What It Even Means When I Give You Feedback On Your Writing

If someone tells you what they don't like about your story, that doesn't tell you whether your story is any good or not.

But does that make their feedback useless? That depends...

Suppose a critic doesn't want to go out on a limb, and is good at grammar, spelling, etcetera? The critic can point out the places where your story has misspelled words, objectively improper grammar, and missing punctuation. If your commenter is right, you've been given easy opportunities to improve your story. You might even learn something about how to write those elements better next time.

The only problem is, it might feel like someone is telling you you're wrong a lot. I'm sorry about that.

But what about other kinds of feedback?

The main problem with long feedback is, you're getting a lot of feedback from only one person. Whatever that person's individual preferences and knowledge, whatever that one person is good or bad at communicating to you in particular...that rather limits the range of what you can get from that person.

I'm sorry about that too. (Hey, I've found a recurring theme and refrain for this blog post!)

If I'm giving you feedback on your writing, what's the one thing you really know?

I thought you and your writing were worth it. Probably I really liked some things about your story. Maybe I LOVED a LOT of things about your story. For whatever reasons, I must have seen something good there. There's an old saying: you can't polish horseapples. I, for one, wouldn't want to try.

If I have ideas about how a story might be changed, they're just...ideas. A idea might be right or wrong for who you are right now, or for who you will be or hope to be in the future. An idea might be right or wrong for where you want your story to go, or for where you suddenly realize your story SHOULD go. Or for where you really really want to go.

I could say a lot about short-form feedback, where someone just says something about how they reacted or related to the story, or remarks on some detail of particular interest to them. One advantage is, you certainly don't have to be an expert to give it (although it really helps if you've at least read the story .) Fortunately, short-form feedback can often be quick and easy to write. It can help more than you might think.

One reason I'm writing this blog post is, fimfiction.net has at least one non-dead group for people who want feedback on their writing:

This group is made for people who just want feedback on their work.

And not those silly likes or dislikes. I'm talking about solid comments with words in them that tell the author exactly how you felt about their story. Come on, now...

Maybe I'll see you there? Maybe I already have.