How to Handle Feedback for Writers

For those of us whose writing was a lifelong ambition, we probably all pictured it the same way: cloistered away at 2am, frantically scrawling a one-draft-wonder by moon and starlight, possessed by the muses, to the awe and adulation of everyone around you.

But the truth, we all know, is a little more complicated.

As solitary and siloed as the act of writing can be, it remains, nevertheless, a communal effort. if you don’t open yourself up to feedback, the odds of success can get pretty slim.

This is complicated by the fact that sharing creative writing at all—let alone asking for criticism—is a fraught, uncomfortable, and sometimes terrifying process. 

If they even give it to you. As many writers can attest, just finding somebody with the time, patience and commitment to provide detailed notes can be like pulling teeth, let alone actually using that feedback to good effect.

That last part is where most of us falter. 

Poor quality or misunderstood feedback can lead your draft into the depths of a creative labyrinth. One wrong turn, and you’re suddenly several drafts farther away from your goal and facing down the minotaur of self-doubt. 

Criticism will always demand an emotional toll. But with the right approach, both giving and processing it can get a lot easier. All it takes is some hard-won objectivity and a little categorization.

A quick note before we move forward: This article will focus mainly on fiction writing, but most of the advice is applicable to other types of content as well.

What Feedback Is (and Isn't)

Before we get into the nitty gritty, we must first establish what we mean by “feedback.” 

For the purposes of this article, we’re talking about an intentional, constructive process. In other words, feedback is something that is intended to help guide or shape a piece of writing. It’s not a vague opinion. 

Let’s illustrate: You've just finished a draft of your new short story. You hand it to a friend, eager for their thoughts. They read it and say, "It's good." 

Sure, that might be encouraging. But what next?

In this example, “It’s good,” isn’t feedback because it doesn’t provide any context to re-evaluate your piece. 

Now, let’s imagine you handed your story to a second friend, and they said, “the romance subplot really worked for me, but I was a little confused about the timeline.” 

This is feedback, because it tells you specifically what element worked best, and highlighted one area that might need more consideration. With this comment, you have a lens through which to examine your draft, even if you ultimately decide the feedback was wrong.

Feedback, at its core, is a response to your writing that aims to improve its quality. It's not just any response, though. Effective feedback analyzes your work's strengths and weaknesses, offering insights to help you refine your craft. It's specific, constructive, and focused on the work itself, not you as a writer.

What this all adds up to is that good feedback is useful feedback. It tells you something specific about your writing, whether that’s good, bad, or a mixed bag. And bad feedback doesn’t have anything to do with the quality of your writing; it just doesn’t help you move forward.

This utilitarian perspective has helped me cast off the emotional burden of constructive criticism, because it reduces the emotional impact of subjective opinions. Instead, I can quickly evaluate and dismiss irrelevant comments and focus my efforts on the ones that will actually push my draft forward.

Types of Feedback

Over the years, I’ve developed a fairly consistent system to categorize feedback. This system is useful not just for processing criticism, but also for delivering and contextualizing criticism to others. 

It comes down to this: When you’re giving feedback to another writer, if you spend a little extra time identifying what, exactly, you’re trying to address, it will be easier to explain your thoughts to the writer in a helpful way.  And when you’re receiving feedback, categorizing feedback by its function can help take the sting of criticism, while also providing helpful context to evaluate each comment.

Objective vs. Subjective Feedback

First, let’s start by distinguishing between objective versus subjective feedback.

This is not, technically speaking, a category, but instead an axis on which all constructive comments reside. 

In short, objective feedback is anything with measurable, concrete impacts on your writing. For example: 

• Factual or logical errors
• Grammar, spelling and formatting issues
• Issues with internal consistency

Basically, objective feedback is typically either rule- or story-breaking. So, for example, if you’re writing a grounded, hard sci-fi novel, and halfway through you start ignoring basic physics without justification, it’s probably going to break your readers’ suspension of disbelief and disrupt your storytelling. 

This is usually the easiest type of feedback to implement, because there’s generally a right and a wrong answer.

Subjective feedback, on the other hand, is typically a value judgment rooted in the reader’s perspective, biases, or preference. 

It may be tempting to toss subjective feedback out, but that would be a mistake. While it’s more challenging to work with, subjective feedback can often prove more valuable to writers, because it reflects readers’ honest experience with the text. In some cases, subjective feedback even helps writers spot yet-to-be-identified issues that need to be addressed.

Here’s a real-life example. 

In the second lecture of Brandon Sanderson’s Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy series, Sanderson describes the experience of workshopping the third novel in his Stormlight series. 

When the group read what was supposed to be the most exciting, climactic scene in the novel, instead of being gripped with tension as he expected, the group resoundingly felt bored and frustrated with it.

At first glance, a comment like, “I find this chapter boring,” is inherently subjective, right? And it doesn’t even seem particularly helpful at first. 

The workshop members each came prepared with ideas on ways to rewrite the chapter in a more interesting way. A less experienced writer might have taken these suggestions and ran with them, ended up with pages and drafts of extra work, and it still wouldn’t have fixed the problem.

