In which I use a number of lists, some numbered, some bulleted, all exciting

There are three things that make this article timely:

1. Discussions I’ve had lately about writing sites that rank submissions based on reviews.
2. The fact that the first draft of my latest book is almost finished and in imminent need of feedback.
3. This afternoon I sat in on a training session for business users on the principles behind user acceptance testing a new system.

The structure of this article also allows me to write a second list explaining what the structure will be:

1. What kind of reviews/feedback you can expect for your writing.
2. How to interpret that feedback.
3. A third point of some description that I haven’t come up with yet, but positively have to because I can’t leave this list with only two points on it, because what kind of a feeble attempt at a list would that be?

So, you’ve written something and because you’ve had your head buried in the story for the past twenty-seven years, you have lost all perspective on what’s it about, whether it’s good or bad, or even whether the real world has moved on from the mobile phones that litter your prose to Apple iBrains, that plug into your cerebral cortex and give you a stroke if you hold your head in the wrong position.

How do you regain that lost perspective? Putting it in a drawer, leaving it for six months and coming back to it fresh certainly helps, but it’s also slow and if you’re anything like me, you find items tidied away in drawers, to all intents and purposes, cease to exist. Fortunately, cosmic coincidence or a paradoxical creator of all things has provided you with a quicker option: other people.

Yes, all other people in the world exist solely to read your writing. Alas, they are often not aware of this, with the unfortunate consequence that they are prone to psychotic breakdowns if you insist to them that reading your three thousand page saga of Snotwinkle and his Bowel Problems is the whole point of their existence. Thusly and concordantly, tread carefully when broaching the subject.

Types of other people include:

• friends and family
• strangers on the internet
• professional agents and editors
• dairy farmers
• brain surgeons

But it doesn’t really matter which you go to, because in all cases you have to judge their feedback in the same way.

1. What kind of reviews/feedback you can expect for your writing.

Firstly, there’s the content of the feedback. I’m going to try something daring here and nest lists within a list. If something goes wrong and I explode while attempting this, please refer to the appropriate contingencies section of the Chicago Manual of Style.

• Novice Feedback:

• Spelling and Grammar
• General impressions of the story

• Intermediate Feedback:

• Writing style
• More specific impressions of characters and scenes
• Pacing and plot mechanics

• Advanced Feedback:

• Story Structure
• Theme and Subtext

Let’s start with the ‘novice’ feedback. You get this when the reader isn’t experienced in analysing a story. They can give you a curt summary of how they felt about the book at the end or apply red-ink to words and sentences that could be fixed far more easily through judicious use of spell-check and reference to a grammar guide, but they aren’t naturally predisposed to deliver any more than that.

I always tell readers to ignore spelling and grammar on anything except a final draft. This isn’t just because of the spell-check facility, but because there’s also no point them carefully identifying and under-lining typos and clunky prose in a scene that may get cut.

The general feedback is more useful, even though it’s not immediately apparent. The response I got to my first books went along the lines of ‘it’s okay’. That was it. At the time, I didn’t know how to deal with such a broad appraisal, so rather than figuring out how to extract information I could use from ‘it’s okay’, I went off and wrote another book instead. Now I’m better at asking specific questions – what was your response to the main characters? Did any passages jar you out of the story? Did you find yourself gripped or bored at any point?

Even casual readers can be a gold-mine of information, provided you give them a framework for responding.

However, beware of leading questions. ‘Did you think the final chapter was too slow?’ puts the notion that it was too slow into the reader’s head. ‘What did you think of the pace of the final chapter?’ is neutral and frees them to deliver their own conclusion.

This questioning drills down into the level of intermediate feedback, where you can use a reader’s response to scenes and characters to help gauge where changes are needed.

The other side of intermediate feedback deals with writing style. A sentence, scene or story sequence delivering the same plot can be constructed in any number of ways. The writing can be clear or confusing, witty or dry, succinct or verbose, and possibly veer from one to the other according to either the dictates of the story or the whim of the writer. A casual reader might identify only that a story was hard-work to read, while a more advanced reader could put that down to the writer’s tendency to construct one hundred and thirty-six word sentences that include nested clauses, like this, which disrupt the flow of the sentence, but allow for fun digressions, like that time I accidentally shot down a hot air balloon carrying the First Sea-Lord of the Admiralty and caused a minor international incident, even though such digressions, which are often not that interesting or important (and which could be handled by parentheses if you get bored of commas), often result in the reader reaching the end of the sentence, which is coming up in a sec, and completely forgetting what the hell the writer started talking about one hundred and thirty-six words ago.

Pacing and plot mechanics form the nuts and bolts of the story. Have you provided enough information about what's going on for the plot to make sense? Are the character motivations plausible? Is suspense generated when suspense is required? Are the action scenes fast and snappy? Did your hero have that gun he's just drawn when he walked into the bathroom for the final confrontation with his nemesis?

I class advanced feedback as the stuff that lies beneath the story. What’s it really about? How well does it illustrate the theme? Does it present its case in an effective manner? Do all the characters and plots serve the theme or are some extraneous or counter-productive?

In my experience, few people can give this level of feedback. It requires not only a deep understanding of storytelling, it also requires a deep understanding of the story being appraised and of the potential audience. A few of us had a long debate of the worth of Avatar at Harrogate. Now, unquestionably there are issues with the story, but that story also resonated strongly with vast numbers of people. Would ‘fixing’ those ‘issues’ have made it any more popular? Or did some of those issues – the simplistic plot and characters, the clichés – actually contribute to its mass appeal?

