Dealing with Editorial Feedback

So, you sent off your beloved manuscript for assessment or editing, and it has been returned to you. It’s squatting in your email; a toad under a black rock.

If you are feeling nervous, depressed, and fearful, that is normal.

It is also normal, after reading through the feedback, to feel rage, despair, self-loathing, writing-loathing, and more than a little editor-loathing.

It’s okay to feel all these things - indeed, some of the rage may be valid. And you should take the time to sit with those feelings, and let them pass over you. For some people, that editorial letter immediately spurs them on to start working on fixing their manuscript. Others have to find a way to come back to their writing.

I’m one of the latter, so I have empathy for writers struggling to deal with editorial feedback.

It’s not that I think my work is perfect—far from it—but that I feel so despondent and overwhelmed when I see that letter or edited manuscript. I think about how much work I’ve already put in, and how much I still have to do, and part of me whispers if you were a real writer, you would be better at this. You wouldn’t have to work so hard, because you’d know what you are doing.

This is a lie. Sure, we become better writers with practice, but no novel ever fell in perfect honey drops straight from a writer’s mind, and coalesced as a perfect manuscript. And as you get better at things, you also learn how BAD you really are at others. You will always be working on being a better writer. (Unless you’re happy to phone in mediocre drafts; perfectly viable practice for some authors in certain genres with a large enough fan base, and even then, I think it’s iffy.)

And every novel will bring a new set of problems and learning opportunities to the table. What worked for your last book, may not work for this one. That’s also okay. Each novel teaches you a little more about what works and what doesn’t, but it also teaches you process, rather than giving you a fixed set of rules to follow.

There’s no one size fits all approach to fixing a novel.

But there are some steps that can make it easier on you. Especially if, like me, you have tendency to feel overwhelmed and not know where to start. This is my process, and it may not work for you, so as always - take what works now, and toss the rest in the bottom of the toolbox. You never know what might come in handy later.

I’m going to break this down into a series of posts, and I hope that you will find something useful that will give you a path to follow when you are feeling stuck.

My first step is to remember the words of the late, great Douglas Adams:

Step 2: Read through the editorial letter, and scan through the notes and comments in the manuscript.

Some of these are going to either piss you right off, or fill you with existential dread. Let go of these immediately. We will deal with them later.

Some will be OMG YES moments, some will be ‘oohhh yeah, that…is a problem/thing I hadn’t considered, but I can probably fix that…somehow.’ These are the important ones. Let them lodge in your brain.

If you need to take some time to let the comments and your own reactions to them compost and settle a bit in your mind. Do it. For some people that’s a few days. For me, it’s several weeks. I need to let all the thoughts, good and bad, slowly drift through my subconscious. I’ve learned to trust that my mind is doing things without my help, and to let it take its time.

When you’re ready, come back to the letter/manuscript, and bring a notebook, mind-mapping tool—whatever you use to get your thoughts in physical order.

I’ll deal with the next section in the next DON’T PANIC newsletter.