Feedback on Your Writing: Beyond the Script

My fellow creatives, we’ve chosen a path that’s not for the faint-hearted. You have to believe, all the way down into the core of your being, that you can this thing — that you can create worlds, that you can bring imagination to life. And we ride the pendulum, sometimes on the daily, as it swings between godlike swagger and the abject fear of not being enough.

And then there’s dealing with feedback.

We are our own harshest critics in so many ways, but we all have our blind spots. Part of becoming a professional in a creative field is learning how to submit our work for feedback, how to receive it, and how to execute it.

I see this all the time in my alter-ego life as a lit professor. I return every student’s first essay with feedback, sharing with them where the work was solid and where it needed improvement. And at that point, the roads diverge.

Some students digest that feedback and work to avoid making the same mistakes again. These writers will grow. Others, for whatever reason, disregard my notes and blunder into the very same traps on the next assignment. I see the same thing in my work with writers.

There are many skills that you can learn from a book, or from YouTube videos, or from webinars. But how to take feedback, sadly, isn’t one of them. This is one of those things you have to learn by doing, but I’d like to share some considerations that might help you in your quest to master this elusive but highly coveted skill.