A fair comparison is Inception - another non-sequel sci-fi movie of similar running time. Both opened to good, rather than spectacular box office, yet kept the audiences coming in week after week. Both achieved good reviews (Rotten Tomatoes has Avatar at 83% fresh, Inception at 87%). Both have garnered a devoted following. Okay, they're different genres - epic romance versus psychological thriller - but they're also different in that Avatar tells a simple story, while Inception tells a sophisticated one. Does that explain why Inception is probably going to end up selling only 20-30% of the tickets of Avatar?

2. How to interpret feedback

Onto point number two of list number two: interpreting feedback. Key point number one of point number two of list number two is knowing who’s giving you feedback. Any reading of a text has to be taken in the context of the reader.

Or, in other words, if someone tells you ‘science fiction isn’t really my thing’ when you give them a draft of a science fiction novel to read, don’t be surprised if they come back and say they don’t like it. That’s not a criticism of your book (though, yes, your book could well be rubbish), it’s criticism of a genre they simply don’t enjoy.

But you can get useful feedback even then. What you have to do is divorce the craft of the writing from the subjective appeal of the story. I once reviewed a story that was clearly literary in bent. Now, I don’t understand literature. I have no concept as to what makes some literature good and other literature tosh, so I could offer them no help there, but I could offer comment on the craft. In this case I think I suggested ways in which they could strengthen their use of symbolism – yes, it was one of those kind of stories.

Bear all this in mind and I don’t see any problem in giving your book to friends and family to read (yes, I believe all agents and publishers who argue otherwise are utterly wrong in this regard). You should know if your Mum is always going to say ‘I loved it, dear’ or your Dad is always going to say ‘This is rubbish, why are you bothering with this writing nonsense and not going out and being a lumberjack like I told you to?’ or your friend Jack hates happy endings or your mate Mandy forgets the plot of any story two minutes after finishing the final page.

If you know all that, you can read between the lines of anything they say. You can ask the questions that will get you the answers you need, or at least know if what you’ve got is the best they can offer. You’ll also know if they’re likely to read it quickly or slowly or not at all.

I’ll quickly expand on that last point. How people experience a story can differ depending on how they read it. Was it brief snatches during a commute on a crowded train? A chapter a night before bed? The whole thing devoured in an afternoon? The last option is likely to make a book feel shorter and faster than if it’s read in either of the other two ways. They're also more likely to to spot over-arching themes and story structures, because they're not experiencing them in such a fragmented fashion.

So, friends and family can be the best people to ask, simply because you know them inside out.

You don’t know the agent or editor you just submitted to. You don’t know if their rejection was because they didn’t like your book or because they’ve already got something similar on their list or because they were simply having a bad day. If they come back and suggest changing x, y and z, you can certainly go and have a long, hard look at x, y and z, but you don’t know their taste. Perhaps this editor loves historical romances and thinks they can turn your alternate-world werewolf saga into one if x, y and z are changed.

Editors, agents and publishers may well be able to give you a higher level of feedback than the casual readers you know well, but the fact that you don’t know exactly where these experts are coming from counts against them. As does the fact that in most cases (i.e. you're not under contract) they simply won’t have time to give you anything more than the most cursory of feedback.

Quick word on writing groups (both on-line and real-world). I’ve never been a member of one, so I don’t know, but I expect they provide either a nice compromise between friends/family and agents/editors by virtue of delivering more advanced feedback from people you know well, or they suffer the vices of the chaotic black hole I’ll consider next.

The internet. It’s like a box of chocolates. Except some of those chocolates are poo.

I’ve participated in a number of online writing sites – Triggerstreet, American Zoetrope, plus a few similar ones for films. You can get good reviews from them… but only rarely. Mostly you’ll be reviewed by idiots and some of those idiots will think they’re geniuses. That’s par for the course. What makes these sites worse is that as submitting writer you’re often striving to get your story reviewed well and often so it climbs the rankings and gets noticed by those hallowed site editors with the power to publish.

This means you need to contend with other writers spamming for reviews. Or offering to review your story well if you do the same for them. Or writing a horrible review of your story to torpedo your chances of topping the rankings, thereby increasing their chances of coming top as a result.

Taking all of those factors into account, as well as your inherent lack of knowledge about the reviewer’s taste, makes it hard to judge the merit of reviews received in these forums.

3. One final point.

This is very important and second only to the point that tells you to consider every scrap of feedback in the context of who’s giving it. The point is this:

Reader suggestions are always wrong.

Always.

Always.

(Mostly)

I say this despite offering suggestions for how else things might be done with almost every review or edit I do. I do that because it’s often easiest to illustrate a point by showing how else a scene could have been handled. This allows the original writer to compare and contrast and draw their own conclusions on whether the argument is valid.

But however wise and sage my advice is (and it is incredibly sage and wise) and how brilliant my suggestions are (they are incredibly brilliant), it’s not my story. I can only guess at what kind of story you intended. I can’t write in your particular style.

My own, typical response to suggestions goes as follows: ‘Hmm, interesting, I could do that, I could do that, but actually I’ve just thought of something even better.”

Which is another thing I’ve found with the feedback I’ve received. However simple or detailed it is, however on-the-nose or misguided the reasons given for something not working have been, every single time I've been led to look again at what I’ve written and questioned whether I can improve it. Nine times out of ten I can. That’s what makes feedback worthwhile.

The only feedback that's truly worthless, is the feedback you ignore.