Note #6: You Don’t Need More Feedback

It’s easy to solicit a million opinions. It’s harder to get clear direction you can act on.

It took me a long time to realize what a surplus of feedback was doing to me. Starting at maybe age fifteen, whenever I faced a conundrum in my personal life, I would talk to five friends or family members (thank you/sorry, friends/family!), get five slightly different points of view, and feel more confused than when I started.

Once this habit was cemented, I did the same with my writing, attending workshop after workshop or sending my work to friends. And with my writing, matters got worse, because I would often receive conflicting viewpoints:

I love the ending…The ending feels abrupt.

Your voice is strong…I can’t connect with your voice.

Looking back, it all seems a little absurd. While I had already crafted an essay or poem and was looking to move toward completion and hopefully publication, all of this feedback made me feel like I needed to go back to the drawing board.

In my search for clarity, I was muddying my own waters.

Now, as an editor, many of my clients come to me in this same state. They have done all the legwork and listened to all the podcasts—yet their work isn’t moving forward.

I now realize that seeking endless feedback functioned as an avoidance tactic. If I could continue getting opinions, I didn’t have to commit to a single direction.

This not only wasted a huge amount of time—it also risked the writing itself. Near the end, after years of confusion and inertia, I was on the brink of losing my passion.

My turning point came when I started working with a generous mentor who really got to know my voice and style as well as my larger goals. I quickly noticed differences between how she responded to my work and what I was hearing from friends or in workshops.

While they sometimes gave vague, off-the-cuff impressions, she told me what was working and gave me concrete steps to hone what wasn’t.

While at times they nit-picked issues that I felt were nonexistent, she listened to my convictions before she read my work and directed her attention toward what I most needed help with.

While they read one or two of my pieces and judged them as detached from a larger picture, she read my work over the course of years and offered tools and techniques that addressed my biggest blind spots.

All in all, she helped me move my work forward in a way that it never had. I was able to finally see that while my friends and family know me and mean well, they are busy people reading snippets of my work—so they can only be expected to operate with that incomplete understanding.

I now recognize how important it is to work with someone who not only has the space and time to grasp my aspirations, but who can also formulate actionable advice.

It’s a tall order, and something I can’t demand from just anyone. So now I can only hope my friends and family are enjoying some silence.

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Image credit: Sketch of a Woman,Jean-Louis Forain