There’s a trap here too.
Sure, easy, nice, simple - give your writing to a Beta reader, or two, or three - this seems to be a first-step manuscript review before changes, and then aprez-changes, what comes next?
It seems so simple, really: place your work, your words, to someone to see, to review and to offer their thoughts, their reaction. Scary. Important. Where’s the rule book?
Choosing carefully who we ask can’t be a clever way to choose only people likely to agree with us. Everyone has to do what’s right for them, and what’s right for the process of write, right, wrong, re-write…
If everyone at our table sees things pretty much as we do, we haven’t assembled advisers; we’ve assembled an audience of fans, comrades, a mutual admirational society, my baby and me ...
Sometimes the person worth hearing is precisely the one likely to make us uncomfortable. Hearing that discussed in a forum at a conference yesterday was just conversation for everyone in the room, but I felt a shiver in my seat …
Feedback is a daunting challenge whether done seriously or flippantly - so it’s partly about the feedback, and partly about the relationships … the feedbackor, and feedbackee …
Some people know us well and still may be the wrong people to ask.
.The whole truth may belong on the table, but that doesn’t mean every opinion deserves a chair at the table, or a vote on anything ...
I came away from the writers’ conference thinking about feedback differently.
In a workshop, we discussed ‘who to trust’ when we choose readers to give us feedback on our writing, because they know much better than other caring types - something about our craft, structure, voice, or the thing we’re trying to make better.
Life is messier.
When we ask for feedback on anything - and methinks women tend to do this more than men do, but in any case- when we ask for feedback on a wide range of things that don’t matter, ones that do matter a bit vs. those that matter enormously - we always risk getting feedback we didn’t solicit from people who we’d rather kept their mouths shut and their noses stuck somewhere else.
But, generally speaking, we don’t ask strangers or professionals - we ask friends because they know us, but just as some will miss-step because they don’t know us well enough, or our writing well enough, sometimes they know us too well.
They may protect us, cheer us, or remember an older version of us.
Yet, someone less familiar may see what we can’t.
And the risk is that both might blow smoke up our proverbial asses.
Or some will kiss that same ass.
So the useful question isn’t simply, “Whose opinion do I value?” It’s, “Whose perspective belongs in this particular conversation?”
And if I’m asking for the whole truth, am I actually prepared to hear something I didn’t invite because I wanted agreement?
