How do you deal with feedback that feels wrong?

How to take what you need and leave the rest.

Hex, making a cameo in Hogfather.

Every time I get stuck trying to pick a topic for this newsletter, I find myself looking for inspiration amongst the blocks that I’m dealing with myself. Because there’s always something…

As I wrote in Monday’s Fieldwork update, I now have a complete script which has been through a couple of edits. I finished it over a month ago, but then went on holiday for a week, was in bed with Covid for a week, then, well, the general election wiped out a week, then I spent a week catching up from the previous three weeks, another week procrastinating and… here we are. Five weeks later and I haven’t made a single new edit.

A holiday, Covid and the election are all legit reasons to pause work, but once again, the thing that shoved a massive spanner in my mental machine was some feedback that I just couldn’t make sense of (the specifics of which I covered a bit more in Monday’s post).

As my ex-journo husband always jokes, if something happens once, it’s a single data point, but if it happens twice it’s a trend. This isn’t the first time that I’ve gotten myself all mentally clogged up after some feedback that didn’t feel right. Last year I spent weeks struggling with some feedback that “felt overly harsh and that, in many places, seemed to miss the point”. 

So now I’m wondering, what’s up with that?

I’ve worked professionally as a writer on and off for decades. I’m used to having my work edited and critiqued. I don’t feel precious about my writing and I don’t have a problem with getting feedback. But there seems to be a specific type of feedback that causes my brain to throw an Out of Cheese Error*, and it’s feedback that sounds like it ought to make sense, as in it’s both comprehensible and sounds legit, but which my gut says is bullshit.

At the root of my problem is, I think, my desire to improve and my assumption that everyone else knows better than me. 

One of the issues with being self-employed is that you very rarely get any feedback or approval. That’s especially true of Ada Lovelace Day, where all the encouragement I get for the year is compressed into a period of a day or two. I don’t get promotions. Or awards. Or recognition. Or, indeed, a decent salary. I just keep ploughing on, knowing that I’m doing the right thing and hoping that I’m doing a good job of doing the right thing. 

Writing is very similar. The vast majority of it happens in the black box that is my head and it rarely gets in front of anyone for their feedback or approval. So when I do get feedback, it feels perhaps more important than it is, and I feel like I absolutely must extract every last ounce of learning from every single comment. Except not every comment has a lesson in it.

I had a chat about this with a friend of mine who’s a professional scriptwriter and his opinion was that I don’t need feedback. Instead, I need to trust myself to know what I like and to then write that. I’m not sure I would quite go that far. Writing is a skill which can be taught and you can’t necessarily learn everything on your own. Sometimes you need an expert eye. 

I do wonder, though, whether our current model of early career writers critiquing each other’s work really is the best way to nurture talent. That’s throwing no shade on anyone who’s in a writer’s group and trying to help others improve — we all do the best we can with what we’ve got.

Now imagine how much faster we’d improve if we could be mentored by someone with experience? It’d take maybe an hour or two a month for the mentor and could be transformative for the mentee. Imagine if such a project were funded by, say, the Arts Council so that mentors could be properly paid for their time? 

I would absolutely love to have a comedy mentor. I’d also absolutely love to run such a project. I ran a mentoring network for three years for women in STEM and had amazing results, with a satisfaction rating through the roof and incredibly high participant engagement. So hey, if the Arts Council wants someone to run such a network, hit me up. 

Anyway, back to script feedback. 

Bottom line is this: Thanks to my perfectionism I can be a wee bit too diligent when it comes to extracting every last ounce of value from the feedback I’m given. I really do need to trust my instincts more. If a particular bit of feedback feels wrong, if it borks my brain, then the feedback’s wrong. But instead of tying my brain into a pretzel trying to work out why the feedback is wrong, I should just go back to the script and see what it tells me.

Learning to take feedback isn’t just about being stoic and taking the punch when it comes, it’s about learning to listen to and interpret your own emotional responses when you read those comments, because they are trying to tell you something. If your gut says a particular comment is nonsense, listen to it, because it’s probably right.

* Terry Pratchett’s Interesting Times includes a magic computer called Hex, designed and run by the wizard Ponder Stibbons: 

He was beginning to suspect that Hex was redesigning itself. And he'd just said 'Thank you'. To a thing that looked like it had been made by a glassblower with hiccups. He looked at spell it had produced, hastily wrote it down and hurried out. Hex clicked to itself in the now empty room. The thing that went 'parp' went parp. The Unreal Time Clock ticked sideways. There was a rattle in the output slot. 'Don't mention it. ++?????++ Out of Cheese Error. Redo From Start.

'