Writing Feedback Two

Write With RCS: This is a bit more about readers in writing groups. There is also info that can be of interest to other writers.

            Feedback can be the most important activity of your writing group. You can get precious feedback when members of your group read a given piece of your work in preparation for giving you the feedback you are looking for. You may want praise, but you benefit by knowing what your writing does to others.

            If you are now in a writing group you ought to soon have your turn as one of the readers providing valuable feedback. You may be an excellent reader and have read much as a writer learning your craft. However so, you will become a better reader  yet, as you read to provide feedback to your fellow writers.

            Use your reading skills to be a better provider of useful feedback.

Here is a miscellany of suggestions for becoming a reader better able to serve your writers:

~ Be willing to become more aware and more conscious.

~ Be willing to become a better perceiver .

~ Be willing to be even more honest than usual.

~ Note that as you perceive more consciously you perception becomes more accurate.

~ Be more attentive to your feelings as you read.

~ Be ready to tell the writer how you understood his writing.

~ Be ready to tell him how you perceive and experience his words.

~ Be ready to replay your experience of her writing as a kind of movie.

~ Remember that you are not a teacher here.

~ You are a reporter of experience, yours.

~ Remember that you are in a teacher-less writing group.

~ Be ready to give your writer a brief summary of what you think she has written. What does it add up to. 

~ What is its center of gravity? What sticks out. Tell us.

~ If you can, summarize this particular pies of writing in a single sentence. 

~ Choose  a word which most summarizes the piece. Choose a word from his writing. Choose a word not from his writing.

~ Don't plan or think too much about this first summary.

~ Tell the writer what happenings or doings she made stand out most at your first reading.

~ Tell her what you remember from last week's piece.

~ Simply tell the writer everything that happened to you as you carefully read her work. Tell how you felt as you read. Were you surprised? Happy? Tell if or when you began to like it.

~ Advice offering or giving is usually avoided. However, if your interaction with the writer indicates a real desire for advice and you feel you have good advice to offer, an exception may be made.

~ Be aware that this is not a story. Its about how you carry our your part in this section of your group.

~ Your feedback comes directly from your experience of the specific piece.

~ You might tell what specific voices are like at various points.

~ Describe what you think the writer's intentions were with this specific piece. Think of some crazy intention he might have had.

~ You might swallow it whole and give the result.

~ Just tell how you experienced work through imagination and feeling. 

                                                                                    rcs