Sounds boring, right? Wrong. There’s absolutely no problem with sucking at something, there is a problem with refusing to learn how to get better. Anyone can get good at anything if they have the tools they need to succeed and know how to use them. For writing, your biggest one is feedback sessions. This is so much the case that people spend thousands of dollars for a singular developmental review on their work.
This blog post is all about critique and feedback groups, related topics, and how to best use (and not use) them to your advantage. Whether it’s over Discord, or a local meetup group, the gist of it is the same. A group of writers gets together, they take turns submitting work and critiquing each other’s work, then (presumably) they take that feedback home with them and learn from their mistakes. The absolute fastest way to grow as a writer is to grit your teeth, get out of your own hand, and simply shove your work in front of someone else and see what they think. If you do this enough - and do it right, you will be shocked at how you grow. Let’s get into it.
People are wild, trusting them blindly is insane. Know your reviewers before asking for a review! I call this concept getting a ‘baseline’ of your reviewers. Before you solicit feedback from people on your work, you want to know what you think of their feedback. Do you generally agree with what they’ve got to say? The critiques they give?
The easiest way to do this is to wait on submitting your work and instead go through a review round where you and a potential reviewer are reviewing someone else’s work. Then when you all meet to exchange feedback, you can compare and contrast the feedback you are giving to what other people are giving. This is your ‘baseline’. Did you find a scene too gory and explicit where they asked for more? Is there that one dude that likes to hear himself talk and plays devil's advocate when literally everyone else at the group agrees on something? Do they have a history of saying nice things when the piece they’re critiquing kind of just sucked? Does that one girl always have bomb advice and you wish you were thinking on her level? Well, with a baseline, now you know. Even just one critique session of not submitting can let you compare your thoughts to everyone else that participated before letting them loose on your own work. This offers some really important perspective for the feedback they will give you down the line.
Romance writers just aren’t going to like your decapitation and torture scene no matter how well its written. That doesn’t mean they have bad advice, but it does frame their perspective. Oftentimes as a writer you take what you can get for feedback, very few people these days have time to read (let alone review). Still, even if it’s only online, you need to be bridging this divide.
The best critiques you can get as an author generally tend to come from two types of people: obsessive readers of all genres who are bordering on manic in their zeal for the craft, and people squarely in your target audience. Are you writing a multi-racial high-tech space opera? You better have some sweaty ass Star Wars nerds reading that stuff before you put it out. Are you writing a romance? You better be putting that book in front of a Saturday brunch romance book club. If you cannot define the target audience that you would slap your book down in front of for a perfect critique, you need to sit down and solve that problem ASAP!
If you’ve ever queried a book, these chunks have special meaning to you. Part of a submission package for an agent to consider reviewing your book is, of course, going to contain a portion of your writing. Depending on their methods, they will either ask you for the first 10 pages, the first chapter, or the first three chapters. As such, it is extremely valuable to know what impression your work gives in these specific sections. What will an agent think about your book 10 pages in? That’s useful knowledge! When I request feedback on a first chapter, I ask reviewers to stop at the 10 page mark and unleash their thoughts there. Then I ask them to do it again at the end of the chapter. That way their view isn’t biased by anything they read after the fact.
Most critique formats allow for a little blurb at the top for the author to put in a description and contextual information. Really try to avoid this. You want reviewer’s raw natural opinion, not their views only after you’ve given them the additional information and context that potential readers in a book store flipping through your book won’t have. This becomes more complicated when you're doing an excerpt from a work a group has never seen before, and when you're doing a chapter not close to the start of your book. If you need to say some quick things about obvious tidbits a reader would know, that’s fine! But no more.
The only exception I would make here is for ‘meta’ information. For example, if you're a gay author writing a gay character, a reader would probably already know you are gay from an author bio or blurb on the cover (although maybe not!). When it’s something outside of the story entirely that would be significant and advertised to readers, then it’s okay. Long story short you just want to replicate the experience readers will have in a bookstore with your work, or as close to that as possible.
It is always a good time for a review. Try a first draft at something, get some review. Take another stab at it, get some review. The only time you should be sparing with asking for feedback is when you do not have that many people willing to read it, and potentially they are only game to read it once.
It absolutely sucks to write an entire book and realize a mistake you’ve been making since chapter three is pulling readers out of the story but is now deeply entrenched in your entire novel throughout. You’re already going to have to go over a draft a million times over, spare yourself making it two million. If at all possible, you want to be learning lessons as you go, and as close to real time as possible. Lessons learned in chapter 3 are much more valuable than lessons learned in chapter 23! This especially applies to new authors who are still learning.
