Taking feedback
This post should take about 6 minutes to read through.
You may have given your writing to a friend to take a look, or you may have hired a professional (like me!) to edit your book. In both cases, you probably polished the text as much as you could, carefully examining the story and the writing, which are different parts of a book and your skill set before handing it over. And even though, by now, you know well that the writer isn't the best editor for his or her book, as we know how the sausage is made, you were still quite surprised by the sheer amount of feedback.
Taking feedback is as much a skill as giving it. It's not easy to receive a book that you considered to be the most polished it can be, secretly hoping for a perfect "All clear, publish it!" only to see that it was far from being ready. It can be overwhelming. The way the feedback was given might also be overwhelming, or the medium in which it was given. Working with clients whose books needed complete rewrite or significant changes before being published, I have seen how to best deal with this understandably overwhelming situation.
First, don't react. This is one of the most important steps. Do not open that document or that message with the intention of jumping into editing right away. Start reading through the feedback for the first time with the initial intention of just reading it. Vow to yourself that you'll do nothing today besides read it. This removes significant pressure from the act of first contact.
Second, read carefully and calmly. Read everything you've received. Read your editor's/proofreader's comments, read their overall thoughts, see what they've suggested you change. Take it from the beginning, and read through to the end. If you need more days to do it due to sheer volume, do so. I've delivered books with fifty comments and a few dozen fixes which would take less than ten minutes to examine, and I've delivered books with five hundred comments and thousands of fixes that would need days just to examine. It's important to read everything, in order to progress to the next step.
Third, digest it. Give yourself time to consider what you've been told. Remember, you're still not doing anything. You're just ruminating, pondering, thinking, and not acting. I'd go as far as to suggest you sleep on it. It may feel overwhelming now, like looking up a massive mountain that you're supposed to climb, or it may seem an easy fix, depending on the amount of feedback. But in any case, I strongly suggest you examine it, and try to understand the implications.
For example, if there's a comment about a character's actions being a bit strange, instead of just fixing it right away and toning down whatever action it was that they did, why don't you spend some time trying to think, first, why did you make them do this, and second, why was it perceived as strange? Could it be possible that instead of toning down their actions, what you should do is show why they actually acted this way? Does it help the plot and their character progression?
Fourth, plan the fixes. It's now time to prepare. It's still not time to act, though, at least in my suggestion. Additionally, it's time to separate the proofreader's or editor's true feedback from what they said. For example, a comment might read, "This doesn't make sense, remove it." But what actually means to say is, "I didn't understand this." What you should do is up to you. Maybe it needs removal—it could have been an unimportant detail, an afterthought on your part, something you tacked on because it felt appropriate but doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things, something you were thinking that day and it leaked into the story. Or it may need additional support, because it's actually important and you shouldn't remove it. Why did the commenter not understand this? What kind of support would it need to make sense, even for them?
They say, when someone tells you that something's wrong with your book, they're most probably right (precluding haters, who are gonna hate, as you shouldn't be writing for everyone). But when they tell you how to fix it, they're most probably wrong. So, examine every piece of feedback you receive with this in mind.
Consider your proofreader's or editor's own biases. I love worldbuilding, and I often feel unhappy with the amount of details mentioned about the world, its magic or special systems, its society, everything about it. I always tell this to my customers, so they know that when I leave a comment like, "Describe how this spell was cast in more details," they know to adjust for my bias. I might want a couple of paragraphs of description, but the right thing to do could be to just add an adjective or one more sentence to avoid bogging down the action.
At this stage, you should prepare a list of any book-wide changes you should make, if applicable. For example, while reading my proofreaders' comments on the first draft of the second Mages' Guild book, I realized that a huge amount of work was required to polish it. I went through each comment I received and categorized it in local, which means fixes in specific wording or typos, and large-scale, which means changes to the whole book. I addressed all the large-scale changes with work on the worldbuilding, which took me about two months, then started working on the book itself. I ended up rewriting it almost completely, which wasn't my initial intention, and it's the reason it's taken me so long to get it ready, but it was what was required. I addressed the local changes while working on the text.
Then comes the fifth part, the actual editing. It's time to change the text. So far, you may have needed two or three days to prepare, and you may need another to do the editing; or you might have needed several weeks to prepare, and it's time to embark on a months-long journey of rewriting. Or, you might be somewhere in-between. Whichever it is, you can now work on your book directly.
If you have prepared well in the fourth step, this fifth step should be one thorough pass from beginning to end and you should be done. If you haven't prepared well, then you'll discover more issues, like plot holes or inconsistencies. It all depends on your preparation.
Don't forget to thank your editor or proofreader! They did quite a bit of work, and if it's a friend or family member, it can very well be unpaid work. Buy them lunch if your book sells! (A huge thank you to Menelaos, I'll make sure to buy you a lunch or three! And, of course, to my wife!)
I want to also address the form in which feedback is received. This depends on the writer and their idiosyncrasies. I have absolutely no issue with reading comments on my writing, even very negative ones, or seeing huge parts of it with red markings. In fact, I feel relief. I feel that I can finally improve my book in real, quantifiable ways. But when someone talks to me, either verbally or through instant messages, about some criticism they have of my story, I find it very difficult to not reply and give "my" side, that is to say, to defend my book. I'm not feeling attacked, but justifications just spring forth. I've learned to force myself to just say "okay, thanks, I'll write this down" when people give me feedback this way, actually write it down, and say nothing else unless asked. It's not the time to explain my choices, it's the time to take feedback.
You should find the way you're most comfortable receiving feedback, and ways to mitigate any discomfort when receiving feedback in an uncomfortable way. Feedback is incredibly important!
You write and publish stories because you want to tell other people your stories. If you didn't want others to read them, you wouldn't publish them, you'd keep them in a local file, not even synced to the cloud. Why back up something you do for yourself, for the sake of doing the action itself? So, since you want to tell your stories to other people, the way they react to them (that is to say, their feedback) is really important, isn't it? Give it serious consideration, and always remember to thank them!
As always, don't hesitate to let me know if you have some feedback for me, whether it's on this or other articles, or on my book (singular for now, as I only have the first one out, but it'll soon be plural, as I'm nearly done with the final proofread), through one of my social media accounts or my public email. Thank you for reading through this article, I hope it was helpful to you!
Keep writing (and editing)!