How To Organize Feedback On Your Writing

You were brave and asked for feedback on your writing — great! Now what?

In order to grow as a writer, it’s essential that you share your work and get feedback on it. If you feel scared about sharing your work, don’t worry. You’re not alone! Check out this post I wrote about that.

But after you’ve done the scary thing and shared your writing and heard back from your readers …then what?

The most important piece is to make sure you have the right mindset for dealing with feedback, and I’ve written about that before here.

In this post, I want to share more practical tips for organizing and addressing feedback you get on your WIP, whether it’s from a professional editor or from a critique partner. This is my method, so likely every step won’t work for you, but having a starting point for dealing with reader feedback can prevent it from feeling so overwhelming.

Highlight the compliments

If you get an edit letter back from your reader, after you’ve read it through and processed it, highlight every good thing they say about your book (and if they don’t say anything good…they’re not a good editor and that’s a bigger problem). This sounds silly, but truly, it is so helpful to have a visual reminder that there are LOTS of good things about your book!

I had heard this piece of advice before, but the first time I got an edit letter back, I thought to myself, “There’s no point in highlighting the good parts; I got so little right that it’s just going to be more depressing to see how little is highlighted.” But I went ahead and tried it, and guess what? There were way more compliments than I had remembered! Our brains focus on the negative, on the areas to improve. Highlighting the positive pieces helps counteract that.

If you got your feedback as comments in a document without an edit letter, as you read through, copy and paste every compliment into a separate doc that you can look at when you need encouragement. And don’t “resolve” any of those encouraging comments in the doc-leave them there as little pick-me-ups when you’re scrolling through!

Write down all the bigger issues

Okay, time to actually start organizing. I like to have a notebook out as I read through the feedback. Any bigger issues, I write down. You could do this with a separate document on your computer or whatever method works best for you.

By “bigger” issue, I mean anything that affects your story at a scene/chapter or overall manuscript level. Character arcs, plot holes, continuity errors-definitely. But also things like “this scene feels abrupt after the previous one,” issues that may not affect the whole book, but will significantly change a scene or how multiple scenes interact with each other.

Line-level notes, like “this sentence is awkward” or “at the start of the chapter, you said it was morning but now it’s not,” stay as comments within the document.

When I’m making my list, I write down the problem to be solved, then list any possible solutions underneath it. I don’t spend a ton of time trying to solve the problem yet, but instead, focus on capturing any initial thoughts I have about it, or maybe suggestions the reader gave that resonate with me.

Organize the list

The list as it stands now is in the chronological order of the story, but it likely doesn’t make sense to work through the edits in that way. Instead, organize the list by size and type. This is when I move my list from handwritten to digital (I use Notion to organize my edits).

First, I organize by size. The list should already only be bigger edits, but there’s still variation within the list. If it’s something that affects the entire manuscript, or an issue that’s threaded throughout the story, that goes higher on the list. Scene or chapter level notes go lower on the list. I also try to organize based on cause and effect. If one issue is that a character arc doesn’t feel authentic and another issue is that the climax of the book falls flat, it’s likely solving the character arc issue will shape the solution to the climax, so I order those accordingly.

Then I like to color code the list, because color coding makes everything better. The general categories I use are: Plot, Character, Worldbuilding (even for contemporary novels!), and General. Each of these gets assigned a color, and then each issue on a list is highlighted in the corresponding color. Maybe this is unnecessary; I don’t really care, because it makes it easier for my brain to look at it.

I use Scrivener to write my manuscripts, and each scene has a “Notes” box with it. For any scene-specific issues, I copy those to the Notes box for the scene itself, along with the solutions I’ve come up with for the issue. Speaking of solutions…

Brainstorm solutions

Now that I know roughly what order I need to solve the problems in, I get started solving! For me, brainstorming is a lot of writing out my ideas by hand. Writing about my writing keeps my brain focused on the task, and something about physically writing out my thoughts with pen and paper gives me more freedom and creativity than typing it out. So my notebook for any given WIP is full of pages of me basically talking to myself about my writing.

Of course, I often end up talking to others about it as well, especially when I get stuck. Usually, the suggestions they have aren’t at all what I need to solve the problem, but just by explaining it and talking it through, I have a better sense of things, and often that’s all I need to figure out the solution.

I try to brainstorm every issue that’s on my list, but there will be ones that just resist having a solution at this phase. At a certain point, I evaluate if it’s something that can wait to be decided until after I get started writing. It might still be a big, manuscript-wide issue, but if it doesn’t change the first few chapters, I can technically start writing without figuring out a solution yet. If it can wait, I move on to the next phase, and trust that when I come to that issue, I’ll be better equipped to solve it after some time away and refamiliarizing myself with the story.

Start making changes

Now that you’ve got your issues organized logically and (mostly) solved, it’s time to start actually editing! I like to read in linear order, making adjustments according to my solution as I go. So I might have several manuscript-wide issues, and each scene, I think through how this scene might be affected by the solutions to those issues. If there are issues/solutions in the Notes box for that specific scene, I add them in.

This is also the point that I add in the line-level notes that I left as comments. Once I’ve made the bigger changes, I refer to the document with the comments, and adjust as needed. If I fully fix an issue the comment pointed out, I resolve/accept (depends on what program you’re using) the comment. Sometimes I’ll mostly fix an issue the comment points out, but leave the comment unresolved, so I can look at it again in future read-throughs, tweaking until I feel like I’ve fully fixed the issue and can resolve the comment. The goal is to only have positive comments left in the document by the end!

Piece by piece, I go through my manuscript making updates big and small. Inevitably, new issues arise. Some of them, I fix as they come up, but others I add to a list of new issues that I keep in Notion, to be fixed in another draft.

This process, even before I actually start fixing things, takes a while! Even though it may mean a month or more of not actually writing or editing your WIP, don’t skip this step of organizing and addressing feedback. Taking the time to make a plan for moving forward with edits will ultimately save you time and creative energy in the long run.

Originally published at https://chelseapenningtonauthor.com on February 25, 2023.