The Most Useful Feedback Hurts

Plus a sci-fi novel update

Since I started focusing most of my work energy on writing, one of my guiding questions has been “how do I get better?”

Writing as a skill has no ceiling. You can and will get stuck on plateaus, but the amount time you spend on them is up to you.

You can’t move past your plateaus, though, unless you know where the steps off are. And while the smaller next steps are often obvious, the biggest areas for improvement are not where you think they are. They’re in your blindspots, the aspects of your craft you don’t even know are lacking.

What’s tricky about improving these blindspots is that since you’re unaware of them, you might react emotionally to hearing they need to be improved on. If you know you’re terrible with commas and someone tells you that you need to work on your comma placement, then you won’t be offended. But if you see yourself as a great explainer and someone tells you that your explanations make no sense, you might tune out the advice because it upsets your self-image.

So there’s a useful heuristic you can use if you want to improve at anything: the more a person’s feedback hurts, the more helpful it often is.

There are obvious caveats: if they’re being a dick it doesn’t count, if they don’t understand the skill they’re giving feedback on then it might be useless, but in general if they can point to a specific area of your craft that needs to be improved on and you get upset over hearing it, then it’s at least worth reflecting on.

I’ve told the story a few times about when I started writing Crypto Confidential and Dan Shipper told me to work on my story telling. It hurt to hear, I assumed I was good at it. But he was right, and by taking a step back and diligently focusing on that part of my craft, the book improved dramatically. I had to rewrite almost the entire first draft, but it ended up being well worth it.

Much later in the publishing process, I received edits from a copyeditor who clearly hated the book, or at least hated crypto. Either he was very anti-capitalist tech-skeptic or he was playing that role extremely well. Either way, his feedback was quite scathing at times, trying to nitpick every little thing I said in the book.

At first, it pissed me off. I almost emailed my usual editor and said “what is this guy’s problem?” But I took a deep breath and looked at it again and realized he was actually giving me quite a gift. By being so deeply critical of the book he was pointing out dozens of places my arguments could be stronger or clearer that other readers had not mentioned. I really wanted to discard his notes as being too negative, but there was quite a bit of truth to them. Sometimes even when it feels like someone is being a dick, they still have something useful to teach you.

And then another reason painful feedback can be so helpful is that it might be painful because you invested significant time into making something you thought was good, and you can’t accept it’s bad because you don’t want to feel like you wasted the time.

Which brings us to the juicy part of this piece. Last week, my agent sent me his feedback on the draft of the sci-fi novel I’ve been working on. I sent the same draft to half a dozen other people and they all mostly liked it. They had some feedback, but I was feeling pretty good about it.

His feedback was (politely) brutal. Confusing character motivations, unbelievable decisions, B-movie action. All things that I didn’t realize I was doing poorly, which I’m grateful to now know about! But also, ouch.

The hardest piece of the feedback, though, which I really didn’t want to believe, was that it was the wrong story to be telling in the world I’d come up with. The world itself, or at least where it’s building to, is interesting, but the story I started with around how it got that way isn’t interesting enough to be able to sell to a publisher. I could self-publish it and it might work out, but if I want to try to get a book deal for it, I need to find a more interesting, differentiated angle.

It’s extremely painful to hear since I have to accept that I need to get much better at this and I need to shelve the ~120,000 word book I’ve already written. But he’s right! It will be a better book for it.

So I’m starting over. I’ll have this draft to potentially do something with in the future, or at least use as lore, but different characters at a different point of time allow for a more interesting book.

And hopefully I can get better at all those little skill components along the way, too.

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