Write With RCS: Writing Group Feedback from your group.
Giving
and receiving feedback may be the top purpose of a writing group. Here I
will emphasize the job of receiving feedback. It need not be a job; we
could call it the process of receiving feedback, but "job'" is shorter.
Your job as a receiver is listening. Not volunteering comments or asking
questions. You are the receiver of greater benefits than you may fully
grasp just now.
In
your group you practice listening. This is not a law but rather a
suggestion and what I know of how to benefit from such groups. Listen
with great attention to how your words affect others. You do what to
have your words to have an effect, right? You
may have bee trying for a specific effect. You want to know how this
group of fellow writers are responding to that which you have written.
You want to know what each felt or thought as they read your work. This
process is not deadly; it will help you to grow and develop as a writer.
You
are learning to be quiet and listen. So, be quiet. Do not tell those
who read your work anything until much later. let them be uncertain of
what of what you wanted your work to convey or at whom it was aimed. Let
them suffer. Maybe they will notice more and be able to give you a more
full and honest response. It is your task to become a better listener,
and not to be a teacher or a question asker. Try changing the word
"task" in the previous sentence to "pleasure." You want to know how your
words in a specific piece of your writing led them to feel or think.
Neither
giving nor receiving feedback is easy. In both it is possible to come
to feel, for a time, that you are always right or always wrong. An
important activity of the imparter of reaction is is to become as honest
as possible. A bit of a job. The task of you the listener/writer, is to
attentive and quiet. Telling nothing and saying nothing may not come
easily to you, the receiver of this treasure of feedback. But you can
remember that you best teacher could probably not have given you the
feedback treasure you receive from the members of your writing group.
That treasure helps you to be a better and better writer. This group
response of fellow writers can better inform you of how the world will
receive your writing than can many an excellent teacher.
Some
readers of your writing may be good at tricking you into telling them
more about the intentions you have for the piece in question than you
intended. But you, as its writer, want only to know what your writing
did to them, with no ''helpful'' hints. When you tell the readers in
your group what you wanted your writing to do to them, you hinder their
fresh and honest response.
You,
as the writer, want to know how the reader perceives and experiences
your words. You want to know what it was what it was like to be him
reading your words. Never stop a reader from from giving you her
reactions. You very much need her feedback and she is will to give it.
Let her.
You
can look to members of your writing group to find out what your words
caused to happen in their consciousness. The better you get at the
uncovering of feelings in your group and how your words effected
consciousness, the better you will be at deciding for yourself when your
words are most likely to be doing what you want them to. or not.
It
may be helpful to remember that members of your group are neither gods
nor teachers, telling you how other words will work better if either
this or that were changed in thus and such a way. What they can tell you
very well is how they experienced a specific work of yours; how they
experienced your words there, how they reacted to them.
Your
readers job is to provide you with a kind of movie of his mind as he
read your work, and it is not your job to tell him how to do so. And it
is certainly no one's job to quarrel with another's experience.
You do not need writing group to write well, but one can truly help. When you would be a writer write.
More to come.
RCS