November 06, 2015 
Amy Bishop 
One of the things I miss from college is writing workshop classes and getting regular feedback from my classmates. It was a simultaneously an uplifting and affirming experience (people like my work! It doesn’t totally suck!) and a very humbling experience (wow, X, Y, and Z don’t work at all).
To write, I think, is to be constantly humbled in some way. If you can’t take criticism or you think you’re set to win the Pulitzer after one draft, it’s going to be a long and uphill haul for you. Writers have to grow thick skins—and so do agents for that matter! Not to sound dreary, but rejection is inevitable at some point in the game. Think of the feedback you may be getting from agents or editors as a chance to grow and look at your material with fresh eyes. They know what’s selling and what’s working in the market. It’s a delicate balance of believing wholeheartedly in your work and fighting for it, but also being humble enough to accept that you’re probably going to have to revise. And re-submit. And revise more.
Be open to having people look at your work and offer critiques or praise of what they think is working. If you can, join a writer’s workshop or community—or get other writer friends to take a peek and offer macro suggestions. Having friends offer feedback on micro changes like typos and grammar errors is also crucial. You want to make sure your writing is as close to finished as possible before submitting to an agent. Believe me, we notice.
In short, really utilize the power of feedback. Use it as a way to start a conversation that will hopefully shape your work into the best book it can be, in all stages of the writing and publishing process.
Who do you turn to for good feedback on your work? How do you think thoughtful and respectful critique has changed your work?
Well, as the Scots used to say in the 17th Century, “From ghoulies, ghosties,
long-legged beasties and envious rivals in a writers group, good Lord deliver us…” One of the best fictionalized examples of this kind of dynamic is in Stephen King’s novel IT from the mid-80’s-you don’t have to read the whole thing, just scan the first third of the book till you find the part where the writer character reminisces about his experience in a college writer’s class-it’s obviously based on King’s actual life-while he endures the self-indulgent pretensions of his classmates, he actually has a marketable gift for stuff that isn’t especially “literary” which the others find quite threatening; his instructor’s fit of self-righteous rage when he sells a story the instructor bagged on is worth the price of the book. I’ve sold enough stuff to know my abilities and tend to agree with the writers I’ve met that the best agents are the ones who have no creative illusions about themselves; if Brian Epstein had his own band he was trying to get off the ground when he met the Beatles, chances are history would have taken a serious wrong turn and no one would ever have heard of either of them. (The resulting nuclear war 5 years later is the sort of creative ad lib that a good writer should be able to produce on a moment’s notice) So while I don’t mind running my stuff by someone who looks at it from a money-making viewpoint, I’m not good to invest my time with someone who’ll merely be angry that it’s better than his stuff or that the main characters aren’t gluten-free vegans or whatever. Finding someone who’s focused on connecting with a paying audience is what this game’s all about, and sifts their prospects for the best stuff to make this happen, sorry for the lengthy sermon, hear my train a’comin’………….
That should be “going”, not “good”; espresso typo…
How do you think thoughtful and respectful critique has changed your work?
– It’s reminded me that I’m not infallible.
– It’s forced me to communicate more clearly in my writing those things I want the reader to know – or not know.
– I learned that I don’t “have” to make a change simply because my readers disliked something. After all, it is MY book; their negative reaction doesn’t necessarily mean I am wrong. Sometimes it means I’ve surprised them with a new idea.