🥑 we'd hate to hear your feedback

Does feedback hurt your stomach?

When editors or beta readers leave their mark on your story, you may have hundreds or thousands of comments and notes to parse through. How are you supposed to do that without going into the fetal position?

If you’ve asked yourself that question, you’re in the right place. We’re going to do a few series about feedback, starting with the first line of defense: developmental feedback, which concerns your story and characters.

Dev feedback should do three things:

1. highlight the elements of your manuscript that work

2. illuminate the areas that need improvement

3. clarify what kinds of improvements would help your story

Based on my own experiences as editor and editee, here’s how I recommend dealing with #1:

When an editor highlights the good parts of your story, celebrate!

Then consider why these elements resonated with your editor. Did a particular action scene shine because of its unique setting or interesting symbolism? Was the meet-cute banter on fire? Did a particular character make your editor laugh a lot?

Write out each element like this:

[This story/scene/character/moment/etc.] worked because ________.

E.g.: The chapter where that one character died worked because the reader was emotionally attached to her.

Great! Now, can you strengthen your manuscript by developing emotional attachment to other characters in a similar way?

Revision isn’t just about fixing a list of problems. It’s about making the good stuff BIGGER and the not-as-good stuff SMALLER.

Celebrate the wins. Roll up your sleeves. Keep doing that good work.

And shoot me a message if you need an editor who can celebrate you.

Next time: when feedback hurts.

Once we reach 100 subscribers, I’ll pick one random subscriber to win 20% off any editing service in the next year. Forward this to your author friends, and thanks for reading Avocado Bites!

^{Avocado Bites is a publication of Avocado Tree Press, LLC, that helps you revise your stories one bite at a time. We love working with indie and traditionally published authors on fiction manuscripts—and if that’s you, welcome to our target audience.}

^{Ready for a sample edit? Here’s our site.}

^{Addison Horner is the chief editor of Avocado Tree Press. Here’s his newsletter. It’s different but still pretty good.}