Guest Blog

How to Incorporate Feedback Without Destroying Your Story

By Chandra Shekhar, December 6, 2021

Feedback tells us what we are doing right and what we could be doing better. The advice and suggestions we receive from beta readers, fellow authors, and other sources can help us transform our flawed-but-promising story into a publishable piece or even a glittering masterpiece.

   Ideally, the process will be almost painless.

   The reality, however, is quite different, as any author who has ever attended a critique session can attest. You go into the session expecting to receive little criticism and lots of praise, but often it turns out to be the other way around. You find yourself assailed from all sides by brilliant suggestions that have one simple flaw — they will require you to completely gut your story and rewrite it from scratch.

It is a chastening experience. Even the thickest-skinned writers can’t help but feel disheartened at moments like these and fantasize about skinning their colleagues with a blunt knife.

   What’s the solution? How does a writer handle adverse—but well-intentioned—criticism?

   I don’t have an answer for this in the general case, but I have discovered one trick that’s helpful in certain situations when a reader points out what appears to be a serious or even fatal flaw in your text. This trick not only makes it almost painless to fix the flaw, it actually deepens the plot and strengthens the story.

   The trick I’ve found is to fix by incorporating. Let me explain with a couple of examples how that works.

   Example 1: Let’s say you’ve written a play in which the following dialogue appears:

                John: We should leave soon.

                Jane: Leave where?

                John: Where? To the reception at the Chamber of Commerce, or course.

                Jane: Oh.

                John: So will you go and get ready? It’s getting late.

                Jane: Let’s just stay home.

                John (staring at Jane): Are you kidding? Don’t you know how important it is for my job that I show my face at this event?

                Jane: Screw your job.

Someone in your critique group tells you that the dialogue doesn’t ring true, because Jane is not the type who will swear at her husband. The criticism is valid, you feel, and wonder whether you should change the dialogue slightly:

             John (staring at Jane): Are you kidding? Don’t you know how important it is for my job that I show my face at this event?

             Jane: Stop worrying about your job.

This addresses the criticism, but at the expense of losing some punch in the dialogue. Here is a better way to rewrite the dialogue:

                John (staring at Jane): Are you kidding? Don’t you know how important it is for my job that I show my face at this event?

                Jane: Screw your job.

                John (open-mouthed): What’s the matter with you? I’ve never heard you swear before. At least, not at me.

                Jane (beginning to tear up): Sorry, John. I’m not myself today. Ever since I got that letter from Cecilia.

                John: …

See what I did there? I incorporated the criticism into the dialogue, and by doing so, I not only fixed the flaw but also deepened the interaction between John and Jane.

   This is a simplistic example chosen for the purpose of illustration, but the point it makes is broadly valid. Whenever you encounter criticism that rings true but would be painful to address, try to incorporate it into the text itself. This will make your text critique-proof, at least as regards that particular flaw. The process will be relatively painless. And it will add depth to your narrative.

Example 2: This is a paragraph from my first draft of a short story about a serial killer:

      With the remaining officers out on emergency patrol, Fiona and Prince were left to man the precinct office. Prince moved his desk closer to the heating vent while Fiona kept her overcoat on. Both kept glancing at the loudly ticking wall clock, anxiously waiting for midnight.

In the story, the above scene takes place in a US city in August. One reader wondered why Fiona would wear an overcoat in mid-summer. For some reason, I had overlooked this very obvious flaw. Unfortunately, the plot requires the event to happen in August and Fiona to have her overcoat on. How to reconcile these two conflicting requirements?

My first impulse was to relocate this story to the southern hemisphere, where it would be winter in August. Then I realized many other elements in the story would make no sense if I did that.

Then I came up with this simple fix:

                With the remaining officers out on emergency patrol, Fiona and Prince were left to man the precinct office. The weather that summer had been unseasonably cold, and as the sun set and the evening shadows crept over town, the office grew chilly. Prince moved his desk closer to the heating vent while Fiona kept her overcoat on. Both kept glancing at the loudly ticking wall clock, anxiously waiting for midnight.

Adding that single sentence not only addresses the (valid) criticism but also brings in an eerie element that contributes to the feeling of dread that pervades the story.

                Mission accomplished!

 

Chandra Shekhar came to the US from India in 1987 to study Artificial Intelligence. After a decade of work on self-driving vehicles, facial recognition, and video surveillance, he switched to the less lucrative but more benign field of journalism. After studying science communication at the University of California, he worked for several years as a freelance writer for the Los Angeles Times, Cell, Princeton University, and other outlets. He taught for a year at the writing program at Stanford University, which inspired him to write his first novel, Mock My Words, and launched his career in fiction writing. 

   He is currently working on Thirst for Power, a novel about the intertwined lives of an idealistic young man, a scheming politician, a romantic professor of English, and an enigmatic social worker, set against a background of political, social, and climate change.

   Chandra is also a prolific writer of short stories, flash fiction, and humorous verse. An illustrated collection of his shorter works titled Unintended Consequences, Illogical Extremes, and Other Ironies of Life is in progress.

Here are links to his novels: 

Mock My Words and Unlight, both on Kindle