We too often receive unhelpful, even harmful, response from first readers of our early drafts. We may feel our writing is being ripped apart or our readers are more interested in fixing punctuation and grammar than in our subject and feelings. Or we may hear, “That’s nice,” which is deflating and doesn’t really help us move deeper into our material. Years ago, I developed a response method that empowers students to develop their writing, to enjoy revision rather than feel shut down by what can feel like harsh or superficial criticism. I have had many students teach the method to their first listeners (often family members and friends) and to their writing group members. Many want to learn again how to use it themselves when they review their work-in-progress. The method helps us learn a language for response that is nonthreatening and empowering, that facilitates our development. This week I am republishing an article about the history of my process, which I call the Three-Step Response Method, as well as a description of how it works. Next week, I will publish an example of the how I used it with a particular student. You may be surprised at how simple it is to teach others to respond in these three steps — they don’t even have to be writers to be of help to you in moving along from draft to finished work.

When I entered my very first university level poetry-writing workshop in 1979, I was too naive to be terrified.  I was a late twenties, non-matriculating student who had been directing a day care center, training personnel and working with four-year-old children and their parents.

I had learned to be child-centered and to honor the way children are most like adults in their feelings and least like them in their thinking. In other words, while from an adult’s view, children “don’t listen” and make “inappropriate choices,” they feel hurt and surprised when adults admonish them. I learned to facilitate the behavior I was looking for in children by understanding that their thought processes were different than mine but their feelings were the same.  Rather than saying, “You are not listening,” I would explain, “I need you to listen to me now.”  I might say, “Mixing sand with play dough might be fun right now, but that sand will mean we can’t use the play dough again tomorrow.”  I learned to explain my needs and my thinking, which helped children relate to me and grow emotionally and mentally.

Each week, I brought raw first drafts to the university poetry-writing workshop. I heard my classmates say: “The poet doesn’t earn the ending of this poem.” “I think the author should cut the second stanza and move the last one to the beginning,” “I like this poem but….” I felt as torn apart and unloved as the poem.  Some participants in the workshop dropped out, feeling that established “club members” were colluding to keep newcomers out.  But I was desperate to learn to write the poems that I (and probably only I) believed I had inside, so I began translating the criticism into sentences that would help me learn.  “The poet doesn’t earn the ending of this poem” became, “When I get to the end of the poem I feel disappointed and confused–I don’t know how I got there.”  “I think the author should cut the second stanza and move the last one to the beginning,” became “As I read, I feel that I am not clued in until the last stanza and I wish for that information earlier.”  “I like this poem, but…” became, “Here are the feelings that come up for me and distract me as I read.” Hearing the words this way made me want to delve into revising my poems.

Ultimately, I applied for and completed the university’s graduate program in creative writing.  Degree in hand, I was offered an opportunity to help teachers understand the revision process.  As I was presenting examples of work-in-progress and discussing ways of responding to that writing that I believed would help the student writers enjoy revision, the teachers asked me if I could explain my process in steps.  Thinking on my feet that day, I came up with three steps: Repeating Words and Phrases that Stick, Explaining Feelings, and Noting What You Still Feel Curious to Know More About.  The teachers shortened this to Velcro Words, Feelings, and Curiosity.  I have been using this method in workshops ever since. I believe more firmly than ever that the job of workshop participants is to respond to the work in front of them by pointing out what they remember, how it makes them feel, and what they wish to know more about. This is very different than the workshop method I encountered in graduate school.  I believe so strongly that response of this sort benefits the writer that I can’t bear to call workshop groups critique groups because the word “critique” means in its root “to tear apart.”  It is at odds with the root of the word “author” which means “maker,” the same root as in “authority.” Instead of tearing work apart, a response group offers fertilizer that helps the writing grow.  People leave response groups feeling inspired to continue writing and revising.

Effective and nurturing response also helps writers overcome the negative self-talk that hinders writing:  “You can’t write.” “This is dumb.” “No one will care about what you have to say.” “Nothing you write can approach the beauty of the idea you have in your head.” “You’re not as good as anyone whose writing you admire.”  Thinking about the value of response, the writer can replace this negative chatter with a positive sentiment: “I will get down what I can.  Later, hearing trusted listeners say back Velcro words, tell me the feelings they have as a consequence of reading my work, and offer me the questions they still have after reading what I wrote, I will carry the drafting process further.”

For response groups to offer their best help, they must subscribe to three beliefs:

1. In a workshop, there is no bad writing, only the opportunity for good writing.
2. Workshop participants are there to help one another find and use these writing opportunities so drafts come to fruition and become vibrant and moving.
3. Instead of criticizing and tearing writing apart, workshops are places to concentrate on growing writing.

Think of the way seedling sprout cotyledons, the first leaves full of nutrition for the plant to come.  They do not have the characteristic shape of the plant’s later leaves, but are essential if the plant is to develop.  Early drafts are the writing’s cotyledons.  The awkward shape and sound may be providing nutrition and will fall away in revision when the signature shape of the essay is revealed, just as cotyledons fall away when plants grow into their right shape.

