Reprinted with permission of the author from Toxic Feedback: Helping Writers Survive and Thrive, University of New England, 2006

Chapter Two: Getting Feedback — Twenty-Two Years
By Joni Cole

One time I went with a friend of a friend to lunch, my treat, so I could pick his brain about feedback. This man was a children’s librarian and aspiring author who had just received a knock-your-socks-off publishing deal for his first novel. I’m talking about the kind of offer the rest of us scribblers fantasize about incessantly when we should be working on our own novels, or at least on our abs. I’m talking hard cover and paperback rights from a major publishing house, a two-book contract, and the one thing that every writer craves more than anything else in the world — an advance large enough to give us an excuse to quit our day jobs. This friend of a friend had already given his notice at story hour.

When I spoke with this man about Toxic Feedback, the first thing he did was criticize the title of my book. But right after that he claimed, with quite a bit of assertiveness, that when he was working on his own book he never solicited feedback from anybody.

“Never?” I asked.

“Never ever,” he assured me, brandishing a knife over his blackened chicken Caesar salad. After all, he explained, how could an outsider possibly have more insight into his book than he did?

Never ever. The notion gave me pause. Maybe this friend of a friend had a point. If you are the one who is writing the book, why should you trouble yourself with other people’s opinions? From this man’s perspective, my own book’s premise — that feedback is a terrific resource you should capitalize on throughout the writing process — now seemed entirely stupid, as stupid, for example, as adding red dye #3 to pistachio nuts. Who needs it? Why bother? In the end, you’ll only end up with something unnatural, toxic, and needlessly messy. Suddenly, I experienced a crisis of confidence.

 My crisis lasted until dessert. As this friend of a friend was enjoying his tiramisu, he casually mentioned that it had taken him twenty-two years to complete his novel. Yes, I had heard him correctly. Twenty-two years. That’s two decades, going on three. Time enough to see five presidents come and go in the Oval Office, the advent of personal computing, and a film version of Charlie’s Angels, plus a sequel. Such a span of time doesn’t necessarily imply any dysfunction in the writer or his work habits (after all, writing is not a race), except for this one additional fact shared by this friend of a friend. During those two decades he labored on his novel, he also experienced extended, want-to-put-your-head-through-the-plaster bouts of writer’s block, self-doubt, and boredom.

Nothing could have cheered me up more. In fact, now I recognized this man as a veritable poster child for Toxic Feedback; the embodiment of my book’s target audience. I understand that novelists, or writers of any kind, need to allow time for their ideas and stories to quietly gestate, without interference from busy-body, opinionated feedback providers. I am also not arguing the fact that this man is an excellent writer who should defer to his own editorial judgment during the revision process. But twenty-two years. Think about how much artistic pain he might have avoided, how many other novels he might have produced in those two decades, and how much happier the childhood of his now grown sons might have been, if he hadn’t been so fanatical about squirreling away his work-in-progress. Despite the cliché, time is not on our side. As this writer said to his own agent, whom he temporarily fired when the woman failed to send his manuscript to publishers at a pace to his liking, “I’m not getting any younger.”

Certainly, there will always be dry spells during the writing process. In truth, I think short, agonizing episodes of writer’s block, self-doubt, and boredom are actually healthy by-products of the creative process; your unconscious’s way of saying, “Hey, Mr. Thinks-He-Knows-Everything, stop pestering me for a while so I can sort out this plot in peace. But I would suggest that extended bouts of writer’s block, self-doubt, and boredom are not a healthy part of the creative process. I am talking about those bleak periods that go on for weeks, maybe months, maybe years, when writers find themselves asking, “Why? Why am I doing this? Shouldn’t I be spending my six minutes of free time doing something that is actually important, like teaching my eleven-year-old to read?” These are the dark days when soliciting feedback is most important.

People typically turn to feedback for help with editing. For example, what could be better than an outside perspective to quickly alert you to the fact that your opening chapter, as precious as it is, is spoiled rotten and could use some solid discipline, say editing down the first seventy-four pages of description about the narrator’s breach birth to a single declarative sentence? But the value of feedback isn’t limited to advice about structure and wordsmithing. Feedback is just as much about bolstering the writer’s faith in himself and excitement about his project along the way. It is about getting some external validation.

Let’s say your manuscript is a mess and you don’t have a clue where to go from here. At this point, the best thing you can do is to show your work to a feedback provider, maybe a trusted friend, or an online critique group, or perhaps even a lively, healthy workshop in your community. Once you do this, your readers will inevitably begin talking about the characters you made up as if they are real. (Okay, most of them are thinly disguised depictions of your relatives, but that is irrelevant at the moment.) Your readers will let you know, in no uncertain terms, that they collectively despise (in a most satisfying way) your story’s antagonist, Frieda, the heiress who is determined to destroy your heroine’s life. They will express grief over your narrator Martin’s secret past that prevents him from reuniting with his alienated son. The men in the group will passionately defend your complex characterization of Cindi, the flight attendant who successfully manages to land the plane curiously topless, while the women in the group will insist that her depth goes no further than her D cup. Debates will ensue, literary and otherwise. “What happens next?” the group will demand. “When can we see more?” they will ask.

With this kind of fresh perspective, a writer sees what is so hard to recognize when working in a vacuum. Your stories, even in the messy draft stage, can entertain people. Engage them in heated debates. Move them. Make them curious. Enable them to connect with someone or an experience outside their normal realm. Writing — including writing-in-progress — nourishes and enlivens the human spirit, yours and your readers.

Armed with these affirmations, you can return to your work with renewed confidence and vigor. You may make a lot of progress, or maybe just a little, but either way you will be better off than you were before, suffering in silence while the seasons changed. And every time you feel lost or bored for an unnatural period of time, you can renew your faith with more feedback, and more reminders from readers that your writing matters. It really does, and no one should wait twenty-two years to hear that.