Friday, June 18, 2021

Honing Your Process of Receiving Feedback and the Revision It May Require

I've only slowly gotten used to my own stages of writerly reaction when I receive feedback. Positive feedback generates a warm satisfaction, almost glee, inside. A victorious feeling. Something worked, especially satisfying if I put in a huge amount of effort. Sometimes, I'm amazed--I don't quite believe it--but I'm basically over the moon.

Harder, though, is feedback that suggests the need for revision. What I do with that kind of feedback often determines whether the piece progresses or not.

I think of all the years I flailed over feedback. I didn't yet trust my own sense of what was correct and useful to my writing and what was just the reader's opinion and had nothing to do with the story I wanted to tell. It was all murky. Either I accepted everything, because who was I to know better. Or I got mad and hurt and stomped away, vowing never to share again.

Both responses were pretty useless.