But Sanderson saw something different. It wasn’t the creative ideas he needed—it was the group’s subjective, emotional reaction to the text. Such a consistent reaction from his readers meant they were likely all reacting to the same issue. Once he realized what it was, he was able to make a relatively simple tweak that improved the scene drastically without major edits.

That’s the power of subjectivity—unlike objective feedback, it doesn’t tell you what to do. Instead, it shows you how readers react to the content you’ve created, while leaving writers free to explore the best solutions for themselves.

Unfortunately, distinguishing accurately between objective and subjective comments takes practice. For one, if you deliver it with enough confidence, subjective comments can sound an awful lot like objective criticism, leading writers to misconstrue not only the nature of the feedback, but also its reliability.

I encountered this exact scenario at a workshop hosted by a regional sci-fi literature convention—I had submitted a short story to a panel of professionals, including the editors of respected pro and semi-pro literary magazines, published writers, and even a tenured writing professor at a highly competitive university. 

The feedback I received was not just negative but virulently so, leaving me questioning whether it was worth pursuing the draft at all. Earlier in my writing career, I would have abandoned the story immediately. And also probably cried about it. But because I had some workshop experience under my belt already, I was able to look a little closer.

It turned out that, while I had gotten some genuinely helpful comments, most of them—and the most acerbic—were wildly off base. They pushed me away from the story I wanted to tell, seemingly because they didn’t like the story they assumed I had written. (To be honest, I’m not sure if some of them even read past the second paragraph.)

My point is this: both subjective and objective feedback can be helpful. But it isn’t always. And to determine that, you first need to know what you’re working with.

Content Feedback

The first true “feedback category,” so to speak, is content feedback. These comments focus on what, precisely, you’re trying to say, and whether it can withstand scrutiny.

In fiction, this could include things like:

• Real-world factual accuracy—for example, are your scientific or historical details correct?
• Internal logic—or, does the story follow its own established rules?
• Consistency—do the characters follow a logical or believable arc? Are the themes consistent throughout?

In short, any comment that concerns the substance of the text rather than its presentation falls under this umbrella. 

Content feedback often focuses on the big picture—your understanding of the central topic, your argument, how it’s formulated and supported. As such, it’s a good idea to address these comments earlier in your revision process, while deferring more detail-oriented feedback.

If it’s poorly delivered, or if the reader is unclear, these comments are easy to confuse with stylistic feedback. As such, it’s good practice to ask clarifying questions, e.g., “is it the central argument you’re objecting to here, do you not like the phrasing?” 

This type of clarification can help readers better understand and articulate their own thoughts—from experience, some readers aren’t sure what they’re reacting to until you ask directly—while also preventing you from getting defensive, or jumping to conclusions and making the wrong edit.

Structural Feedback

While content feedback focuses on what you’re actually trying to communicate, structural feedback gets into the how. 

Structural feedback is exactly what it sounds like—the skeleton and scaffolding that support the story you’re trying to tell.  It often focuses on: 

• The order of events or ideas
• Pacing issues
• Extraneous or missing elements

It’s essentially the “big-picture” version style feedback. As such, it’s a good candidate for a second revision, after you’ve fixed up the content issues. 

These comments tend to be quite subjective, because they hinge on the reader’s expectations. 

For example, let’s say you’ve written a low-arcing, deliberate, character driven story. If you hand it to a reader who prefers plot-driven stories that move at a quick clip, they’re likely to suggest you cut the draft down quite a bit to improve the pacing. Whether that’s good or bad advice depends on what you, the writer, want to do.

In this scenario, if you’re the writer, it’s helpful to have a solid understanding of your readers’ preferences and biases. This gives you context for their feedback. In the example above, the reader in question probably wasn’t in the target audience for that story. But if someone who prefers more deliberate stories gives similar feedback, then you know to take those pacing issues seriously.

Similarly, if you’re asked to give feedback on a story that’s misaligned with your preferences as a reader, it’s best to disclose this bias early, so that the writer can process your comments more effectively.

Style Feedback

Stylistic feedback is the more granular twin of structural feedback. It also focuses on the “how” of writing. The difference is that these comments center on more specific details. 

While it’s best handled later on in the revision process, stylistic criticism can have an enormous impact on a reader’s experience, the tone and effectiveness of the overall narrative.

To illustrate, here’s an example of setting description in Harry Potter: 

The narrow path had opened suddenly onto the edge of a great black lake. Perched atop a high mountain on the other side, its windows sparkling in the starry sky, was a vast castle with many turrets and towers.

"No more 'n four to a boat!" Hagrid called, pointing to a fleet of little boats sitting in the water by the shore. Harry and Ron were followed into their boat by Nevlille and Hermione.

"Everyone in?" shouted Hagrid, who had a boat to himself, "Right then— FORWARD!"

And the fleet of little boats moved off all at once, gliding across the lake, which was as smooth as glass. Everyone was silent, staring up at the great castle overhead. It towered over them as they sailed nearer and nearer to the cliff on which it stood.

