549 – Getting Feedback On Your Writing
Description
You’ve finished a draft. Now what? Oh right, you have to show it to other people. If that thought made you groan, we sympathize. Getting other people’s feedback is often a real challenge, and once you have the feedback, what are you supposed to do with it? We have some thoughts on all that, and with any luck, they’re useful ones!
Transcript
Generously transcribed by Ace of Hearts. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You are listening to Mythcreant Podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny.
[Intro Music]
Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of Mythcreant Podcast. I’m Oren, and with me today is…
Chris: Chris
Oren: …and…
Bunny: Bunny.
Oren: All right, so good news. My story is drafted and I’m working on a new idea where I’ll just put it in a drawer to age for a while until it’s like wine, and then it’s better ’cause it’s just been in there for a while, and then I’ll release it. That seems like a good way to handle a story that you’ve just finished.
Chris: Of course, the important thing is to write for yourself. With heart!
Bunny: I love it when a book has legs. You know when you kind of swish it around on your bookshelf?
Oren: If it doesn’t have heart, then the legs won’t work. This metaphor, it’s all working together. It’s all connected, man.
Bunny: It’s deeper than you can comprehend. 10/10, no feedback, end the podcast.
Oren: The topic for today is getting feedback on your writing, which, uh… is hard. And I don’t like doing it. I would prefer if I didn’t have to.
Bunny: [sarcastic] But Oren, people don’t care about me. They’re not taking days off work to read my doorstopper!
Oren: You know, that is a problem. I mean, getting people to read a super long novel is not easy. People have lives and they have work and stuff.
Chris: I would just say that I get into writing so that I can just sit alone staring at my computer. This means that I have to communicate with people.
Oren: The worst!
Bunny: Yuck, yucky people! Give me feedback, but ew!
Oren: Beta reading is a huge part of this, and we will definitely talk about beta reading or whatever stage of reading you want to call it. One thing that I’ve been thinking about a little bit, even before beta reading, is when you are asking questions about your story and trying to get advice, like it’s not even finished yet. You’re asking about ideas or trying to brainstorm. A lot of authors kind of struggle with this, and this is not a roast. I’m not gonna make fun of anybody because it’s difficult to know exactly what to ask. It can obstruct you getting feedback and make it harder for you to get any useful information from people when you’re asking.
Bunny: I definitely made the mistake back in the day when I was a mere commenter sending an essay to you both in a Q&A being like, “Analyze my magic system, please! Does this make sense?” You’re not gonna get feedback that way. And you very kindly wrote back and were like, schedule a consultation maybe. I was like, “oh, I’m an 11th grader. I don’t think I can do that, but thanks!”
Chris: There’s another blog that I read for a while where the blogger decided to try Q&As and he would get a question and then, like… kind of roast the person a little bit on the blog post, and I just thought that was really mean! It’s like the nature of getting questions from the internet means you get a lot of bad questions. People don’t know what kind of questions you need. They can’t read your mind, so you have to be nice to them. No surprise, this person did not continue doing Q&As. I’m guessing people did not really like that.
Oren: I have seen this a few times and it always just kind of bothers me. We recently had to shift the Q&A to patron only, just because it was taking up too much of our time. Before we did that, we would get a lot of the same questions and yeah, it can get annoying. You’re like, “why are they asking me this? I’ve answered this question a bunch of times,” blah, blah, blah.
Chris: Over time our guidance, like, here’s our checklist where we try to give you advice, it gets longer and longer.
Oren: But it does weird me out a little bit when I see big blogs – you know, to the extent that there are any of those left – answering questions and seeming annoyed that you asked them. You guys have the Q&A form!
Bunny: And answering them gives you traffic too.
Oren: If you’re tired of answering these questions, you could just not. You know, there are a few questions where when we get them, we’re like, we’ve answered this question before, and we just link to it. We don’t put those on the site. That is actually something that is an issue when you try to like, “Hey everybody, [huge block of text], now give me feedback.” There are situations where that is useful, but be aware of the context you’re in. Like that’s the sort of thing you do with a critique partner where you’re exchanging big blocks of text to review. Like, here judge my magic system and I’ll judge your politics system or whatever. Usually that’s not the sort of thing that you’re gonna ask a forum or a Discord channel or whatever. You wanna try to make these questions specific just because the chances that anyone’s gonna be able to give you very good feedback on something that long are pretty low.
Chris: Yeah, I think it’s also important that people are signing up for the amount of work you’re asking them to do. So we have some guidance on our Discord server where Discord naturally limits the length of posts. If people are asking for advice on our server, it doesn’t get too long. But we have a rule about linking offsite, like off Discord. And expecting people to go somewhere else and read something somewhere else, and then give feedback. Because that’s just like an extra step that you’re asking people to do and who knows what kind of format it’s in on the other side, who knows how long it is, all those other things. And so the rules are just: tell people what you have for them to look at. Describe what it is, how long it is, the format it’s in. Anything they need to know about the experience. If it’s a horror story, obviously that’s important for them to know. And just get volunteers before you just vomit something huge right on a channel where people are chatting. That’s the last thing. Asking a lot of people who have not engaged with you and have not signed up for that.
Oren: Like when you are asking for full feedback, that’s gonna be a whole thing. But for now, if you’re only looking for advice on this specific thing, pare down the information as much as you can and be abstract because chances are most of these people have not read your story. They are not gonna know any of the context. So if you get specific, they’re not gonna be able to answer your questions ’cause they don’t know the context. But if you try to give them the context, that’s almost certainly too much information.
Bunny: Seeing walls of text, just a general rule of the internet: the longer the wall of text, the fewer people will read it.
Chris: I mean, when we did Q&A, we specifically had a 300 word limit, and it was kind of like, okay, if you can’t explain the situation in 300 words, then it is just way too elaborate and lengthy for just a quick question answer.
Oren: So for example, if I were J. R. R. Tolkien, and I wanted to know if people thought it was a good idea to bring Gandalf back in The Two Towers. I wouldn’t try to give the whole explanation for how he’s coming back, because again, that probably isn’t gonna mean anything to most people. They’d say something like, I have a major character who appeared to die in book 1, but we never saw his body. Would it be contrived if he returned in book 2 after going through a series of divine interventions off screen? And the answer is yes, it would be, and it was. You can kind of answer your own question that way when you abstract it and stop trying to add all of these excuses you’ve put in, sometimes that can help.
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