How to Give Kind, Specific and Actionable Creative Feedback

Become a valued member of your critique group!

Giving feedback is really difficult. It’s hard enough to read work that’s finished and try to decipher it. It’s hard enough to edit our own work. Editing other people’s work is even more difficult because now there are other people’s feelings and styles in the mix!

However, getting feedback is extremely beneficial as an artist. Sometimes it’s really hard to see a work’s strengths and weaknesses if we’re standing too close to it and what a gift that we can provide that perspective for our colleagues. Writing (and indeed most arts) can be very solitary, calling the introverted to them. This is a chance to be a little more social, but in a structured way that’s mutually beneficial.

In college I was not good at giving feedback. I did not give each piece enough time. I maybe could identify strengths and weaknesses, but I was still kind of grading the short stories and not providing valuable feedback.

Luckily, this is a skill like any other that you can develop and continue to grow throughout your career as an artist.

What is valuable feedback?

1. Valuable feedback is kind.

2. Valuable feedback is specific.

3. Valuable feedback is actionable.

Kind Feedback

Sharing work, even if you've done it a lot, is vulnerable and can be uncomfortable for many people. In poetry, writers are often sharing extremely personal aspects of their lives through their work--trauma and grief are actively being processed.

Even if an artist’s work isn’t personal (it’s depicting a fictional character), it’s personal. They wrote it. It addresses things they hold close enough that they want to share them.

Your job is not to judge what they want to say, but to respect their experience and honor the courage it took to share their work. If the work is awful—you don’t need to say that. You don’t need to tell people that it’s a long way off from being good.

Let’s face it—most writing/art even by great artists is mediocre. That’s not a good/bad thing it just is. So we need to focus on the idea that all work can be improved. All work can do a better job of saying what it needs to say—at discovering its essence and leaning in.

Kindness is essential to this practice. It allows people to put aside their defensive feelings and listen. It shows that you respect them as people and you value them as members of your group.

How to Give Kind Feedback

• Lead with strengths. Every piece has a strength. Maybe it’s the raw energy, a specific line, an interesting perspective—find it and praise it.

• Take every work seriously. It’s not always easy to tell what stage a writer is at with their work, but if they’ve brought it to a creative workshop they’re (hopefully) looking for advice and suggestions. Honor their seriousness about the craft with your own.

• Don’t ask about author intent. I’ve never seen a question raise hackles so quickly as: What did you mean by this? It’s good practice as readers to interpret the work based on what text is there. If the discussion shows the writer that the intent was unclear—that’s information for them. As a reader you only get what’s on the page—assume that it’s meant to be that way and describe the effect it’s having.

Specific Feedback

Giving specific feedback is so important, but it can be extremely difficult depending on how your group gives critique.

I engage in two main styles of feedback—I will exchange poems one for one with another poet for more detailed critique. In this case I generally have a more nuanced understanding of their work and how this particular poem fits into it. I know their voice better and I have more time with the poem. The feedback I give in this setting is much more specific and detailed than in my writing group.

My writing group does a workshop biweekly. The writer reads their piece and the poets offer comments and feedback on the fly. If you’re a fast reader, you might have time to read the piece or sections of it again, but a lot of the comments are based on first impressions. It’s much harder to give specific feedback in this context, but it’s still possible.

How to Give Specific Feedback

• Tie general statements to specific aspects of the piece. This is absolutely crucial. Instead of “I really like this” it’s much more helpful to pick out specific lines/aspects. Why do you like it? Is it because the images are clear? Is it the word choice or word play? An interesting metaphor? Does it make you feel something?

• Tell the author what the piece is doing. What is the tone? How is the formatting adding/taking away? How are you reading/interpreting the content?

• Find the most noticeable aspects of the piece. Are they positive or negative? How does the attention catching bit relate to the whole? (this is really useful in quick workshops because it might be all you have to go on)

• Have you read anything like this before? If so, would that connection be interesting or helpful to the author?

• How finished does the work seem? Does it jsut need tweaks to become more effective or would it benefit from structural or content shifts?

Actionable Feedback

This is maybe one of the hardest parts of giving feedback—how do you give an artist constructive feedback that they can act upon? How do you make suggestions that aren’t prescriptive but are also not vague?

Some authors are very comfortable editing their work and don’t need actionable feedback as much, but most writers would like to at least be turned in the right direction (or at least understand the direction the feedback is trying to go).

Actionable feedback strikes the balance between giving the artist agency to change their piece in the way they see fit but still take your comments into consideration with concrete suggestions.

The reason this is so difficult is that it takes extremely close reading and knowledge of craft.

How to Give Actionable Feedback

• Understand what the piece is doing. Giving feedback is not the time to talk about the kind of art you like. It’s the time to give the artist information about how to make their work more effective while retaining their voice/perspective. You have to ask specific questions of the work to ascertain this. Once you see what the piece is doing you can ask what’s holding this piece back from accompolishing its goal? Maybe it’s a piece about the weight of time, but the piece moves very quickly because of the word choice and rhythm. You can point out that slowing down the diction with longer words, longer sentences, or perhaps longer lines would let the piece embody its content as description slows work down.

• Learn more about your craft. This is something you can do before and after workshops. Read widely and try to gauge the effect of different styles of writing. How does a poem work? Read books on craft, experiment with your work, and read your contemporaries. Notice your gut feelings and challenge yourself to explain your intuition through the text. I recommend The Craft of Poetry by Lucy Newlyn to help with this, but each art form has aspects of craft that you can engage with and that brings more actionable suggestions into your toolbox.

• Avoid giving suggestions for specific word changes. I think this gets too prescriptive and then the group gets bogged down in synonyms. Instead if you think a word needs to be changed you can say something like “I think you could pick an adjective here to add more to the image you’re creating, something more evocative or with more energy.” The poet should feel free to pick words based on their sounds/meanings without being told what to write.

• Don’t suggest a 180 degree turn for the poem. I’ve done this before. I think most of us have. But telling a poet that their work in formal meter and rhyme would be better in free verse rarely gets you anywhere. Even if villanelles rarely get published or your group is not comfortable giving critique on rhyme, the poet chose this form for a reason, even if it was just an exercise. Whether or not you like formal poems (or insert genre/style here), suggesting a huge turn for an artist usually means that you don’t like or understand the work, which is just not helpful. Plus, this is rarely the kind of change writers want to make (even if it might be necessary…) so it’s not very actionable.

• Use what you know! If you have a particular strength or focus, bring that to your group. If you have a good ear, give feedback about how a poem sounds. If you have a lot of craft knowledge, you can share terminology or other work that might inspire them. If you write narrative poems, talk about the story of the piece. If you like wordplay talk about how writers can lean into that. You don’t want to make all the writing in the group the same, but you still want to lean into the aspects that you most enjoy/enjoy learning about because you’ll be able to give more concrete feedback.

• Let the writer know what you see without telling them they have to change it. Workshop groups are usually interested in making pieces clearer and more consistent. This is just a trend I’ve seen, regardless of the writers’ styles. I don’t always like my pieces to be very clear or consistent, but I want to know where those pressure points are. Actionable feedback doesn’t have to be acted on. Sometimes knowing how a piece is working is enough to be helpful.

• Give the feedback you’d like to receive! Model the kind of feedback you’d like to hear about your own work. If you want to know more about the rhythm of your piece, learn and talk about the rhythm of other group members. Groups learn and grow together and you get to be a part of that process.

I hope that this helps you give better feedback or at least consider how you’re giving feedback and how to make it more effective. Please feel free to give me feedback on my advice or share what you’ve done to improve your feedback!