If you're serious about writing, then you need to be serious about getting feedback. You might ask friends to read your work, swap drafts with writers online, or hire an editor—or even all of the above! The bottom line is you're too close to your story to be objective, so you always need to see how it flies with other people.
And when you do, you will often find one or more of the following happens:
- Readers provide conflicting feedback—one likes a passage, while another hates it.
- One reader suggests a sweeping change that changes your vision for the novel—it's not what you were trying to do.
- A reader hates a part that you absolutely love.
- Readers are confused about something you know you explained.
It can be frustrating, especially for new writers, to try to figure out how to handle feedback like this. You want to please everybody, but it seems impossible!
A key way to approach this is to treat the feedback like a doctor: interpreting it as symptoms, diagnoses, and prescriptions.
SYMPTOMS are what the reader feels as they're reading. Maybe they're confused, frustrated, or bored. The important thing to remember is that the reader is (almost) never wrong about what they feel. It doesn't matter what you intended; if the reader is bored, they're bored. Start there.
Many readers will then try to provide a DIAGNOSIS of what they think the problem is. They might think they're bored because they don't care about world-building, or they're confused because a fantasy term wasn't explained properly. Remember that the reader is not your doctor. They are usually right about what they're feeling, but they're not always right about why.
Maybe the world-building is really interesting, but in that particular moment in the story, the reader cares more about whether the protagonist escapes the people hunting them. Maybe the fantasy term is explained perfectly fine later, but there needed to be just a little more context so the reader could understand the sentence where it was introduced. (Or maybe that particular reader isn't used to holding things in abeyance.)
Readers aren't always aware of what causes their feelings, but if you assume that their feelings are real, then you stand a much better chance of addressing the root cause of the problem.
Finally, some readers will try to PRESCRIBE A SOLUTION. Readers are often wrong here. They know what they're feeling, they maybe know why, but they aren't you. They don't know your story or what you're trying to accomplish. They don't live in your head. Most people's prescriptions are likely to be wrong.
Who Can You Trust?
It's important to learn who to trust. Trust readers to know what they're feeling, but beyond that? It depends.
You can probably trust readers who are fans of books like yours. They might know the market better than you, or they might have insight that you lack. Their solutions might not perfectly fit your story, but their diagnoses might spark some good ideas.
You can usually trust readers you've worked with or those who really get your work. You'll know these folks from your relationship with them.
You can often trust professionals. Editors aren't perfect—they can provide bad diagnoses and prescriptions like anyone else—but the more experienced they are in your genre, the less likely they are to give you bad advice.
More than anyone else though, trust yourself. You alone know your story and what you are trying to accomplish, and you alone are responsible for turning the story into whatever it becomes.
Sometimes, a reader's diagnosis or prescription will feel right—it will strike a chord, possibly even solving multiple problems for you at once. This is great! It's exactly what you want feedback for.
But other times, a prescribed solution won't sit right, and you won't really know why. Trust your feelings, but don't ignore the feedback entirely. Something didn't work for the reader, and it's up to you—and only you—to figure out what.
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