Two Values of Feedback: Identifying Your Writing Strengths and Overcoming Weaknesses

As a writer, you likely have one or more things that you can write very well and a few points that you definitely can not.

From my own experience, my writing strengths are dialogue and character development. My weaknesses are setting and description. Both of these I discovered through feedback given by other writers and people who kindly read my work and critiqued it.

However, I have done my best to overcome these weak points and today, I’m ready to share some of my tips with you!

Identifying Your Writing Weaknesses

All right, so right off the bat, I love to talk and I’m very much a geek on several topics. Writing character dialogue is as natural for me as breathing.

However, stopping to describe the room where the characters are talking in, or better yet doing so before the conversation begins is not so simple for me.

My poor friends had to tell me, “Hey, your dialogue is great, but we have no idea where this story is taking place!”

If they hadn’t told me, I couldn’t have improved. Yes, it was perhaps a little difficult to receive at first, but they were nice about it. Also, knowing that it was coming from fellow writers, who had been there or were there, it made it much easier to swallow.

Knowing your weaknesses doesn’t mean you’ve failed. It just means there’s room for growing your writing muscles.

Identifying Writing Strengths

The same friends who had to tell me that my description wasn’t great would tell me “you write really realistic characters!” (My favorite feedback would be when writers with siblings would say, “YES that’s what my siblings do!” when referring to a pair of characters and I’d get to tell them, “I’m an only child.”)

Why are my characters so good, while my description tends to fall by the wayside? It’s because I love to watch people. My brain subconsciously files away information about people and how they behave in certain situations for reference if, like say, I want to make them laugh.

This in turn has become a strength for me when I write. All that you and I have to do is put what we observe into words. It’s that simple!

Overcoming Writing Weaknesses

You know that quote about practice and perfection? That’s what I’m going to elaborate on here.

When it came to getting better at my descriptions, because of my feedback, I was able to figure out what was missing. Taking the information given me by friends, I would read other books and pay attention to what they described and what they didn’t. I also looked at articles specifically about how to write description.

It took practice and asking friends to read things and tell me whether or not they could picture the scene based off the description I gave them. However, because I stuck to it, I have been able to understand what makes up good description and my stories have gotten much clearer.

How Do You Get Feedback: Reaching Out to People

For me, my feedback came from an online writer’s forum that was part of the curriculum I took. We would post excerpts for the others to read and give feedback on. We called it “critiquing.”

This came in very handy when I was wanting to know what somebody else thought of a scene, or I knew something was wrong with a scene, but I couldn’t put my finger on the issue.

You don’t have to find a writer-specific forum to get writing feedback. You can ask friends on social media to read parts of your stories (or even the whole story) and tell you if they liked it, were confused, or got bored. Even family will often be happy to read a few pages for you.

If you’re not sure how you’ll take getting negative feedback, ask people to give you the “critique sandwich” when they can. A critique sandwich works like this. One positive thing, then the critique, followed by another positive. To put it another way, “Hey, your character is great, but I can’t quite tell how they’re feeling in this scene. The talking door is really funny though!”

Feedback is a valuable part of growing as a writer, as it allows you to understand where you and the reader can’t quite see eye to eye yet. If your reader is confused, they might get frustrated and put your book down, and that’s the last thing you want to happen.

Brooke Johnson, out.