The gift of feedback

Plus books, burlesque, and robots

Hi friends,

A quick note about an upcoming event: I’ll be on a panel with Brooke Shaffner, author of COUNTRY OF UNDER, at Kew & Willow Books in Queens, New York, on Friday, May 3. More details to follow!

I hope you’re all enjoying the first signs of spring. I spent a wonderful whirlwind of a night in NYC last weekend, hanging out with old and new friends at Books and Burlesque. I even won a raffle prize full of oddities, amusements, and unmentionables! If you live in or near New York and have never been, I highly recommend it! It was a super-joyful way to celebrate literature, performance art, sexiness, and body positivity.

This weekend, I got to see my son and his high school robotics team compete at a FIRST Robotics regional competition—the culmination of six weeks worth of intense work designing, building, and coding a robot based on specific criteria given by FIRST. The team’s robot suffered some setbacks on the first day of the competition, but they turned things around and finished out with an amazing performance. I was really proud of them.

In the pit, improving the Red Hot Chili Bot!

Yesterday, I also received my first round of feedback on the first hundred pages of my newest novel. I’d been fussing with them for months, to the point where I could no longer see if they were doing what I need them to do. So I asked two trusted writer friends to take a peek and let me know if I’m on the right track.

The first time I let a piece of work out on its own is always a scary moment. For this project, I’d shown a very rough draft of the first fifty pages to my writing group much earlier on, but it was so rough, I didn’t feel the stakes were as high as they are now, after I’ve spent so much time polishing and revising. I chose my readers carefully—hoping for responses that will both point out what needs improving and give me an honest assessment I can trust. And also be nice!

What I received from my first reader, my lovely author friend Amy Reading, is nothing less than a gift. If you don’t have a friend like Amy, I suggest you go out and search for one. Or, even better, become one! In addition to being a wonderful person, Amy is also very skilled at giving writing feedback, to the point that she’s made it into an artform. She begins by enthusiastically pointing out everything she loves, everything you’ve done right, everything you’ve always wanted to hear as a writer: your work is splendid, your voice is hitting all the right notes, your story has her absolutely hooked, etc.

And then she uses everything you’re doing right to point out where she wants more, going into excruciatingly wonderful detail, challenging you to push things further, to interrogate your choices, to find where you can veer from cliche and enrich your story. It’s the second time I’ve received feedback from Amy, and both times it was equal parts terrifying and inspiring.

I’m a firm believer that writing feedback should not be all about what needs improving, but also about what’s working well. We need to know what we’re doing right in order to build on our strengths and to feel encouraged that we’re starting on solid ground. In short, what’s the use of feedback if it doesn’t support us in the belief that we have the ability to bring our work where it needs to go?

Nevertheless, now I’m experiencing my usual 24-hour post-feedback roller coaster. Amy helped me feel confident that I have a decent project on my hands, but it will require a lot of work—work I currently have no idea how to do, and no idea if I even can! But I’ve learned from experience to trust myself and my process. For now, I’ll let Amy’s words and encouragement percolate in the background. I’ll take notes, assemble a reading list of books that might offer me helpful examples, agonize and daydream until I have something like a direction and enough confidence to dive back in.

This is what useful feedback does—it challenges and inspires, lifts you up and makes you believe you have a project worth fighting for. I’m so grateful, and I hope you’re all feeling just as buoyed by the people in your life this week.

And I hope your writing projects are pushing you into new territory, challenging and inspiring you to try new things.

Meanwhile, I look forward to next time.

Yours,

Jen