Since I totally suck at actually getting the writing done (Despite the “official” deadlines I have) I thought I’d write a post about editing. 

Yes, because I’ve never done that before. 

Constructive Feedback

How would you classify this kind of feedback?  Well, anything that helps really.  You may share your work in progress with friends or family, you may be part of a writing group, or if you’re lucky (as I am) you may have a few dedicated writing buddies who exchange work from time to time.  Writing groups though, may be a little hit and miss.  I used to attend a writing group – long disbanded now – where we often exchanged work to receive feedback.  Well I’ll tell you, the few of us who were regular attendee’s had various projects on the go, some had a serious volume of work behind them, others just wrote occasionally for pleasure.  However, I found the group somewhat disappointing and occasionally frustrating.  Why was this?  Primarily it was because the majority of the feedback was – and this wasn’t just to my work here – along the lines of “I really liked it”, or “that was really good.” Which as we all know is not feedback at all.  It doesn’t particularly help you as a writer to know that someone liked your work. 

I further remember at university when we had our feedback sessions each week.  Now I don’t want to appear harsh to anyone, but you could tell who was serious about writing and who was just doing it to pass the unit.  The work that was workshopped just to pass the unit lacked a certain something.  Some of the work was just plain bad.  I’m not saying they were bad writers, only some submissions were.  I would torture myself every Sunday, writing detailed feedback, giving notes – most of it (hopefully) constructive, even on the work that I didn’t like, or the work that was clearly just for the mark.  But I did it because lets face it, if you can’t get good at analysing other people’s work, how are you going to be good at analysing your own? 

But I digress. 

Utilising Feedback

 
The feedback I’m concerning myself with here is in an official capacity.  Anyone who hopes to get published is obviously going to need to have their work read and, well, edited, by an editor.  Now I’ve never had this before.  Obviously I’ve had feedback from friends, and I’ve made alterations based on that (or not, depending), but getting notes and suggestions from an actual editor in an official capacity is a whole different beast. 

It is different because if you totally ignore everything the editor tells you, then they won’t work with you, and you wont get published.  I’ll be honest, this is what terrifies me!  After my first round of notes I got back, I had that voice in the back of my head saying, “change everything she wants you to!  Do whatever she says!  If you don’t she’ll ditch you and your story wont get published!” 

But this is the other end of the extreme.  If you do change everything your editor tells you to, then you’ll more than likely get ditched too.  Nobody wants to work with someone who is a pushover. 

So where is the middle ground?  While I like to think that I give mostly constructive feedback, as far as I recall, I have never (or at least very rarely) replaced the writer’s text.  I may suggest alternatives to certain lines of dialogue and so fourth, but plain rewriting someone’s text is – I find anyway – a little rude.  It may appear that you don’t trust or believe in the writer’s voice, or that you feel you can do a better job.  Now it’s fine to maybe suggest a replacement line of dialogue if it’s a real clanger.  God knows I’ve written some god awful dialogue in my past.  What writer hasn’t?  I keep a hold of that and sometimes, when I’m dissatisfied with a writing session, I just tell myself “Well, at least it wasn’t as bad as…” 

The Middle Ground

 
No, the middle ground is to take on board any notes and suggestions, and change your writing accordingly, your own way, in your own voice.  With each piece of feedback I get, my online editor gives me a list of questions to do with the episodes, which gives me some indications as to what is clear and what isn’t.  This is I find very useful.  Don’t replace text when you give feedback, but ask questions. If you ask questions of the writer, it is the clearest indication of what it is that works and what doesn’t.

My editor also makes alterations (suggests alterations) to the text, and I will mostly (but not always) alter the text, or change a scene, to accommodate.  After all, if you receive feedback on one chapter at a time (or an episode at a time, in my case) there may be material in there that doesn’t make immediate sense, but is clarified in a later episode.

