Start Collecting Your Feedback

The Most Powerful Habit to Improve Your Craft

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

I have never taken notice of the feedback I’ve been given about my work as a writer. I’ve also always hesitated to ask for feedback at all. The idea of having to hear what people really thought about my work… horrifying.

This year, I decided to try something different.

I took the plunge last year to actually put my work on the internet, for the public to read. This was huge step number one. But I realised that something was missing still from my process:

It’s not enough to just lob out your work into the universe. You’ve got to take notice of what comes back.

Every time someone gave me feedback on my work, good or bad, I saved it into a collection.

I receive emails every time someone responds to me on Medium. These emails are now forming the basis of my feedback collection.

As it stands, I have 28 items in my inbox tagged with ‘Feedback 2019’. I’ve got a bunch more screenshots saved to my desktop, with feedback from other places like social media, email, etc. I haven’t written down any verbal feedback.

In all of this, 27 of the items are positive. They’re things like, “This article really spoke to me,” or “Thank you for writing this piece.” This list of items doesn’t include everything I’ve been emailed, I’ll admit — sometimes if it was just a short comment or similar, I forgot and immediately archived it.

That this was my default for the past… years. I’ve always just glossed over whatever anyone said, good or bad, and told myself I’d do better next time.

How completely pointless.

Two reasons:

1. Wherever I received negative feedback, I wasn’t making note enough of any constructive criticism that could be used in future to improve my work. I was just saying to myself, “Yeah okay, whatever” and filing it away.
2. Whenever I received positive feedback, I did the same thing, and thus always felt like my writing was getting nowhere, speaking to no one and worth nothing. By continually glossing over the positive, I could keep telling myself my writing was meh, and that I had a long long way to go to get anywhere.

I do still have a long way to go. But I’m also on the path — that’s important to remember.

Get into the habit

Every time there are words about your work, note them. Take a screenshot or create a tag in your gmail inbox. Whatever form it takes, make sure you’ve got a copy.

I’m still no good at writing down any verbal feedback, but one step at a time…

Keep your feedback organised

Make a folder, both on your computer and/or in your emails, and make sure everything ends up there. It should be viewable as a whole list of items, whenever you need to.

You might want to go a step further and tag according to the nature of the feedback — I use Airtable for things like this. You can assign a whole bunch of information to each item, including when it was received, categories, copies of the original, etc.

Separate helpful from unhelpful

While it’s great to get into the habit of taking down and saving all of it, there are trolls out there. And people who assume their version of reality is the only version. In which case, their feedback may be less than helpful.

You might not want to keep troll or destructive feedback. I personally remember those really destructive things far too well — more than anything else. Like being told by someone close to me that they don’t like a lot of writers’ early work because “it’s just all about them anyway, and they are usually pretty boring.” Seems innocuous (and maybe even true) on one level, but I found this utterly paralysing — Don’t be so boring! Don’t use anything too similar to yourself!

Much better to put those really unhelpful items aside.

Set a time to reflect

If you’re compulsively looking back on your feedback, you might never create anything new. That’s not the aim here. So set yourself a clear and concise time in which to review, and summarise any key lessons.

And for positives, the same applies. If you’re starting to feel a bit negative about your own work, look back and remember: actually, I really spoke to this person. And speaking to even one person is a huge achievement.

After all, we tell stories and make art in order to connect. If you connected, you did the incredible — you related, at an essential level, to another human being. Amazing!

In conclusion…

The negative internal voice — the one that completely lacks in self-compassion — can become the dominant voice if you let it. Collect your feedback in order to introduce some balance into the equation.

You won’t do super amazing work all of the time, but if someone suggests a way you might improve, that’s great too — they’ve given up their time to help you on your journey. Now all you have to do is think about whether this can be integrated into your practice going forward, and if so, how.

Without collecting your feedback, great or small, progress will be harder and slower — you will only have yourself as the judge. And ultimately, unless we are creating only for ourselves and for nobody else to see or experience, this isn’t a viable way to grow as a creator.

Start collecting your feedback. Give yourself the opportunity to grow.