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!

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.

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.

Chris: One piece of context that is really useful for characters is just what is their general role in the story, because sometimes that can matter, like whether they’re a protagonist or an antagonist. That can come with some very different rules for what you need to do with, you know, side character, mentor, love, interest, those really general categories, they only take a second to put down. That is for anything about characters can be very relevant information.

Oren: Stuff like, I’m looking for advice with the climax. Specifying where in the story you are can also be helpful. So anyway, that’s the basic advice I can give if you’re just asking for a quick question. The sad part of this is that the ability to know what to ask is something you will develop as you get better at writing. So there is a certain amount of the chicken and egg thing. Just focus on the most important information and don’t try to deliver everything at once.

Chris: If you’re asking a character or plotting question and you’re at the point where you’ve learned some basics of what plot structure is, then that’s kind of the information that’s usually most useful to convey with your questions. Instead of like tons of specifics about everybody’s circumstance, the general like, oh, I’m at the climax, or I’m trying to do a surprise reveal, or I’m at the opening, whatever it is. What you learn is what you need to tell, which is why it’s so tricky. Of course.

Oren: Beta reading is of course the big, you know, elephant at the end of the writing process as it were. It’s hard, but you gotta do it. So how do we pick our beta readers?

Chris: Because a lot of people get feedback from other writers, it comes with its own upsides and downsides, and I think it’s worth comparing that a little bit. The thing about writers is it’s possible for them to have a better understanding of what you’re trying to do if you tell them, and that sometimes they’re knowledgeable, but they’re also just a lot more likely, I think, to try to give advice and that doesn’t necessarily make it good advice. Lots of writers love their writing groups and think they’re very helpful, and that’s great. Obviously, writers teaching each other is much cheaper than hiring an editor. We are, of course, always cringing because we hear things that aren’t a good thing for people to tell each other.

Oren: You hear stories of people giving the most wild advice in writers’ groups, and I’ve also personally seen this, right? This is not just a thing where I’m depending on other people, you know, I’ve gone to writers’ groups and heard like, “you should drop that entire plot arc.” And it is like, wait, should you? You barely know anything about that plot arc. How can you suggest that?

Chris: When we’re doing editing, we also ask a lot of questions about what the writer wants and what they’re trying to do. And writers helping each other are very likely to skip over that part and not pay attention to what kind of story the person wants it to be. We generally are supportive of beta readers because we feel like they are a little bit more malleable. They’re less likely to tell you what to do, especially if you ask them not to make suggestions and more likely to just tell you what they experienced. The downside of that, of course, is that it does leave you to figure out, this is what my readers are saying, but like what does that mean and how do I fix it?

Bunny: I’m all right if readers ask prompting questions. Like, “what if” questions just to get me thinking. I think that can be super helpful. Maybe I’m biased ’cause I also try to do this when I read other people’s work. Like this is something that occurred to me. What if you did this instead of this? What if you did the reveal here instead of later? Like, I’m not trying to prescribe anything to them, but I’ve found that that can be a helpful consideration, like a way to get you the creative juices flowing because genuinely having other people’s perspectives and ideas can help you cook the story in ways that putting it in the single pot of your brain wouldn’t, I don’t know.

Chris: And then eat the metaphor, mmm! I think communicating what you want obviously is really important, especially if you know you’re in a place where you really need positive- If you’re feeling really down and you really just need positive feedback. You know, for me, oftentimes I’m in a stage by the time I get to beta reading where those kinds of questions are no longer helpful for me and leave me wondering why somebody said that. Like, did you suggest this because you didn’t like something? That’s my biggest problem with suggestions is usually they’re not something I’m gonna do and that’s fine. But if a reader is bothered by something… and for some people, they just can’t help it. They don’t know how to express what they’re bothered by, right? They can’t identify what it is about the work, and so it’s easier for them to make a suggestion than it is to put their finger on why they’re making the suggestion. But I think the problem with suggestions is they have a tendency to replace the information that a writer often needs, which is, well, why did you make that suggestion? Are you a little bored here? Or something else?

Bunny: And certainly when you’re giving your draft out to others to read, you need to know what you’re trying to get back from them. Overall impressions are good, but I’ve found that, you know, the more specific you can be, I guess this is a balance. You don’t wanna be super specific, but you also don’t just want them to read the story and then kind of circle it back and be like, well, like that’s also not super helpful to you.

Oren: I do like a little more guidance than that.

Bunny: I mean, I just had to do this recently and Oren, you were one of my beta readers for a script for this dinosaur game.

Oren: Yeah, yeah, that was fun!

Bunny: A couple other folks from the Discord read that, which was very kind of you. What we did for that was at the end of each, essentially, level of the script, we gave a questionnaire, and the questionnaire was surprisingly difficult to design because you have to be very careful about avoiding leading questions. Like we had a villain reveal and we wanted to get people’s thoughts on what they thought of the character that would be the villain. But you can’t indicate too hard that there’s something up with that character because that means that the reader will be like, “oh, there’s something up with that character.”

