Fear and feedback
Turn the thing you fear into your secret weapon
Hello, friends—I’m really glad you’re here!
Before I get to today’s topic, I wanted to say a big thank you to all those who took advantage of the recent deal on annual Page by Page subscriptions. PBP is one of several ways I make a living as a writer, so it means a very great deal to have your support!
I also want to thank all those current paid PBP subscribers who accepted my invitation to meet up online and talk about your projects! I thoroughly enjoyed chatting with all of you, and am already looking forward to hearing about the next stage of your work!
This week, I’m returning to a favourite topic of mine: feedback.
I’m currently revising some chapters from my BFB (‘Big Fat Book’, or ‘Big Effing Book’ on difficult days), and I’m finally at the stage where I know I need to solicit feedback. This is something I might do at various stages in a project (even near the beginning!), but since I’m preparing to send this book out to potential publishers, I really want to make sure it looks its best.
Soliciting feedback is scary, even at this stage of my career. But in the very beginning, it was terrifying.
I dreaded the Q&A that followed every conference paper or presentation. My heart rate would spike whenever I opened reader reports on books or articles. And the prospect of discussing my work with senior colleagues and more experienced writers sent me into a panic. I was afraid of a lot of things—embarrassment, exposure (I had a massive case of Imposter Syndrome), criticism. But what I was really terrified of was failure.
You see, at that stage of my career, criticism felt like failure. It felt like The End. And in a way that was my own fault: because I rarely shared anything that wasn’t a super polished, repeatedly revised draft, I was almost always sharing things that—to me—felt like finished products. When those supposedly finished products came up short, I inevitably felt like I had failed, which only made me even more reluctant to seek out feedback in the future.
What I’ve learned over more than 20 years of writing and teaching inside and outside of academia is that feedback isn’t the end: it’s where the process of making your work better begins.
Sure, I regularly publish work that I’ve written without soliciting outside feedback first. But in both my literary criticism and my comedy writing, I’ve found that other people’s feedback always makes my work better.
Here are a couple of tricks I use to overcome my fear of feedback (and to get the most out of it):
I ask early. Remember that ‘30-60-90’ approach to writing I shared with you ages ago? Well, whereas twenty years ago I would wait until a piece of writing felt like it was 90% of the way there before asking for feedback, I now start asking for feedback when it’s only 30% of the way there. The stakes feel much lower at that stage, but the benefits can be much greater: if early on somebody points out something HUGE that I’ve overlooked or gotten wrong, I can course-correct without too much effort. Take that, failure!
I ask for specific things. No matter what stage a piece of writing is at, whenever I ask for feedback I ask for feedback on very specific things. I think of this as ‘directed’ feedback: I direct my reader’s attention to the specific parts of my writing that I’m least confident about, or that I know least about, or that I feel are weakest. This makes it easier for my reader to give me feedback, since they know what I really need their opinion on, and it also forces me to step back from my work for a moment and consider what I need to make it better.
I explain what I’m not asking for. Is there anything more frustrating than getting feedback about something that you already know is a problem but are planning to fix at a later stage? Ok, yes, there are lots of more frustrating things. But what makes it particularly frustrating to me is that, whenever it happens, I feel like I’ve wasted both my reader’s time and my own. If I’m sharing an early rough draft with notes and typos all over the place, I don’t need anyone to tell me I’ll have to get rid of the notes and fix the typos before I submit the work anywhere! So when I ask for feedback, I always try to clarify what stage my draft is at, and what I don’t need feedback on (e.g. ‘This is a really, really rough draft, so at this stage I don’t need line edits, but I would be extremely grateful for your thoughts on how the piece is currently structured’).
I ask my peers. I ask more senior/experienced people for feedback, too, but if I’m really feeling nervous (or if my work is at a really early stage) I always approach my peers first. Not only is it less intimidating, but it also often means I’m reading their work, too! And that means I get to learn things that might improve my writing when I’m coming and going, so to speak.
Because asking for feedback can be scary, it’s easy to forget that it’s one of the most powerful tools you can use to improve your writing. You won’t always like or agree with the feedback you get, but I promise you that you will always learn something useful (even if that something is ‘I guess I’m not being clear enough in this piece because my reader totally didn’t get what I was going for’!).
And here’s the thing: if you practice asking for feedback enough, you may even find yourself actively seeking out criticism from some really scary sources.
When I was in the process of writing my second book, I was asked to submit a list of potential peer reviewers (though the actual peer reviewers would remain anonymous). If I’d been asked that question while writing my first book, I probably would have suggested people I was pretty sure already liked me and my work, or people I hoped would go easy on me. But this time, I thought, Whose criticism scares me the most? Who do I think are the toughest experts on this topic out there? What I had finally realised was that, if those people gave me feedback before the book was published, I could be confident that the final version of my book would be practically bulletproof.
As I type, I’ve got several colleagues either reading or awaiting chapters about the reception of Chaucerian obscenity in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries (it’s a topic I personally find fascinating, but still: THANK YOU, wonderful colleagues!!!). I also have a very different bunch of colleagues currently reading over a short humour piece I’m hoping to submit somewhere cool (THANK YOU, L1 Satire Writers Group!!!). And I’m very, very excited to see what all of them think!
Fingers crossed….
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VB,
M
So much of what you said resonates with me - I also used to equate feedback with failure. Now I try and reframe it as 'helping me become a better writer' but I do still find it painful! Here are my 7 strategies for dealing with feedback with self-compassion: https://sanjidakay.substack.com/p/how-to-deal-with-feedback
Thanks Mary! Great to read this post.
Loved this post, Mary! I've been incredibly grateful for feedback on my work this week - I was nervous about it precisely because, as you say, I hadn't handed in anything until a draft was complete and then it felt like the stakes were high! The feedback I got was incredibly encouraging, as well as constructive and precise, but I'm going to try and take on board what you say here to think about how sharing work earlier on might be more beneficial (and less nerve-wracking). Thanks as always for the insights!