Receiving criticism is hard, but what is even worse is having someone lie to your face. You want to get better. It’s perfectly okay to write bad stuff, to step on toes, to have a beta reader point out that something is maybe offensive and you really need to think about that. As long as you handle it respectfully and promise to learn and grow. The best critters are the harshest ones, keep them close! Just know that with every harsh review you take in, it is another lesson you are learning, and more you are growing! Everyone sucked at one point, it’s a fact of life that’s perfectly okay.
Oh God no, don’t do that! Preferably you have the aforementioned ‘baseline’ to help guide you, but even then. As a rule of thumb: when one person says something you can ignore it, when multiple people say something it’s true. You’ll drive yourself mad if you take each person’s reviews. You’ll do entire pass overs of drafts with changes only to give it to someone else and have them suggest it be the way it was. That being said, when a lot of people are saying something. That’s when you start taking it very seriously, that’s where you identify an opportunity to learn and grow.
Giving critiques is an artform all to itself. Balancing the line of being polite but honest, trying to remove personal bias and help articulate what would best help an author achieve what they want, etc. Some people are further along in their learning journeys than others. And much like any belief systems, people fall on different ends of the spectrum of how much bias they want to keep in or remove from their critiques.
This one’s hard to make a rule about, but is easy to follow. A decent (but far from bulletproof) rule is to watch for words like “too” in a critique. “Too gross”, “too lovey-dovey”, “too sad”. These are the types of words critiquers tend to use when they are describing their personal tastes to you, not necessarily what’s best for your work.
The emphatic exception here is when someone follows this statement with “for the character”. If someone says “this seems too cruel for Casius”. That’s not someone articulating a personal taste, it’s them describing a character acting out of character. A nice green flag to look for in critiques are phrases like “if you want that, perfect, if not then”. This is someone going out of their way to tell you what your work invokes with them, but to empower you to decide if you think that’s a good or a bad thing. Then, with the ‘then’, they tell you if you would like to change it, what they would suggest.
When someone tells you something, especially something that would involve a lot of rewriting. You want to ask them how pervasive the observation is. Are they saying that because they saw one specific line and are stuck hyper fixating on it? Or did they feel that way throughout? If they feel that way throughout, you want to ask for examples. This simultaneously allows you to confirm it is indeed a pervasive issue, but even better, it gives you examples of where you have an opportunity to change and improve.
This post is on receiving feedback so I won’t deep dive here, but this is the golden rule of reviews. People remember when you showed up to a session and clearly didn’t remember their characters' names. They remember when you barely had any comments in their work, etc. Put good effort into it, and get good feedback out of it. Simple as that.
I firmly believe that you want to be trying to surround yourself with a good base of people that are in your genre. People that know what you want and have the same tastes as you - BUT, when you come across it, do not write off critiquers who are not primarily in your genre! Yes, absolutely couch their critiques with that in mind, but do not throw it out. Some of their critiques can be amazing. Good prose, dialogue, and characters are universal across-genre, and if those aren’t the foundation of any good writing, I don’t know what is. Likewise, sometimes cross-genre critiquers can bring interesting perspectives. As a primarily SFF author myself, I always get some interesting feedback from primarily romance readers. Oftentimes they can be more in tune to my characters emotions and conflicts more than I had even thought I was. And that’s useful!
Finding groups is damned hard. There's scheduling, if they click, their size, their rules. At the time of writing this, I’m in about three different spaces. Larger ones have the advantage of receiving more reviews, but tend to have less room for you to submit, and mean more review work on your end. Smaller ones are awesome because you can throw whole sections of manuscripts at people, but obviously the variation in feedback is limited so you have to have a lot of trust in your critiquers. The internet has some awesome ones even just on Discord, but writing is a lonely enough hobby as it is, so if you’re looking for human connection you’re out of luck there. Meetup is a great website for finding groups like these, so is Reddit. If you’re in a big enough city, there’s sometimes even dedicated guilds/societies/clubs that do this.
Keep backups! In the cloud, locally, printed out! I don’t care, just do it! With feedback in particular, it can be good to have various drafts if you ever think “oh I wish I had that one quote from that character four drafts ago before I took that other advice, because now it fits well here instead”. Backups will just save you other headaches in general.
Feedback groups are time consuming, but they are well worth it. The two primary things an author needs to improve are to read books and to receive critiques. It can be a hard thing to do. To earnestly open your soul to others and specifically request they trash on it. But as with anything, our talents harden and grow. Best of luck out there writers!
Enjoy!