I suppose I’m an ideologue about creative feedback. I believe thoughtful feedback is the fuel of creativity, the engine that drives us to grow and learn and change. Feedback is the oxygen in the room, without it, creativity often withers and dies.
How we understand and respond to feedback so often corresponds with the ways in which we respond to life itself. To how we can grow and change.
Feedback is essential to me, from my editors, from my wife and friends, from readers and other people online.
I don’t always like it, but I always need it. Feedback is how I have grown in every way that I have grown. And almost every way in which I have not grown corresponds to the feedback I didn’t get or didn’t want to hear.
Feedback is the mystical essential to the creative process, any professional writer or artist grasps its importance and struggles to figure out how to deal with it.
I am a professional writer, I have written 29 books, and every one of them, good and bad, has been shaped by the honest and sometimes ruthless ethos of my editors, who are merciless in the pursuit of my improvement and success.
Feedback is misunderstood and often misapplied.
It is not about praise or criticism, it is about improvement and growth. It is not about making people feel badly about their work, it is about helping people to do better work. No one’s work is perfect, any work can be improved. Feedback gives us a mirror in which to see the reality of our work, without it, we are talking only to ourselves and to people who are not detached or objective.
In the past few years, I have just begun to become a good writer in my own mind, I am drinking in the old ways of feedback – my editors and friends – and the new ways – e-mail, Facebook posts, letters, text messages. I get a lot of feedback, it has informed my writing and helped me understand how my work affects the outlook and emotions of people.
Put simply, feedback is information about reactions to a product, a person’s art or performance of a task, feedback is used as a basis for improvement and ideally, encouragement.
Feedback, once mastered, can be applied to almost every aspect of life, from marriage, to work, to the parent-child relationship, to the human-animal bond.
In my marriage, feedback has been essential to building trust and communication. If you cannot speak the truth to someone you love, you cannot truly love. If you cannot hear the truth from people who read and follow your work, they you will wither and calcify.
A few years ago, I started a Facebook group called the Creative Group At Bedlam Farm. It is gathering of more than 250 creative people of all different kinds – writers, artists, painters, bloggers, poets and photographers. It’s a wonderful place, but like all online places, it has a history of struggle.
The Creative Group is a collection of gifted people, sharing their work and creativity in a safe and an encouraging environment. It is one of the joys of my life, seeing the wonderful work they do every day, and the ways in which they support one another. But feedback is still a delicate and sensitive matter, sometimes, I learned, even explosive.
In fact, the group was nearly destroyed over feedback last year.
Many different issues cropped up in many different ways, but my increasingly urgent, even hectoring, requests for thoughtful feedback were met with confusion, anger and resentment. They led to politicking and drama, an unraveling and disenchantment, so much so that a gifted and increasingly closely-knit group of members stormed out one day without anyone – even good friends – saying goodbye.
“Now you know what it is like to be a girl in middle school,” one of them messaged me weeks later. It was my comments about feedback, she wrote, “that made us feel unsafe.” She thought I was telling her what to say.
Ah, I thought, safe zones. But there are no safe zones for creative people, every day, they rip open their hearts and souls and put their work out there into the world, where it will live or die. There are no safe zones out there for people who wish to live creative lives.
It was the ugliest moment in the three-year history of the group, and the most upsetting for me as well as others. I am grateful that we have moved so rapidly beyond it. The remaining and new members of the group seem to enjoy feedback, they ask for it all the time, from me, from one another. It has simply stopped being an issue.
It is not always easy to explain who people react.
Feedback is a difficult thing to explain.
I remember one day one member of the group took a cute photo of her dog in her back yard. The post was not memorable or especially creative, it was just a cute photo of a beautiful dog with some sappy text about how wonderful the dog was.
Four people posted that the post was “brilliant” and the poster was showered with heart emoticons (which I confess, I have always hated and never used. They are a poor replacement for real thoughts.) I posted a comment saying that the word “brilliant,” which has never once been applied to me or my work by any editor or publisher in 29 different books, is not a compliment, when it is used in so slip shod a way.
I remember my heart sinking when I read that post.
I knew if this talented writer kept getting comments like that, she would stop growing. Her well-meaning friends were not serving her well. Who can do better than “brilliant?” And she did stop growing, at least then. The people who posted those comments were angry over my comments, and eventually left the group.