In this passage, there are lots of visual, concrete details, delivered in a relatively grounded and straightforward manner, generating a sense of immediacy.

Compare that to this passage from The Fellowship of the Ring:

The sun on the hill-top was now getting hot. It must have been about eleven o’clock; but the autumn haze still prevented them from seeing much in other directions. In the west they could not make out either the line of the Hedge or the valley of the Brandywine beyond it. Northward, where they looked most hopefully, they could see nothing that might be the line of the great East Road, for which they were making. They were on an island in a sea of trees, and the horizon was veiled.

On the south-eastern side the ground fell very steeply, as if the slopes of the hill were continued far down under the trees, like island-shores that really are the sides of a mountain rising out of deep waters.

As in the previous example, this description includes a lot of concrete detail to orient the reader. But they’re presented in a more elevated tone, resulting in a more fantastical, dream-like feeling for the reader.

In both passages, a new setting is being introduced. But the stylistic choices are used for different impacts. Neither is inherently better or worse, but they couldn’t be used interchangeably.

As you can probably guess, stylistic feedback is the most subjective and at times arbitrary feedback you might receive. These critiques hone in on smaller-scale artistic choices. As such, it can be difficult to untangle which comments are helpful and harmful to the narrative—especially when your critiques include specific rewrites or editorial suggestions.

If you get feedback addressing style, and aren’t sure how to move forward with it, try using a more restrained approach. In other words, don’t take your readers at their word or blindly accept style edits. Instead, make a note of the areas that received the most criticism from your readers. 

If necessary, ask clarifying questions: 

• Which specific details threw you out of the narrative?
• Which parts of this passage worked better for you?
• What styles of writing do you normally enjoy reading or writing?

Then, put their comments aside, and look at those passages through your own eyes instead of depending on their edits. This strategy often helps me identify problems and resolve them in a more stylistically coherent way. 

If you’re critiquing someone else’s writing style, here are a few pointers: 

• If possible and appropriate, try to make critiques without offering specific rewrites.
• If you need to make a direct edit or provide an example rewrite, explain clearly and specifically what issue you’re trying to address and why.
• Always disclose whether you are making a subjective edit or if you’re correcting an objective issue.
• Always respect the writer’s voice. If you can’t untangle your own writing style from your critiques or edits, avoid giving stylistic feedback.

Pro Tips for Better Workshop Sessions

Whether you’re a writer collecting criticism, or a reader evaluating someone else’s piece, workshop sessions go better with clear communication. 

With that in mind, here are a few tried-and-true best practices to run helpful critique sessions: 

• Establish consistent feedback format and delivery style. You don’t need to align with a professional workshop model, but a standardized format makes sure everyone knows what feedback to expect and how to offer it. 

• Lead with questions. Writers can collect more relevant feedback by asking specific questions of readers up front, such as, “is the worldbuilding believable,” or “how is my pacing?” This gives critiquers something to focus on while ensuring that the session aligns with the writer’s goals. 

• Don’t argue. It’s tempting to get defensive about your writing or your opinion. Keep your mouth shut anyway. The goal of a feedback session isn’t to establish who is right or wrong, but instead to understand how readers are authentically reacting to a piece of writing. 

• Do clarify. While it’s verboten in most workshops to push back against criticism, it’s highly encouraged to ask clarifying questions. For example, if one reader says they struggled to suspend their disbelief, you might ask them which specific details threw them out of the narrative. Readers can also clarify by asking the writer questions about their goals for a piece. This can help to sharpen the focus of their critique.
• Set boundaries. Placing limitations on the types of comments you want can help to ensure a more productive critique session. For example, if you’re writing about a highly personal or traumatic experience, you might not be open to comments challenging its believability. Or if you’re very early in your revision process, you might not want to waste your time on style and structure.

Above all, treat yourself with compassion. If you’re anything like me, the craft of writing is not just close to your heart, but also foundational to your self-perception. So it’s natural that taking criticism—no matter how helpful—is at times an emotional minefield. 

If you find yourself getting upset, give yourself the space to work through those feelings. Then, when you’re ready, come back to your revision with renewed clarity of purpose. 

And remember—not all advice is good advice. Even if it’s delivered in a confident and authoritative-sounding way. So if you get feedback you disagree with, don’t second guess yourself. Just consider the feedback thoughtfully and reject it if necessary.

With time and practice, embracing and implementing critical feedback gets easier. If this is a skill you want to work on, consider joining a beginner-friendly writing workshop in your community. I joined my first one at my local library.

When I first started writing, feedback was something to fear. I expected first-draft perfection every time, and agonized over every seemingly-negative comment. But that changed with time and experience. Now, critique sessions are some of the most valued aspects of my writing process—and even formed the foundation for several of my most significant friendships. 

I hope this system helps you make the best of your reader comments, advance your writing, and tell amazing stories. Try it for yourself, tweak it and build on it. Then, share your polished stories with the world.