Oren: You just say, hypothetically, if this character was important later, and then at the end you say, now please, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, beta readers, ignore what was just said. Don’t pay any attention to it. Forget you heard that.

Chris: Yes. Uh, jury, just, uh, forget it.

Oren: That’s how memory works.

Bunny: I think we literally said, what do you think is the deal with this character? I think that’s how we ended up phrasing it. You know, another thing that is useful to get information from beta readers on is how much they understand unusual terms in the world, right? You wanna make sure that they’re on the same page as that. And we had a couple of unusual terms referring to the moons in the world, and so we wanted to poll beta readers on whether they knew what those things are. So you can say, what are X and Y? Or you could say, who are X and Y? I think we went with “what are,” because they’re moons. But if someone was like, oh, they’re characters and didn’t realize until the question that they’re what’s and not who’s, then you’ve missed an important piece of information.

Oren: I have always tried to come up with some questions to ask for things that if there’s something wrong, it might be that the reader doesn’t specifically notice, so they won’t think to report it. So I tend to ask questions like, do you feel like you know what the characters look like? Does the outcome of this storyline seem to matter to you? That sort of thing. Those are informations that sometimes a reader, especially if they know what sort of thing a story needs, might think of, but they also might just not notice the absence. They might not notice that they don’t know what the characters look like or that they aren’t super invested in what’s going on here. So that’s the sort of question I found can be helpful.

Chris: Certainly if you have any concerns, putting questions at the end makes them less likely to be biased while they are reading.

Oren: Yeah, always at the end. I sometimes put them in between like sections if it’s something at the beginning, and I don’t wanna wait until they get to the end ’cause they might have forgotten by then. But you don’t ask them questions about something that’s relevant that hasn’t happened yet, unless you’re being sneaky about it. If you’re sneaky, that could change things. But you know, you don’t just be like, “Hey, what would you think if that character died later?”

Bunny: I think I’ve also found that depending on the number of people reading your story, which is probably gonna be a small number, we were quite lucky to get as many people as we did reading that script. But I found that a useful rule of thumb is that if one person brings something up and maybe is confused about it, it might not be a big deal. Like, file that one away. If two people bring it up, take note. If there are three or more notes on that same thing, you’re probably gonna have to change it. And of course that depends on what the thing is, but as I’ve gone through writing workshops and stuff like that. That has been a helpful general guideline in helping me parse feedback and what I need to focus on most.

Chris: Especially if you were in a writing group, people can be really opinionated and besides a writing group, oftentimes for people, the first person to look at their story is their significant other, and I know we all want to please the people close to us. But sometimes people, I think, put a little too much stock in that one person who can also have their own weird idiosyncrasies and personal preferences just like everybody else.

Oren: [sarcastic] Chris, it’s not my fault that every story you give me is perfect and shouldn’t be changed. You’re trying to, you know, make this about my biases. Maybe you are the biased one.

Chris: Every time I talk about how I wanna tweak something to make it better, Oren argues against it. I’m serious. My own stories.

Bunny: Oren, that’s not your job!

Chris: He is like, “no, it’s perfect the way it is.” Or like if I get editorial feedback from another editor, you know, I’ll be like, oh, hey, this editor made this like great point. And then I can tweet this and he will be like, “hmm, don’t change it! Editor’s wrong!”

Oren: Sometimes they are wrong.

Chris: Don’t change anything based on one person unless they, like, sometimes I get feedback from one person and it’s like, okay, I can totally understand why they thought this, and it’s just a little tweak, a few different words. I have no problem making a tiny change because it’s easy. For anything significant, one person’s opinion is not something that you should be making compromises for or significant revisions for because everybody is different and there’s just outliers all over the place when it comes to readers.

Bunny: Except if I’m the one. My suggestions are enshrined and you must follow them.

Chris: But one thing I just want people to look out for, if you have a writing group that meets together and talks where they influence each other, what can happen in there is you’ll get some people who are like, “Hey, I didn’t really like this thing, I felt like it could be different.” And then other people will reflexively argue against them. Like, “no, it’s fine! There’s nothing wrong!” The people who like something don’t actually out vote the other people. There’s no negating somebody’s experience, and that’s where we go to the Pareto improvement. We’ve got like several people who didn’t like something and several people who thought it was fine. Can you make a change that will please the people who didn’t like it without making it worse for the people who did like it? People typically have experienced this story alone first before they talk about it with other people. Somebody else’s vote of confidence doesn’t get rid of the people who didn’t have a perfect experience.

Oren: It can also happen in the other direction. You can have someone be like, this part was really cool for these reasons. And if that person is charismatic, other people might just change their opinion to go along with what that person is saying. I have seen this happen so many times that I kind of don’t trust giving feedback in group settings anymore just because it feels like the first person to speak can really influence what everyone else says. And maybe that’s not true, but it certainly seems like it’s true. Even in a chat situation, I can just kind of predict how the chat’s gonna go based on who the first person to reply is.

Bunny: For any faults I had, I will say that my senior thesis workshop group, in addition to being small, which helped, and moderated by the professor, had everyone read and annotate the section we were critiquing every day, and then write up our feedback and print it out so that once we get there, we have our initial impressions in hand unchangeable to hand over to the other person after we discuss it. So perhaps that can be a strategy.

