Feedback that Helps, Feedback that Doesn’t
If feedback doesn’t honor your vision, it’s just commentary based on taste.
When I was in graduate school, I brought to workshop a poem about an intense friendship. The poem, like the friendship, bordered on romantic, and my workshop classmates kept referring to the poem’s “you” as “he.” I interjected at some point to say that it was not about a man, but another woman, and the professor used it as an opportunity to talk about clarity.
As my classmates talked, I sank into myself, embarrassed by the professor’s implication that I had been trying to hide my sexual identity. I wasn’t trying to be unclear, I had just made some assumptions while writing, and my readers made some assumptions while reading. It could have been useful for me to think through my intended audience, and whether important it was to me that gender be clear (to straight people). Instead, the poem became an object lesson that might have been helpful for my classmates but was on another planet from my intent. ‘
In the old workshop model, the writer stays silent while a teacher and classmates assess their writing. There is a tendency in these discussions for readers to try to smooth out whatever is uncomfortable for them in the piece. This type of critique is easy to learn: you cut what “doesn’t work.” You write to the reader who is least likely to know what you are talking about. And so, unsurprisingly, when writing about a trans person, I’ve been told “just take the gender stuff out and make it a love poem.” I’ve gotten almost the exact same feedback when writing about sexual assault.
There is a different kind of feedback that opens, rather than closes, possibilities. When you take authorial intention into account, you can dive into and widen complexities rather than trying to tame them. This is why I love writing mentorship. It’s not a workshop or an assessment of “good” and “bad” from an expert writer who doles out criticism from on high. Instead, it’s a conversation.
Sometimes complexity comes out rough on the first try. Sometimes the parts of a work that an early reader might want to smooth out are the seeds of what will be the most exciting part of the piece. Writing workshops, when run in the old way, can snuff out these seeds before they’ve had a chance to develop into something surprising and beautiful. Honoring a writer’s vision, especially what they’ve only gestured towards in the first draft but might fully develop in later drafts, can help create more exciting work—but, more importantly, grow more confident writers.
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