4 Important Tips to Getting the Most Out of Critiques
Feedback from others helps improve your work — if you do it right.
I had a long (long, long) road to a successful career in publishing. The first novel I wrote was dashed off to agents after nothing more than a spell check and a quick read-through.
Such an amateur mistake.
After that book was soundly rejected by every agent in my genre, I quickly realized that one of the greatest resources available to writers and artists is peer critique. In writing, this means you ask a fellow writer to read your work and provide feedback on ways to improve it, but the concept exists across all fields.
At first, I thought the key to benefitting from critiques was just to get as many as I could. I threw myself into writer communities, both online and in person, reached out on social media, and even used my limited budget to pay for critiques. And after a lot of time and money, I realized that, much like everything else, the nature of a good critique came down to quality, not quantity.
Now, after decades of experience and having learned the hard way, I give critiques professionally, but I could have saved myself a lot of time and trouble if I’d known then what I do now.
#1: Giving — not getting — critiques makes you a better writer
When we want to make our own work the best it can possibly be, our first instinct is to get as much feedback on it as possible. We want others to give us, basically, a checklist of what to fix.
However, that’s not learning. That’s just rote, mindless following of directions.
It’s also taking the easy way out.
After all, isn’t it far simpler to be told what to do and just do it? It’s the difference between a paint-by-numbers and an actual work of art.
Giving a critique, on the other hand, is harder. You have to both identify what’s wrong with someone else’s work and also articulate why it’s wrong. This isn’t a matter of providing a solution — that’s not the right tactic at all — it’s a matter of explaining on a critical, craft level what makes a work not work.
For example, it’s easy in a casual reading of a book to toss the novel aside and think I’m bored; I’d rather read something else. But if you stop to analyze and explain why you’re bored, you have to critically examine the craft, pulling apart the elements that aren’t working. “Boring” can be a slow pace. It could be too heavy of description. It could be a lack of character motivation. It could be a lack of tension. It could be a lack of mystery. It could a lot of things, and if you, the critiquer, can figure it out, you’ll not only have grown in your skills as a critiquer, you’ll better be able to identify that same problem in your own writing in the future.
Just getting feedback may help you improve one single work. But giving feedback helps you improve your overall skills as a writer for all future work.
#2: Critiques Are Better Used for Big Picture Concepts than Tiny Details
When giving notes, make sure you’re looking at the big picture. Don’t worry about grammar — that’s too micro. Critiques are for totally restructuring a work, kicking at the foundation, remodeling everything.
A good analogy would be a home remodel. Looking at the grammar or focusing on the little details that don’t affect the overall plot are like arguing over paint in a house whose walls are going to be ripped out due to mold.
Instead, you have to pull back. Look at the forest for the trees. A lot of critiques are done using in-line comments, making individual notes on sentences, but a better method would be a structural edit letter, providing more general feedback on the overall plot, world, characters, tone, voice, etc.
#3: Know the nature of your critiquers
Not all people critique in the same way.
This was a hard lesson to learn, and one I only discovered after I spent weeks laboring over a friend’s manuscript, providing pages of notes and hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of in-line comments on her work, to only get back a few smiley faces and “good job!” notes from her for my own work.
Bonus tip: Before committing to swapping an entire manuscript with someone, give it a trial run of a sampling of 25 pages to ensure you’re both happy with each other’s critiquing methods.
Some people are cheerleaders in a critique. They aren’t trying to skimp on the work (hopefully) — they just honestly like to cheer people on. Their critiques are generally all positive.
On the flip side, some people are detractors. They feel it’s their duty to mark everything that could even possible be told in a different way. They spend paragraphs ripping apart every line of your work, even the irrelevant details that don’t really matter.
Some people have bias. You named a character something that happens to sound like the name of their ex-boyfriend, and now they hate that character irrationally and cannot ever see past that.
Some people simply don’t know how to critique well. Perhaps they’re experts in a seprate genre but aren’t aware of the difference between tropes and cliches in the genre you’re writing. Perhaps they are good writers themselves, but can’t articulate ways to help others.
Some people are “solvers.” They want to rewrite your work for you instead of point out the areas that need improvement.
It’s not enough to just get a critique of your work. You need to get a good critique that has the right balance of pointing out successful areas and providing notes on areas that don’t work.
#4: Use stages of critiques to mark improvement
Once you’ve figured out the style of the people you want to approach for critique — and that will take trial and error to determine — gather your best critique friends close and never let them go.
And also, use them in stages.
When I first started getting critiques, I sent out my work to everyone I could as soon as it was done. This resulted in two problems. First, there were far, far, far too many cooks in the kitchen — I had people pulling my attention in all kinds of different directions, suggesting opposite advice; it was chaos.
But secondly, this meant that once I had actually sorted through all the advice and applied it and completed the rewrite…I had no one else to look at the second draft.
That’s the thing that is easy to forget. It’s not a matter of writing one draft, getting feedback, writing a second draft, and being done. Oh, no. You may need to write three, four, ten drafts before you nail the work. And you don’t want to burn through all your help in the first.
Revising a manuscript is a marathon, not a sprint.
Keep in mind that, almost always, you’ll be unable to use a critiquer more than once. It’s very hard for someone to get an old draft out of their mind when reading a new draft. I’ve tried multiple times — when the person reads the second draft, they often still recall the first draft’s problems, or they’ve gotten attached to things in the first draft they want me to put back in — it’s a mess.
So you get one shot with your carefully selected cadre of critiquers. Use them in stages. Here’s what I did:
- After the first draft, I sent the work to two critiquers who had a reputation for working quickly were best at the “big picture” ideas.
- I rewrote that draft with their notes. Then I sent to more critiquers who read a little closer and had a good eye for specific problems. For example, if my first round had suggested that my characters needed work, I revised with an eye for that, then sought out someone who I knew did characters well.
- I rewrote the draft with their notes. Then, dependent on how well I felt that had worked, I either contacted someone else, or I sent the work to some cheerleaders. It always helps to end on a positive note that bolsters your courage before taking it to the next level of submitting it to agents and publishers.
Learning to write takes practice, feedback, and focus. Good writer friends who can also critique your work and help you critique theirs are worth their weight in gold.
