Natalie Ann Holborow

There are few experiences that feel as deeply personal as receiving writing feedback, no matter how hard you try to separate your creative work from your sense of self. When writing feedback comes, it’s hard not to feel like it’s your own body that’s been scribbled over in tracked changes with the instructions to make it better.

When you sent out your new story or poem, perhaps you felt brave and vaguely Pullitzer-adjacent despite yourself, only for it to return with comments such as “unclear motivation”, “do we need this scene?” or “I couldn’t connect with the protagonist”. At which point, you briefly consider retraining as a horse groomer.

Feedback isn’t there to crush you, but mishandled feedback will. What you’re aiming for is improvement, not complete emotional combustion.

To help, let’s take a look at some examples of feedback you might encounter as a writer and exactly how to respond to it without self-destructing.

1. The “this isn’t working for me” feedback

This is a pretty common response and (probably) the most irritating, mainly because it fails to answer why. It offers no real guide, no helpful bolts to tighten and no neat little list that tells you specifically what you need to improve (e.g. “Try moving the perspective to this character instead”). It’s simply someone telling you that the work that you’ve so lovingly created basically made them feel nothing. Ouch.

With this sort of feedback, you’re left scratching your head over whether the person meant any of the following:

• “I didn’t feel invested.”
• “The pacing dragged.”
• “Something’s off, but I can’t explain what.”
• “I kept putting it down.” (This is the literary equivalent of “I forgot you existed”)

And because it’s vague, it can feel unfair, like being told your outfit isn’t quite right without specifying whether it’s the velour jacket, the flamingo-print shoes or your face.

Don’t be afraid to dig deeper and ask more questions. If a reader doesn’t click with your work, resist the powerful urge to explain that chapter three contains important symbolism and a callback to a line you’re very proud of. Try this instead of defending:

• “Was there a particular moment where you started to feel that?”
• “Did it feel slow, confusing, or emotionally flat?”
• “Were you expecting something different from the premise?”

For example, “I didn’t feel invested” translates to one of three craft issues:

1. We don’t know what the protagonist wants or we don’t feel why it matters.
   Wanting to “solve the case” is functional. Wanting to solve it because her brother is the prime suspect and she knows he’s lying about something is emotional. That’s what gets your readers invested.
2. The stakes aren’t specific enough.
   “Everything could fall apart” is vague. “If this fails, she loses her job, her flat, and the only person who still believes her” is tangible.
3. The scene isn’t changing anything.
   Scenes need movement, whether that’s a revelation, a complication or a new doubt. If nothing changes, the reader’s brain quite reasonably wanders off to think about snacks.

Do also consider whether you’re even asking the right person at all. Choose your beta readers wisely – not all feedback is equal because not all readers are your intended reader.

If you’ve written a tightly plotted crime novel and handed it to someone whose entire bookshelf is solely romantasy, their “I didn’t connect” may simply mean there weren’t enough moments of passionate longing in a candlelit tower. Equally, if you write introspective literary fiction and give it to someone who prefers high-octane thrillers, their “nothing happens” may mean “no one was chased.”

Before you dismantle your manuscript, ask yourself:

• “Does this person enjoy this genre when it’s done well?”
• “Are they responding to execution or to convention?”
• “Are they part of my intended audience?”

This doesn’t mean you ignore their feedback, but you contextualise it. If three crime readers say the middle sags, that’s a structural issue. If your romantasy-loving friend says, “I just wanted more romance,” that may be a genre expectation mismatch, not a flaw. The trick is not to harden yourself against feedback, but to weigh it intelligently.

2. The conundrum of conflicting feedback

In fiction, conflicting feedback is destabilising but in poetry, it is practically guaranteed. One reader says your protagonist is unlikeable, while another says she’s the only reason they kept turning pages. One workshopper thinks your poem is gorgeously restrained and another thinks it needs “more on the nose emotional clarity”. Someone begs for more backstory just as someone else has written “CUT” in angry red biro.

At this point, it is tempting to throw your entire laptop into the sea.

Conflicting feedback feels worse than uniformly negative feedback because at least with consensus you have direction. With contradiction you have noise, which makes you doubt your instincts.

In fiction, conflicting feedback often clusters around character and pacing. An abrasive protagonist will divide a room. A slow-burn middle section will delight readers who love psychological depth and frustrate those who want escalating plot. If one person calls your crime novel “subtle” and another calls it “dragging,” you may not have a universal pacing problem; it may simply be that you’ve written a book that requires patience.

In poetry, the divide is even sharper. One reader calls the poem too obscure; another says it’s over-explained. Someone wants you to clarify the metaphor; someone else insists you trust the image. Poetry lives on the fault line between clarity and mystery, and different readers stand on different sides of it.