Chris: Yeah, that’s a good move.

Bunny: If you’re worried about a particularly charismatic feedback giver trampling or manipulating everyone else, evilly.

Oren: Narcissistically. Oh boy. 

Bunny: Gaslighting, even.

Oren: People react to each other, hot take! And sometimes that’s gonna distort the results of what you might otherwise get.

Chris: They can be convinced to go along with what the other person says, or they can be almost intimidated into silence in a subtle way. It’s like, oh, everybody likes this, so I just won’t speak up ’cause I don’t wanna rain on everyone’s parade or vice-versa.

Bunny: I don’t want to evaporate the rain.

Oren: In general when it comes to beta readers, I do recommend screening your beta readers if you have that option to make sure that you’re getting the kind of reader who you might actually want to read your book. You don’t give your high seas pirate book to someone who doesn’t like boats, and you don’t give your courtly manners book to someone who is really big on action and gets bored without fight scenes. You might not always have that option because not everyone has a big group of people they can call on for beta reading, but if you can, definitely do that. That’s one of the big advantages of using people you know, as opposed to just going to an online critique site. Then you just get the Wild West. You have no idea what is motivating any of these people to say what they’re saying.

Bunny: They might think Joseph Campbell has some good points.

Chris: I know not everybody has the benefit of friends with similar tastes in books, but I do think that often if you do have those, that is the best source of feedback because their tastes are similar to yours and because they’re friends, your friends are more likely to read your book and try to give the feedback that you ask them to as opposed to whatever feedback they want to give, take a little time for you. That kind of thing.

Oren: I mean, this is basically the place where you try to figure out how to give things back in these relationships, right? That is one of the reasons why it can also be useful to do this with writers. Even though as we’ve discussed, writers can have their own baggage. If your friend is a writer and you beta read for them, they can beta read for you. And you know, that is a very easy way to keep this a two-sided transaction. But your friends probably aren’t all writers and so, I don’t know, give them cookies or something, be a good friend and they’re more likely to want to help you.

Bunny: They’re not writers. They’re mentally sound and have real lives.

Chris: The other thing that I think can come up, again especially if you are encouraging people to ask questions, is what kind of changes you make to the work based on their feedback. One thing is don’t try to answer everybody’s questions in the work. Some people will wonder about things, but if you answer every question that people wonder about, you can add too much exposition to the story and just bog it down and tell things that most people just don’t need to know. If you do find yourself getting defensive and arguing with somebody, there’s something wrong and you may need to change what you’re doing. Obviously, we all get defensive sometimes. It’s totally natural, but I think the goal is to eventually get over the defensiveness, do what you need to do to do that, and then get curious about why they reacted the way they did by asking more questions and finding out why they perceived something the way that they did.

Oren: If you work with the same people often enough, if you’re doing well and writing a lot, you can get a sense of, “this person is very critical” and “this person tends to be very praising” and you know, you can calibrate accordingly, right? That doesn’t mean you throw out the critical comments of the person who’s more critical or just disregard whenever the nice person praises your story, but you can evaluate them. You can know that maybe you should give a little more weight to when the nice person critiques something because you know that they really mean it. A little more weight to when the critical person praises things. You know, stuff like that.

Chris: Definitely don’t put in exposition arguing with them.

Bunny: Nothing is cringier than when you read a book and you’re like, I can hear the comment that spawned this little tirade and the narration about how all this makes sense, actually. Let me just give it a couple hundred more words and I’ll prove you wrong, invisible comment!

Chris: I mean, if somebody’s confused and they just don’t know something, and they really do need information, that happens. But thinking like, “oh, no! Well, I can justify this by putting in more exposition.” It’s probably not gonna work. It’s just gonna make you look silly. When it comes to defensiveness, another thing when we select the people who are giving us feedback, and some of us have more control over that than others. Sometimes people get defensive because somebody is actually being a little condescending or a little rude. You know, I personally had an experience where I found that I didn’t feel the need to argue with almost any of my beta readers, except for these two guys, who turned out to be guys who were pretty close to me in my life, hence why they were beta reading. And I realized I couldn’t resist arguing with them because they were actually condescending in the way they responded, and so I just stopped using them as readers. Problem solved.

Oren: That’s the right choice. And then, you know, you’ll also just have the occasional beta reader who’s not doing something wrong, but you’re still upset because they critiqued your story. And how dare they, frankly. The solution to that is to, you know, cry on your floor for a little while and then send them a nice thank you email.

Bunny: With cookies.

Chris: Yeah, go complain to a friend, loved one or whatever for a while, and then be nice.

Oren: Well, with the evergreen advice to be nice, we’re gonna go ahead and call this episode to a close.

Chris: If you got some useful tips from this episode, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.

Oren: And before we go, I want to thank a couple of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He is an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of Political Theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week.

Chris: This has been the Mythcreant Podcast. Opening/closing theme: “The Princess Who Saved Herself” by Jonathan Coulton.