Giving feedback is a skill. Everyone is capable of doing it; however, doing it well requires a lot of experience and practice, of course, but also guidance and study.
One of the things that frustrates me most about the Internet is it empowers everyone to publish feedback for anyone or anything and make it available everywhere. What’s more, the Internet has made too many people too confident in their feedback skills because we can always find an echo chamber. If our ideas meet resistance, we aren’t forced to re-evaluate them. We just find another place to express those ideas.
But I digress.
This isn’t about giving feedback. This is about taking it. That’s a skill, too. An essential one. Not everyone needs to know how to give feedback because we can all choose to keep our thoughts to ourselves, but everyone will need to take feedback to grow and improve.
One of the ideas that resonated with me in my creative writing studies came from the amazing and incomparable Courtney Brkic. She said, and I’m paraphrasing, use what is useful, and put what isn’t into a drawer for later.
That practice of mental sorting is not only applicable to creative writing, but to life in general, and I think it’s fundamentally helpful for personal growth. Act on what you can act on. Control what you can control. Harness that which empowers you.
I later used this idea when teaching my own creative writing courses, and I found it especially useful for novice writers who’d yet to develop their skills of giving and taking feedback. I told my students their goal for giving each other feedback was to ensure every student left the classroom eager to write. The last thing we want, especially at that stage, is to be frustrated or paralyzed, especially when frustration and paralysis are useless.
(Sometimes, a little creative paralysis can be good when an artist reflects or evaluates where they’re going, but most times, we just need to create. In the creation, we usually find our way.)
The way to eagerness and passion is empowering feedback. I think people generally want to move forward, and useful feedback is better fuel in that endeavor than feedback that is frustrating or paralyzing. Dwelling on that stuff gets you nowhere. Believe me.
Bruce Lee had thoughts about this:
“Absorb what is useful, discard what is useless, and add what is specifically your own.”
This was a core principle of jeet kune do, the martial arts style he conceived and in which he professed students to be like water.
Now, I’m far from a martial artist, but I’ve read about this on wikipedia, so.
Bruce Lee developed a fighting style of counterattack, but he intended for his teachings to be used in one’s life, too (as, so I’m told, martial arts really is all about). The idea on the mat or the ring or the street or wherever you’re fighting, presumably, is to take what is coming at you and use what you can use, block what you can’t use, and express your own identity through your fists or feet, or something.
Look, it’s probably not a perfectly applicable philosophy for writing, but I’m trying here.
The self-expression component is more about mastery, but the point here is again to sort through what is useful and what isn’t.
Use what empowers you.
Courtney expanded on the above idea, saying the useless stuff you put into a drawer might become useful when you’ve gotten some distance from your work, and I think that’s another integral skill in taking feedback: separating your self from your work.
You are not your work. If someone gives you negative feedback on your work, it isn’t an indictment of your character. As a creative writer, I completely understand how intimate we get with our work, but understanding and embracing that distinction is critical.
Only when you separate your self from your writing can you sort through the useful and useless and harness the empowering and discard the paralyzing.
All of that said, sometimes people are just wrong or provide useless feedback, and it’s okay to discard that which isn’t useful. Like, don’t put it in a drawer. Put it in the trashcan, and forget about it.
In writing as in life (and jeet kune do), the path forward is carved out by that which is useful to you. The useless only puts obstacles in your way. And at the end of that path is mastery and understanding yourself.
Let the world come to you, and find your passion. Find what empowers you. It’s only when you embrace that which sustains and energizes you that you can truly progress along the path that no one else can travel.
Put that shit on a poster and send me my royalty checks.