Instead of counting opinions, look for patterns underneath them. Are multiple readers reacting to the same chapter, the same stanza, the same ending? Even if they describe the issue differently – bored, confused, unconvinced – are they pointing to the same place? That’s usually where the issue lies.

The deeper task is to return to intention: return to your “why”. What experience are you trying to create? Should the protagonist be unsettling? Should the poem leave the reader slightly unmoored? Should the middle of the novel feel claustrophobic rather than explosive?

When advice clashes, decide consciously. You can’t write a book or a poem that satisfies every reader without sanding off everything distinctive about it. However, if you’re noticing a pattern in the feedback that’s returning to you, it may be signalling where you need to focus.

3. The dishonest (but temporarily lovely) false praise

This is the glowing, enthusiastic response that tells you absolutely nothing but makes you feel like you’ve been handed a bottle of Moët and a massive bouquet. For example:

• “I LOVED IT SO MUCH.”
• “You’re SO gifted.”
• “This is the best thing I’ve ever read in my life.”

Yes, you’ll feel on top of the world for six minutes, but then it becomes oddly destabilising because you realise that, once again, there’s nothing to work with. It tells you that the reader felt something positive, but not what caused it; not the line, not the scene, not the turn in the poem and not the character choice that made gasp. It’s basically the literary equivalent of someone saying, “Dinner was incredible,” and you thinking, “Was it the sauce? The timing? The salt? Was it luck?”. (The dinner was spaghetti hoops on toast.)

There’s research in education and performance psychology that reveals that feedback that directs attention to the task and specific performance details tends to improve outcomes, while feedback that shifts attention to the self (e.g. praise of the person rather than the work) can reduce performance (Kluger & DeNisi, 1996). In other words, general praise about your talent might make you feel wonderful, but it’s not necessarily going to do anything to sharpen your skill.

When praise lacks detail, it can also do something slightly unhelpful to the ego. It frames the success as innate (talent? Gift? Magic?) rather than the result of decisions you made on the page. And if it’s magic, how do you replicate it? How do you refine it? And how on earth do you do it again on purpose?

In fiction, you might hear, “I couldn’t put it down,” which is lovely, but was that because of the pacing, the voice, the unanswered question at the end of each chapter? In poetry, someone might say, “That was beautiful,” but was it the imagery, the restraint, the rhythm, the emotional turn? Without specificity, you’re left guessing what actually worked.

Of course, relentless criticism is corrosive. But uncritical praise can be creatively numbing. You might find yourself getting protective of your draft too early because your mum and your best friend said it was flawless. The good news is that most people who offer enthusiastic praise are well-intentioned. They definitely felt something, but they just haven’t articulated it.

So, instead of accepting “I loved it” as the end of the conversation, gently extend it. You might say, for example:

• “That’s so kind! Was there a particular moment that stood out?”
• “I’m so glad it worked for you. Which part stayed with you most?”
• “Did anything surprise you?”
• “Was there a character or image you connected with?”

Don’t think of it as fishing for compliments, but as gathering data so you can see exactly what worked. Often, what comes back is revealing:

• “I loved the scene where she lies to her sister. That felt so real.”
• “The final line of the poem really hit me.”
• “I didn’t even realise the time passing until the twist. I thought that was clever.”

Now you have something tangible (hooray!). You can see the mechanism and you can identify exactly what landed. Perhaps most importantly, you begin to understand your strengths not as mystical qualities, but as repeatable craft choices you can use to shape and improve your work going forward.

4. The “projection” feedback

This is one to be careful with because it’s hard to spot. Sometimes, the suggestions are in fact brilliant and will inspire you to do better. And sometimes they won’t. Projection feedback usually begins with a genuine response; something in the work sparked a desire (e.g. for more romance, more darkness, more drama, more redemption) and the reader follows that desire to its logical extreme.

In fiction, this often sounds like recalibrating the genre. Your literary novel becomes, in their version, a high-stakes thriller! Imagine! Or maybe your morally ambiguous female protagonist is reshaped into someone more “likeable,” more commercially viable and more conveniently aligned with the reader’s comfort zone.In poetry, it can be subtler but no less intrusive:

• “Have you thought about making this more narrative?”
• “I’d love to know exactly what happened; maybe you should explain it in the notes.”
• “What if you explained this metaphor?”

None of these suggestions are inherently wrong; in another draft, in another universe, they might produce a perfectly good piece of writing. The question is whether they produce your piece of writing. Joyce Carol Oates once said, “The first draft is the writer telling herself the story.” Projection feedback is often the reader trying to tell it back, but in their own voice.

