, that’s crazy, I can’t cut the epilogue. But because I trust this reader, I did the thought experiment, and as I thought about it, it didn’t seem so crazy. What if the story really did just end? I could move the one piece of information that was necessary from the epilogue to the last chapter, and then… I ended up cutting the epilogue.

Last note! If you have the luxury of doing more than one round of beta reads, I find that it’s useful for the second round to have people who haven’t seen the story before, as well as people who have. The first group comes at it with an unbiased perspective; the second one remembers the original text and can judge the changes.

Next month: how to be a good beta reader for others!