Bending an Ear: When to Listen to Writing Advice

Beta readers, workshopping, editors, agents, publishers – so much advice for your work, and so much of it contradictory! One says your work is too slow; another says you need more description. One says you need to pare down your prose, another says your description is too sparse. Emulate Hemingway. Emulate George R.R. Martin. Emulate Agatha Christie. Emulate Tolkien.

How do you please all your readers? Do you just ignore everyone’s advice? Do you try to take everyone’s advice? How do you reconcile them? And where is there room for developing a personal style?

The short, simple answer to the first question is: you don’t. No one can please every reader, and there will always be those who just don’t like what you’re doing. It’s not personal; for whatever reason, they just don’t connect. And that’s fine.

But you do need as many readers to connect as you can, and the key to that is writing feedback. Feedback is desperately important, because you can’t come at your work as an outsider; you know what you meant to say, you know what you’re implying, you know what will happen. Your eyes may skip over errors because you already know what you’re reading. That means that you should seriously consider advice – from the right sources. Those sources are people who understand good writing, and whom you trust to give you useful concrete feedback, rather than random static. Choosing carefully who to read your work is crucial to getting useful responses.

Ignoring everyone’s advice is not the best way to improve your writing. And, if you are certain your writing is fine the way it is, don’t ask for feedback from others, only to be angry if it’s not all positive. That’s not fair to the people who put in time and effort to read and critique your writing.

Taking everyone’s advice isn’t the solution, though. Someone may give you perfectly reasonable feedback, but it may not apply to you. You may have an editor who likes a different style, or who dislikes the style you’re deliberately using. You need to make sure that any workshop you’re in is compatible with what you’re looking for. Picking random beta readers probably isn’t a good idea, if you don’t know what they read, or what they like. (That doesn’t mean you should only pick beta readers from among those who you think will give you limitless positive feedback – balance is necessary).

So how do you reconcile them?

A lot of that depends on how experienced you are as a writer. If you’re still in the stage where you haven’t mastered your technique, you may want to rely heavily on more experienced writers to guide you through. But if any of those writers tell you that there is only one way to write, that’s a red flag. Having a diverse range of writers makes a wonderful selection for readers: it’s like a buffet where you may not like the pickled herring, but the fact they have mushrooms makes you deliriously happy. If all the buffet had was pickled herring, some people might love it, but they’d have a smaller clientele.

I hate pickled herring.

One of the best ways of telling if your beta reader or workshop or editor knows what they’re doing is that they give clear, detailed feedback. Often, the feedback may be both objective (“You’re using two different tenses in this paragraph, did you mean to do that?”) and subjective (“I find this character intensely annoying because of a, b, and c.”). This doesn’t mean that you have to accept the advice unquestioned: it’s an invitation to begin a dialogue that can seriously improve your writing. It’s that dialogue that will help you to refine your personal writing style.

“How does the character annoy you?” “She refuses to take personal responsibility for her actions.” This is where you need to a) decide if that’s the character you want to paint; b) if it isn’t , find out what specific things lead the other person to take it that way; c) decide if you actually agree; and d) either roll with it and make it your own, or change something to avoid that impression.

Many times your readers will not have a consensus about what they think. It’s useful to see if the character (for instance) annoys only one person, or reads that way to five. Again – you don’t need to take the advice, but it gives you more information to decide how you want to proceed. It might even give you a brand-new idea you wouldn’t have had otherwise. You might even be able to brainstorm together to come up with solutions to potential problems (which is particularly helpful in workshops).

But is it always sensible to weigh all advice equally?

Not really is the short answer. The more complex answer is: Are they interested in your story, or do they want to make it theirs? Are they experienced critics, or are they just learning? (There’s nothing wrong with getting readers who are inexperienced, as long as they’re not your actual editor[s], who needs to have a higher level of professional competence. It’s just important to know the position they’re coming from.) Did fifteen people agree with you and one disagrees? Probably not a problem with your writing – unless that one person has a really good idea, and clarifies something that everyone else missed. If one person has a button that you’ve managed to push, you need to decide whether that’s okay, and whether their reaction is useful. If someone tells you that you’re supposed to write like anyone else – well, they’re wrong. The ultimate goal is to learn to write in a style that is uniquely your own.

You’re the one who’s going to decide how much you listen. In the long run, what you want from your beta readers, your workshop, your editor, is to hold a mirror to your work, and let you read it backward. The best critics are the ones who help you tell the story you want to tell.