Let’s take a look at the difference between feedback that sharpens and feedback that projects. Remember: useful feedback sharpens your intention, but projection feedback often replaces it.

Sharpening sounds like this: “I was fascinated by her dissatisfaction at work; I wondered if that thread could be developed further.” That keeps the spine of your story intact and intensifies what’s already there.

Replacing sounds like this: “She should quit immediately and reinvent herself abroad.”
Now we’re in a different book.

Sharpening asks: “How can we emphasise this distinct character trait?” Replacing asks: “What if this character had an epiphany and became someone else entirely?”

It’s a subtle but crucial distinction. If you’re writing a slow-burn character study about quiet discontent and someone suggests adding a murder to “raise the stakes,” they’re not identifying a weakness in execution. Rather, they’re suggesting a different kind of book.

And it may, of course, be a perfectly good book. It’s just not the one you set out to write.

Projection feedback can trigger defensiveness, especially when the suggested changes feel like erasure. But before dismissing it, pause and ask yourself: “Is this suggestion pointing to an underlying issue?” For example, if someone wants your story to be “more like a thriller,” are they actually saying the pacing lacks momentum? If they want more romance, are they responding to an emotional thread you underdeveloped?

For example, you don’t need to move your protagonist to Italy, but perhaps you might need to clarify why she stays. Or maybe you don’t need to change the narrator’s age or gender, but you might consider whether the perspective is being used as powerfully as it could be.

Translate the suggestion into a question about craft, then return to intention.

5. The genuinely useful feedback

Every writer knows the particular dread of opening a document full of comments, even if they’re all wonderfully useful. Good feedback exposes the gap between what you meant to put on the page and what is actually there. You know, in your bones, that the character’s decision makes sense, you know the ending is devastating and you know the emotional shift is justified. Of course you do – you lived inside it for months.

But the reader does not live inside your head. They only have the evidence you gave them. And if the evidence is thin, no amount of intention will save it. But this is exactly where great feedback can help you really make your work sing.

When feedback is accurate and constructive, it tends to circle the fundamentals:

• Motivation – “Why does this character do this, now?”
• Causality – “Does one event clearly lead to the next?”
• Emotional payoff – “Does the ending deliver what the story promised?”
• Clarity – “Is the reader oriented or slightly adrift?”
• Earned impact – “Has the big moment been prepared for or does it arrive unannounced?”

In poetry, it might be:

• “The turn doesn’t quite work here, does it need to come later?”
• “The final image doesn’t quite land. Can you echo back to the previous symbolism of X?”
• “This line is jarring to the overall flow; consider rewording.”

Notice what this kind of feedback does not do. It doesn’t ask you to abandon your premise or rewrite the genre, but rather it asks you to execute your vision more cleanly.

The instinct, when you realise a comment is right, is either to collapse (“I can’t believe I missed this, I am a fraud, I must quit writing immediately”) or to overhaul the entire manuscript in a frenzy. Please don’t do either of these things – take a moment to grab a coffee and a biscuit (it’s custard creams or nothing).

Now, take a breath and do the following:

1. Reread the flagged section slowly, as if you are not the author. Try reading it in a different font or on a different device if it helps you separate yourself from it a little more (but for God’s sake, don’t use Comic Sans).
2. Identify exactly where the reader’s confusion or disappointment begins.
3. Ask: what’s missing? Does something need explaining? Or perhaps there needs to be some kind of echo back to something earlier in the draft?

Often, the fix is surprisingly contained.

When you repair something and see that “ah! Yes! This flows far better now”, you feel the manuscript changing for the better. It might not look like your first draft but that’s because first drafts are meant to be messy and open to improvement.

The feeling of watching your manuscript become stronger through helpful feedback is actually deeply satisfying – even more so than being told you are The Best Writer In The Universe.

Read your feedback and act wisely

The key to using writing feedback constructively is emotional management before craft management. Here’s simple framework you can use:

1. Receive – Don’t respond immediately.
2. Regulate – Feel your feelings privately.
3. Review – Extract actionable insights.
4. Revise – Make deliberate, not reactive, changes.

Remember: feedback is about the work, not your worth. The draft is not you. The novel is not you. The short story is not a referendum on your intelligence, your future, or your legitimacy as a writer. It is simply a thing you made and the good news is that the things you make can always be improved.

If you can learn to sit with feedback without either dismissing it defensively or internalising it catastrophically, you’ll gain resilience (and this is far more valuable than empty praise). Resilience and an open mind goes a long way in a writing career.

Now, please: close the document. Have another cup of coffee. And then open it again (calmly) and begin.