So, you’ve written your manuscript – yay! That is fabulous! Really, you have achieved something marvellous. You should feel enormously proud of yourself. Now, take a deep breath, gird yourself and let’s keep moving forward.
Writing your MS is often the fun part. Now comes the bit where you must revise and re-work much of your text to make it even more amazing. Once you’ve fully absorbed that revisions must happen, it’s very likely that your second, third, fourth and beyond drafts will take a toll on you emotionally. That’s where this series of blogs by developmental book editor, Laurel Cohn come into play. Creative writing Art of Writing retreat Alumni will be familiar with Laurel’s Backstory class in Florence. She regularly holds us in thrall with her tips on when, where and how to introduce a character’s past into our text.
In this Five Part series on building resilience within your manuscript development phase, Laurel discusses your revision process to prepare you psychologically as well as professionally for what can be a gruelling part of your writing growth. Getting and emotionally managing feedback on what you’ve already written can be a roller coaster. In this second of our five-part series with Laurel, let’s hear about her experience with writers and their reactions to receiving feedback.
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“The most confronting aspect of developing your work for publication is sending your work out into the world for feedback.”
Anwen Crawford, writer and critic, said this when asked what she would tell aspiring writers who are reluctant to share their work: ‘Be assured that everyone is equally scared! Even experienced writers can struggle with sharing their work, because this act makes all writers feel vulnerable. But it’s worth remembering that the vast majority of your readers, teachers and editors want your writing to be as good as it can be. They’re not there to tear it down or make you feel bad (and if they do these things, walk away).’
Asking for feedback at any stage helps you break out of the isolation of writing; you are no longer working in a void, wondering whether or not you understand what is required of you, or whether you are communicating what you intend. By seeking feedback from others, you are taking positive, constructive steps to improve your own writing and develop as a writer.
The key to managing feedback is to separate your sense of self from the actual work, from all those words. Your ability to take your work to the next level of development largely depends on this separation. Only with this separation will you be able to embrace the potential that revision and feedback can offer. Yes, you pour yourself into your manuscript – you live it, breathe it, are immersed in the process – but remember that the writing produced is a collection of words, a representation of your thoughts, ideas, research, and imagination. Yes, you are likely to be emotionally attached to your work, and indeed you need some sort of attachment to find the commitment to have come this far with your writing project – but the words can be cut, rearranged, changed or omitted, without drawing blood. The manuscript is not you. Any suggestion that something may not be working in the manuscript is feedback about the story on the page, not about who you are.
Let me give you a personal example. When I sent my PhD supervisor the first draft of my first chapter, I was quietly confident that it read okay. Although it had been 25 years since my undergraduate degree, I had spent the intervening years working in the publishing industry, mostly as an editor, and assumed I knew a thing or two about writing. I was pretty relaxed when I walked into the meeting with my supervisor several weeks later. David had the printout of my chapter in front of him. He leaned across the table and said with a gentle smile, ‘Well, this isn’t working, is it?’ I was stunned! ‘O-k-a-y,’ I said slowly as I recovered. And then I asked why. We had a good relationship – this was almost a year into my candidature – and I absolutely trusted his judgment. So began my steep learning curve about academic writing, as opposed to writing for trade publication.
What mattered most wasn’t how inadequate that first chapter was, but how I was going to go about fixing it. The important thing wasn’t the feedback itself, but how I was going to respond to that feedback. Although my ego took a soft blow, it didn’t leave a bruise. I knew it wasn’t personal, it was just part of the process of becoming a better academic writer. So I knuckled down and rewrote the chapter, and rewrote it again, and kept going till I got it right, getting feedback from my supervisor after each draft. That first chapter took about 8 drafts. Slowly I got the hang of it. Each chapter after that needed fewer and fewer drafts. I listened carefully to all the feedback, argued the points that I disagreed with, and asked lots of questions to clarify things I wasn’t sure about. Some suggestions I sat with for a while before deciding what to do.
You don’t have control over the feedback you are going to get, but you do have control over how you respond to it. Certainly, dealing with criticism can bring you down, but the important thing is what happens next. Do you wallow in self-pity? Do you get angry? Do you give up? Do you get fired up? Do you become determined to 'show 'em'? Do you do all of the above? Most of us go through a spectrum of emotions and responses after receiving feedback. It’s where you end up that is most important.
A few years back I got a call from a writer who said, ‘You probably won't remember me – you assessed my memoir manuscript five years ago.’ I did remember her, and her manuscript, which had needed a lot of work. She said that when she received the assessment report, she was so embarrassed about what she had sent me that she stuck the manuscript in a drawer. It took over 12 months before she could look at it again. Then she re-read the report, and started rewriting. She was calling to invite me to her book launch – after three more years developing it, she'd found a publisher who loved it.”
Next in Laurel’s Building Resilience Series? Recharging your batteries!
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If you’d like to share any comments or thoughts, I’d be happy to hear from you. Email me directly at lisacliffordwriter@gmail.com.