They saw their role as to support, not challenge. And that is the feedback trap, the issue that recurs and recurs. It’s all about love, they said. But it isn’t all about love, I replied. It’s about honesty and growth.
People often equate feedback with criticism.
We all want to hear the same thing, that we are wonderful and “brilliant.” But I know the pitfalls of that. I love praise, but I need criticism. If I am told I am brilliant when I am not, or told I am brilliant routinely, the very word loses all of its meaning, feedback loses it’s power to challenge or inspire.
As much as I would love to be called brilliant, I dread the idea even more. It would be the end of me if I thought for one second I was brilliant, and the people who might say so would not be doing me any favors.
A number of people who left the group had been working with me on various and exciting projects – books, e-books, essays, blogs. We spent a lot of time discussing and planning these projects, many came to me for feedback on their work.
Some had become close friends, they loved one another as much or more than they loved creativity. That happens on many online groups. In a different context, it is a great thing.
I love creativity as much or more as I love anything, and that may be my problem, my disconnection from many others. We all have the right to want creativity in whatever way we wish. It may be arrogant, but I think I know what it takes to be successful and good in a creative sense, and insofar as I am and have been, it is honest feedback that has gotten me there.
It is difficult to give honest feedback to someone you love, that is why my editors are not my friends. Feedback is best applied when used in “me” terms and words. This is how I felt about your piece, your painting.. These are the emotions it touched in me, or didn’t. These are the ideas I had about the piece might have been even better. And these are the wonderful things about what you have done.
Feedback fails when it is relayed in excessive or false or reflexive praise, or only in a heart-shaped emoticon, which communities nothing of use to the creator and is a poor excuse for words. Writing this, I hear and see in myself a rigidity, almost an authoritarian tone, one former member of the group said I was a Maoist. This is worth reflecting on, but so far, I am committed to feedback as the salvation of people who wish to grow and change, and for me, creativity is all about growth and change. When you stop changing, you die the first death.
I am sorry to learn that the ones I am still in touch with have almost all abandoned or postponed their projects, some of which were highly promising. They are too busy, they will get to it one day, when their kids graduate, when their husbands aren’t so busy, when work lightens up when their mother or father aren’t sick.
When life isn’t happening so much. For me, that moment has never come.
Feedback is the string that holds it together for me, the rocket fuel that gets me up and moving.
So I am doing better, learning more. The group is in a very good place.
I am working one-on-one with people more, so that we can establish the trust and communication that makes feedback easier to accept and less threatening. I communicate more feedback in private than in public. I talk on the phone when there is any confusion or hint of misunderstanding.
I am sharing my honest reactions to posts. I am working to be especially patient and careful with people who are putting their work out there for the first time. They are special, and need special attention.
And the members of the group are learning to live with feedback and offer it.
What is good feedback?:
It is honest, never cutting.
It is affirming, not diminishing.
It emphasizes what is good, not just what it is not.
It sets goals for change and improvement.
It helps the creator understand the audience (my online readers tell me every day how I am doing, and what works and does it, I can see it from their posts and visits.)
Good feedback is never about being “brilliant,” “loved,” “dumb” or inadequate. That is feedback run aground.
When I offer feedback, it is not my job to tell anyone if they are good or not or worthy. Only the artist and their audience can determine that. My role is to offer my visceral and emotional response to the work and hopefully, any ideas I can offer to make it better.
I tell my students every single that there is not such thing as a perfect work, it is the job of others to suggest how a work struck them and how it could better. The writer or artist takes it from there.
I believe that people who do not seek feedback and cannot absorb and consider are crippling themselves and limiting how far they can possibly go. If you don’t wish to go anywhere, it doesn’t matter.
For me, the fuel analogy for feedback is apt. Feedback is the fuel in the tank, the propellant that tells those of us who wish to lead creative lives how far we can go and what it would take for us to get there. It motivates us.
If you’re going to say what you want to say, you’re going to hear what you don’t want to hear.
All I’ve ever wanted to hear is that every word I write is brilliant, and it is the one word I have never heard and perhaps will never hear. Because I am not brilliant, even when I am very good.
My editors do not ever tell me that I am good or bad, they tell me every single time how I can make my work better, even when it is very good. I wince and groan, and am exhilarated and uplifted.
So I will keep struggling to define and encourage feedback, it is the boundary between who we are and who we wish to be. It is important.