How to Blend Story Feedback Into Your Manuscript

How do you blend story feedback into your manuscript? This can seem like an impossible task—maybe you’ve received feedback that requires major surgery on your story. Maybe you’ve received conflicting feedback from different sources. Or maybe you’re having a hard time determining which ideas you should use and which ones you should throw out. How do you even begin?

You’ve gotten some great story feedback, but how do you weave it into your manuscript?

READ THROUGH ALL STORY FEEDBACK BEFORE REVISING

For my WIP, I received two thorough sets of notes—one was four single-spaced pages; the other was eight single-spaced pages. On the one hand, I’m super-grateful for this objective insight. On the other hand, I died a little inside—because Fourteen. Pages. Of. Notes.

I had to really think about how to apply this critique. Should I make an elaborate chart with each point of story feedback, and map out where the two sets converged?

Or how about I write out a timeline for my story, and plot out—graph-style—each piece of feedback in chronological order?

SHOULDN’T I BE DOING SOMETHING THAT INVOLVES LOTS OF OFFICE SUPPLIES?!

Yeah, so that’s where my brain went first because I’m aggressively controlling in certain scenarios. Obviously, my writing is an area where I don’t mess around.

But here’s where I ended up.

Sure, there might be a benefit to organizing and plotting your critique. But for me, I realized that I could get endlessly bogged down in this process. I might never actually finish my WIP because I got so fed up with trying to parse through my critique in an overly controlling way.

So I sent both sets of critique to my Kindle, which I only use when I’m reading in bed. When I’m reading in bed, I’m two floors away from my laptop where I do all my writing.

Do you see where I’m going with this?

Many writers encourage a robust reading life, because as you’re reading, you can’t help but download information about how authors handle plot, character, dialogue, and theme. It almost happens whether you want it to or not. And then, miraculously, when you sit down at the page, your brain recalls everything it was downloading in the background while you were lost in the story.

Why not give this method a try with your story feedback?

Print it out, or send it to a device that you never use for writing. Set aside a block of time, and just read your critique. Don’t read it with your laptop open, ready to make immediate changes to your manuscript. Don’t read it with a highlighter in hand, ready to pounce on the points you know you’ll want to change.

Don’t even look at your manuscript. Just let the story feedback sink in.

You don’t need the highlighters and the charts and the tables and the graphs, because the important stuff—the stuff that clearly needs to be changed—it’ll stick with you. You won’t forget.

Once your brain is nicely marinated in your critique, then go back to your manuscript. Take another pass at it using what you’ve downloaded from reading your critique.

USE YOUR GUT

When you read through your story feedback, it’s kind of like turning on the light in a dusty attic. As the writer, you’re so close to the manuscript that it’s hard to see the forest for the trees. But as soon as someone with a little distance dives in, they’re able to shine a light on the things you couldn’t see because you were hacking your way through the wilderness of your story.

But once that attic light comes on, you’ll instinctively know which changes are the right ones to make. How? Because you’ll feel like face-palming every time your critique partner points out something that seems totally obvious now, but you couldn’t see before because you were so in love with that descriptive passage that really made the scene come alive, you know?

Face-palm moments are good, though! That “DUH” feeling is your gut saying, “Yes, you obviously need to make this change.” And that kind of certainty is comforting as you go about further sculpting and molding your story. So take note of the face-palms; take note of the DUHs and let them guide you as you’re conquering your revision.

EDIT BIG TO SMALL

You’ve read your story feedback; you’ve taken note of those face-palm moments—now it’s time to start incorporating that feedback. Here’s where you get to use a sane amount of office supplies, if you’re that kind of person.

To start, it’s helpful to understand the difference between editing and revising. The GSC blog post on this very topic is here. In a nutshell, editing entails changing little things—grammar, spelling, syntax—while revising entails big structural changes to your story. Be mindful of this difference, and make sure that you rearrange the skeleton of your story before you get hung up on things like word choice and writing the perfect description. You really don’t want to change any of the little stuff until you’re in final rounds of edits. Because that scene that seems crucial right now that you’ve spent hours perfecting...well, it might not make the cut when you’re making those sweeping structural changes. So save your finessing of the fun stuff—description, picking the perfect word—until you’re fairly certain your story’s skeleton is solid.

I’m deep into revision myself, and I get it—it’s hard. Sometimes you just want to fall back on the easier stuff. The stuff that doesn’t literally make you want to rip your hair out. It’s going to be hard no matter what—there’s no magic bullet to make revision painless—but here’s how I’ve been coping with the changes to my story’s skeleton.

Once I read through all my feedback, I had a trusted critique buddy help me pull out the important beats—or story elements—in the parts of my story that needed the most work. We wrote all the necessary beats on post-it notes, then grouped them into chapters based on the feedback I received. I took pictures of the post-its in their new arrangement, and have been using those photos as a reference as I rewrite chapters. Identifying the most important beats and then arranging them in a visual way helped me to wrap my head around the changes I needed to make.

IT’S YOUR STORY TO TELL

Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong. — Neil Gaiman

I can’t overstate the value of having an objective third party review your work. And you do have to maintain a willingness to kill your darlings...but! 

If you receive a piece of feedback that doesn’t ring true with you, you don’t have to use it. 

You wrote your story because it’s important to you; because it’s something you needed to say to the world. Trust yourself to make the right decisions for your story.

After all, it’s your story to tell.