It’s about getting used to not being precious about your work.  But it also opens up new avenues.  I think I mentioned in my last post that this series is big.  And dense.  There is so much stuff in it and I’ll be honest, it isn’t all going to fit in the one series.  Also, some of the characters are superfluous.  In context to how I originally envisioned it, as prose, then yes, you can include the smaller characters, the ones who are in the background most of the time, who don’t have main storylines.  However, scripting is a different beast.  Eight main characters and almost a dozen supporting may work in a book of prose, but in a series?  Can you name a series which has a main cast of almost ten characters and more than that in recurring roles?  Shut up about Lost! So you have to cut some.  And while some of my characters were heavily under-developed anyway, it has been suggested that I lose some characters from various scenes and replace them with others.  And this does cause me a little pain. 

However!  It does also get my creative juices flowing.  It’s part of the thinking on your feet thing.  Making the given suggestions work within the greater context.  And it has actually helped a few more of the pieces fall into place for me.

 Now all I need to do is write them!

So with that in mind, I’ve been thinking about what I do when I give feedback, and also the kind of feedback I like to receive on my writing. And here’s the result – my six tips for reviewing someone else’s work and giving feedback.

Six? Six? That’s not catchy at all is it? Well it was going to be five until I realised I had left out a very obvious, but no less important one. Besides, I’m not going to hamstring a perfectly good list by forcing it to fit a title; that’s not how I roll!

1. Be constructive

This is number one because I want to get it out if the way – it is SO obvious, and should go without saying, but in the interests of completeness…

Don’t just say that something is rubbish. Don’t just say that something is great. If you like/dislike something, tell them why that is. There. Done.

2. Be honest

Another obvious one, but it can be very easy to go all coy and give only praise. Praise is a great ego massage, but there’s only so much you can do with it. If a writer has given you something to look at, it should be because they want to improve it, not because they are showing off. So point them in the right direction!

3. Keep it broad brushstrokes, and don’t write it for them

If I’m asked to give feedback, I will generally keep that feedback broad. I will talk about pacing, characterisation, how I felt about a piece overall. Unless I’ve been asked, I wouldn’t want to pick on a particular paragraph and try to dissect it (apart from to say it was too long, for example – again, quite a broad point to make).

I am not editing the piece, so it would do no good to tell them to cut sentences, or write in more appropriate words. I don’t want to impinge on the writer’s voice, or the direction they are going to take their story. There are times when I think I would have written a sentence differently, but a lot of the time, that comes down to personal taste or style (again, there are exceptions – I would point out if I did not understand a particular sentence for example).

As an illustration, I might read a chapter from a longer piece and say something along the lines of,

“A lot if stuff happens in this chapter, and there are a few different concepts about how the world works that are introduced all at once. I wouldn’t mind a slower pace so that I can digest it all”

Or

“I’ve got a good handle on character A but I’m having trouble distinguishing between characters B C and D”

It’s then up to the author to decide if they agree and to work out a way of slowing the pace down or differentiating their characters.

5. Ask them what they’re looking for

A lot of times you might want to give comments about a piece if work. but the author is already aware of the issue or may even have written it that way on purpose. This is especially true if you are reviewing part of a longer piece of writing. For example, it is not hard to imagine reading a detailed description of a character and commenting, “I don’t think we need to spend so much time over such an insignificant character”. The author might know different, and might prefer to know whether that description was vivid enough that you would recognise the character several chapters later, when they suddenly become vital.

So, with this in mind you can ask the author if there are any specific things they’d like you to look for.

6. Ignore what authors ask you to look for

Okay, so I deliberately phrased that point like that to mess with you! But seriously, even if I’ve asked for something I should look for, I will then ignore that when I read through the text. I will then read the questions afterwards.

The idea behind this is that I want to be able to give an honest answer, untainted by bias because I’ve been primed. After all, the reader is not going to have a list of prompts to indicate how they should read the text. Having read the questions, I may go back and re read parts or all of the text, but this is largely to help decide why I felt the way I did about it. Say I completely missed the description of that character above. I would want to be able to tell the author why I thought that was, and offer any tips I could.

So those are my tips. There’s probably a great many more things you can usefully keep in mind when looking at writing, but these are the points that I tend to concentrate on. If you have any tips, please share them in the comments.