Incorporating Feedback
Behind the Scenes + Exclusive Writing Lab on how you deal with comments on your work
Welcome back.
After that first time up to read in workshop, I developed a system of going through the commentary from Tom and the other writers page by page and transferring all their marks onto a my master set of pages. Praise. Typographical errors. Line edits. Everything.
Next, I sat down and typed the feedback into my computer copy.
If a suggestion bugged me, I didn’t cast it aside. Rather, I looked at this feedback a couple extra times to see what bugged me. If I still couldn’t make it work, I let the comment go.
The entire process took about two hours.
Let me say it again: I entered edits. I did not re-write. If I re-wrote then I’d lose the benefit of the edits. I have a belief there is a powerful and immediate energy in feedback from your teacher, editor, and classmates. It is alive. And it has an expiration date like milk. 🥛 For me, it was about seventy two hours. Maybe a week.
I got my feedback in within three days. Always.
I know a lot of writers who do not incorporate feedback into their work right away. What they do instead is save their workshop pages in a file while believing they will go back later, or in the next draft. When they do go back, what happens is they have forgotten what was said in the particular workshop. What had been brilliant, on-point, and timely feed back is now curdled. And all that lovely, smart workshop wisdom has become useless.
I might be making more of this than I should, but it happens in my own classes at Blackbird Studio, too. People say, “Oh, no, I’m not putting the comments into my work, not yet,” and this helps me understand why they are not making progress in their craft. That is another thing about incorporating the feedback right away. By putting even the smallest change into the work, you are growing in your craft.
(Go directly to the next post on the Blackbird journey now).
The only kind of writing rewriting.
~ Earnest Hemmingway, A Moveable Feast
Why does a writer resist this part of the workshop process?
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