In many of my MFA classes, including the one I’m currently taking, I get a lot of feedback on my creative work. It’s part of why I wanted to pursue an MFA, but sometimes figuring out how to process it is challenging. After taking lots of classes, and working with critique partners over the years, here are three kinds of feedback that I’ve decided I can, for the most part, ignore.
- If someone is just flat out confused/wrong about the kind of story I’m writing. This usually comes in the form of people who only read epic fantasy and/or hard science fiction – or don’t read a lot of fantasy or science fiction at all. Yes, the names in my fantasy novel are “weird” if your main window into fantasy is Harry Potter (though I’m not sure that Rell and Ragaryn are any weirder than Albus and Hermione.) And if someone only reads hard science fiction, it’s absolutely no surprise when they think my space opera romance scenes are too “emotional.”
- If two people give me contradictory feedback. In my recent critique workshop my professor loved the exact same detail that one of my classmates didn’t like. I’m keeping the detail.
- Like anyone else, professors have pet peeves and strong personal preferences. If I identify those I tend to take their comments on those issues with a grain of salt. I had one professor rip my “repetitive sentence structure” apart – even grade me down for it in the grammar category of the rubric because “word use is grammar.” And yet, she was the only professor or critique partner I’ve ever had who suggested I had some kind of large scale problem with this. She also, I learned, did this to several other students. So, beyond trying to pay a bit more attention to varying my sentence structure, I stopped worrying about this.
And anything that doesn’t fall into those three categories…well yeah, I probably have to fix it 🙂
Jenel Alan 