Asking for response in these three steps allows writers to use almost anyone as a reader for help with early drafts.  Tell those who agree to read your work-in-progress that all you need them to do is: 1) say back the words and phrases that strike them when they read or listen to your writing, 2) tell you the main feelings your writing engenders in them as well as other feelings it creates that actually get in the way of receiving the work’s main feeling, and 3) let you know where they want to know more.  These tasks don’t require the skills of an English teacher.  They require listening and the courage to articulate feelings honestly.

When any individual or group of individuals is responding to your work-in-progress, take notes on all the information these readers offer, and don’t interrupt them with any additional information at all, since if you tell them anything, they will be responding to a combination of your writing and whatever you tell them. What you want is response to what you’ve put on the page since ultimately your writing goes out into the world without you.  After listening to the response and reading the notes you take, you will find yourself revising well.  You are the authority during revision. Use responses to help yourself fill in holes that you now see in your drafts.  You don’t have to try to satisfy every curiosity.  Fixing some holes often makes others go away. In the volley between the trusted readers’ responses to your writing and yours to their statements, you will find your way through the revision process.

The Three-Step Response Method

By giving response in three separate stages, workshop readers linger over a participant’s work-in-progress long enough to find a way to articulate their responses clearly.  It is important that they not start telling writers how to fix their drafts (the writer will instead get information on what nutrition the cotyledon has or still needs to have).  When workshop participants have agreed to give response in the three steps but then drift into a different style of response or skip ahead to a step when the group hasn’t finished with a previous one, a gentle reminder to stick to the steps usually works to keep everyone on track.

Step One: Velcro Words
After a workshop participant reads a draft, listeners repeat the words and phrases that have stuck. They don’t tell why the words stuck or even say, “I liked…” They merely repeat the words back as closely as they can remember them.  It feels wonderful to the writer to hear words back. All of us write to be heard and there is no better affirmation that you’ve been heard than hearing your own words from someone else’s mouth.  Not telling why the words stuck keeps the focus on the writing and keeps the listeners focused on the work-in-progress.

Step Two: Feelings
To warm up for this step, before actually looking at writing, I have workshop participants list as many emotions as they can and write them on a white or black board if possible. The more emotions everyone lists, the more versatile and articulate everyone becomes in responding to writing:  gentle, harsh, lost, discovered, nostalgic, sentimental, fearful, reconciled, panicked, bored, surprised, thankful, in mourning, grief-stricken, at odds, defeated, successful, glib, surrendered, and resistant are but a small number of what we generate. We discuss how feelings elicited by the subject and tone of a piece of writing often include opposites:  sadness and joy, displeasure at loss and surprise at opening up to new gain, and innocence and learning for example.

When readers report the feelings they experience from the writing presented in workshop, I divide this step into two sub-steps:  First, I have them report feelings that seem to be in keeping with the subject and subtext of the draft. Once someone had written about being stuck in a long line of cars at a U.S.- Canadian customs check. He wrote that he felt like Mt. St. Helens right before she erupted.  Readers reported feelings of bottled up anger or unbearable frustration.

Next, workshop participants report whatever discomfort occurs inside them from phrasing and details that veer from the writing’s subject and subtext. For instance, the writer at the customs check also included this detail:  “My stomach felt like a pond.”  The readers reported that the calmness of a pond surprised them in the context of frustration.  Although the writer gets to decide if his metaphor is accurate or not, upon listening to the response, the writer might find that in the drafting process, his unconscious was delivering information about his actually enjoying being slowed down.  The writing might take on a new direction depending on what the writer decides about the readers’ emotional confusion.  The whole body of reader responses concerning feelings helps a writer figure out how his or her writing is making contact with its readers. Even if readers have contradictory responses, noting them helps the writer, who often clears up contradictions with very small changes in wording or examples.

If readers are confused, if they feel ripped off, if they feel batted around in different directions, the words are causing that confusion, that theft, that pushing away. If such emotional journeys are not in the service of the real subject, the author figures out how to change the words.  It’s a “self-correcting” exercise like learning to cut with scissors–no one teaches children to cut on the lines–they keep at it and one day their eye-hand coordination develops to the point where they can do it. Receiving feeling-level response helps writers cut along the true lines of their writing’s emotions.

Step Three: Curiosity
Finally, readers tell the writer want they want to know more about and where in the writing they wanted to know it. Specific curiosities indicate to the writer where more details and anecdotes are required to fully evoke or describe experience and insight. When writers listen to where others want to know more, they get additional help in recognizing their writing’s real subject and where and how they may have skirted it. They often also realize that what they skipped because they thought it might bore a reader is exactly what the reader wants to know or that they inadvertently skipped something just because they know their subject so well.

The three-step response method works because it honors feelings (we want to succeed, we are shy, we are easily wounded, etc.).  It works because it opens up possibilities for the writer, leaving him or her not only empowered to continue developing a piece of writing but eager to do so. Since most drafts, whether by new or experienced writers, are not fully developed in the thinking and choices they contain, helping writers approach these drafts as I approached the children in the day care center encourages writing that is authentic, lively, and very much worth getting right.