Feedback

One of the beauties of publishing online is that you get feedback. Well, you get it if you publish through a publishing house, and you get letters. The most (in)famous feedback that I know of happened to Larry Niven at a Worldcon. A fan cornered him at a party. He had a list of 40 some inconsistencies (8 major) in Niven's Known Space stories, and he wanted Niven, then and there, to resolve them!

Writers crave feedback. If you're honest with yourself, you want comments that will help you get better. If you're in it for the psychological stroking, you want people to tell you how wonderful your writing is (well, you want that if you're honest, too). Someone once said the best criticism was 5,000 words of closely reasoned adulation. That's good for the ego, but does it make you a better writer? On the other hand, the feedback I got for a fantasy story ("trite, disappointing, incompetent armies led by incompetent generals...") hurt. I didn't reply that that particular general was based on the worst aspects of both John Bell Hood and the Italian WW1 Commander in Chief Cadorna(!). Hood was a brilliant division commander; to be depressed, read a history of his 1864 Tennessee campaign. And as for Cadorna...there were eleven battles of the Isonzo between 1915 and 1918. The critic had probably never heard of Cadorna, the Isonzo, Hood, or Franklin (she may have heard of Nashville, and I suspect that at least once in her life she had heard of Tennessee).

So what makes good criticism? A mentor I had once went over a story of mine with a fine tooth comb, commenting on everything from word choice to punctuation to the logic of the plot. It was exhausting, but at the end I knew why I didn't like parts of the story, and I knew how to improve my next one. That's one kind of criticism, the kind you'd get from a line editor, though Bob's comments about my plot and the way I did characterization were not what a line editor would do.

Another kind of criticism is what one another writer (one many times published) gave me. He read the whole story (it was a novel) and came back questioning one of the key concepts (somebody would use access to another timeline to do counterfeiting -- which is how Counterfeit Line got its name). It did seem illogical, and I went to Plan B (he didn't fault the concept of access to an alternate time, he thought that was intriguing). He also didn't fault (most) of how I told the story. He showed me a couple of shaky places, and suggested how I might shore them up.

I did the same for Ted Sanders (writing under the name D T Sanders). While I niggled on his punctuation and some word choice, and did the same with a little of his imagery, I asked a couple of plot related questions that led him to throw out three chapters of his WIP and do some severe rethinking and rewriting. It's only fair, Ted did the same thing to my current WIP, Different World. I've ended up rewriting the whole thing from the beginning and cutting out an entire subplot.

Someone I met online sent me a novel he'd written and wanted my opinion. I wavered between brutal honesty (you can see where I'm going with this) and friendship. I came down in the middle. He had written an 18,000 word novel, and I pointed out this was a novella, or a novelette, and to be a novel should be 60,000 words or more (publishers seem to like first novels to be around 85,000 words). He pleaded that he couldn't expand it any more, so I began exchanging e-mails with him (he lives in the Mediterranean littoral), going over the chapters one at a time. I went over everything I could think of, and included possible plot elements he was tossing off and dropping as he wrote. When I last saw the story he was at 55,000+ words and in the middle of a major rewrite. Oh, and he dropped the first 30 pages (9,000 words) as the story didn't start until after those pages.

Other feedback just adds to the creative juices. For example, I've been getting a series of e-mails from someone who had read (and liked) the Kalliste's Storytime stories. He works in archaeology, and he sent me links to several online scholarly journals amplifying points I'd made from logic. The latest came this morning, and is a collection of papers on dating the eruption of Thera/Santorini, which is a pivotal moment in Kalliste's life. The link is: http://www.arts.cornell.edu/dendro/thera.html. What follows is a brief summary of my notes about Kalliste, the papers linked above offering some support.

When Kalliste was born is left as an exercise to the reader. You can e-mail me your suggestiosn, or put them in the Comments Section (I hope I have it set up right).

It's fun when feedback suggests you got something right.

How should you respond to feedback? Don't argue. Listen, note down what they said, and consider it. You may end up rejecting it entirely, but if you get in their face and argue, that won't help. Remember (and this applies to those giving feedback, too), we are criticizing words on a page. That's all.

Writer's groups offer the most immediate feedback. This is how you learn from one another, but an important point is that you must have some people with some pretty well developed skills so people can benefit. If everybody is at the lowest level of fan fiction writing, nobody's going to be able to say "this is wrong, and here's why, and here's how to fix it". In the better writer's groups you get that.

Writer's groups - should you join an online one? That depends. You should at least try them and see what it's like. At this time I belong to one online group, though I haven't contributed in several months. Most of the feedback I get is either face-to-face, or via attached e-mail.

The most important feedback, of course, is when somebody is willing to give you money for your story. Listen very closely to what that person thinks/wants.

So keep those cards and letters coming in. It helps motivate me, it helps me get better, and all of those other nice things (though I'll brood over the ones I don't agree with).