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In my upcoming poetry workshop, Re-Visioning Your Poems, one of the focuses of the class is the idea of coming up with an entirely new vision for your work. The key to being able to see your work from a different perspective is having useful, objective feedback.

But here’s what we don’t talk about enough: How to incorporate that feedback into writing. You might be wondering: How do I actually do the work of incorporating that feedback? How do I decide what feedback matters and is useful and what feedback just doesn’t work for my draft? How do I start the revision process for my writing? How do I know when I've revised enough, and my writing is ready for submission?

The key is writing what you love, and loving what you write. Here are my tips for navigating the feedback-to-revision process while staying true to your voice as a writer.

Re-visioning Your Poems
DATE: 4 Weeks starting November 4, 2024
​TIME: Asynchronous, Self-paced via Poetry Barn
Price: $275
Do you struggle to know when a poem is “done”? Do you have a ton of poems, but you’re not sure if they’re ready for publication? Do you need help learning how to better edit your own work?

Join us for a nitty-gritty dive into the different methods of revising poetry. Learn how to self-edit for voice, form, structure, tone, and meter to re-envision your poems. Give life to your old drafts and prepare them for submission, with help from a professional editor.​

How to Take Notes While Receiving Critique

How do I organize my notes for revision?

For me, the process of accepting and incorporating feedback into my writing starts during the critique process. I meet with my critique group about once a month, and our method is to give each other verbal feedback and then after our meeting, send each other more detailed notes via a track-changes Word document.

During that verbal exchange, I take extensive notes on what each person is saying, often down to the word. This helps me later to remember what each person thought about my work. While I’m writing my notes, if something strikes me as particularly important to return to in revision, I make a big note in all caps: FIX THIS LATER! or else: COME BACK AND MAKE THIS MORE CLEAR!

This way, I can remember what seemed most important at the time of critique. Now, sometimes, when I return to those notes, I realize I have already fixed that problem during revision, or else it wasn’t as big of a deal as I thought. That is perfectly fine to do. But generally, these all-caps notes form the basis of my revision.

During the process of critique, it’s helpful to make notes to yourself. I find it helps me to objectively evaluate each piece of feedback. One of my biggest issues is feeling too emotional over my writing. Notetaking helps me process my feelings so I don’t let them take over.

Make notes of what each person says. Make notes on why they might feel that way. Make notes on how you feel about that feedback. Keep these notes private and in a separate file from your actual manuscript. Then, you can refer back to them later.

Understanding the Source of Feedback

How do I pick a critique partner?

It’s important to think about who is giving you feedback. For example, a beta reader is more of an average reader, while a professional editor has experience with publishing. You might dismiss more quickly someone’s feedback if they don’t often read books in your genre.

If someone says they don’t like your genre or don’t often read it, take their words with a grain of salt. They might not understand, say, a very well-known trope. But it’s also useful to know how someone outside of your genre feels because writing is more successful when it has a universal appeal.

Be wary of feedback from friends and family. While they mean well, these folks generally don’t give great craft advice. It can be tempting to please them because emotionally, you love them and may want to please them. But it’s better to get feedback from other writers, readers of your genre, and professional editors.

Professional editors often don’t sugarcoat their feedback. Pay attention to any industry standards they bring up that you might not be aware of. But also realize that editors are humans, too. Their feedback is still subjective—based on their experience and preferences.

Analyzing the Feedback and Prioritizing Changes

How do I start the revision process for my writing?

After you’ve had a little bit of time to process the feedback (say, a few weeks), you can return to your notes with your book manuscript open beside them. Re-read your notes and look for any common themes or recurring issues. If more than one person noticed something, that means it’s probably something that needs addressing. Keep an open mind and focus on the goal of improving the manuscript.

Make a list of the most important feedback points that you want to address in order of significance. Use that list to approach your manuscript.

I’ve found that I need to focus on ONE thing at a time while I revise. So, for example, I might need to change a character’s backstory. So I will go through the manuscript and make note of each time that characters backstory is mentioned, fixing them as I go.

This is slightly different for a poetry book, where each poem should ideally stand alone. In that case, I often revise each poem individually. However, I may revise a poem so that it fits into the larger theme of the book, so I will often refer back to the other poems during the process.

This can be thought of in terms of larger picture vs. smaller picture items. Start with the big issues (like character arcs, plotholes, and events) and tackle them one at a time, then you can go in and focus on smaller things (like line-by-line edits or grammar).

Write What You Love, Love What You Write

How can I maintain my voice and style while making significant changes to my writing?

It’s easy to feel combative toward feedback on your writing. After all, you came up with this idea, put the effort into writing it, and worked hard on it. Your story, poem, essay, or book matters. You might be writing something very personal and based on personal experience.

But unless you’re writing memoir specifically, that personal experience may not always translate to a compelling story, and particularly not in the first draft.

The art of revision is about stepping outside of yourself and looking at your manuscript through someone else’s eyes. For me, the goal is to find the ideal audience for a book. How does your ideal reader see the book? What do they want out of it?

It can be tempting to try and include every suggestion. But not every suggestion will work for your voice/style, your genre, or your goals with the project. It is okay to dismiss suggestions that don’t fit with your plan. No one is going to be offended if you don’t use their feedback (and if they did, they probably aren’t a very good writing friend.)

Here are some things to consider when trying to maintain your voice and style:

1. Know your style. Who are your influences? What books are comparable to yours? What does a reader in your genre expect from a book? What are themes you love and return to again and again?

2. What do you love about your work? What would you refuse to remove, no matter what, if asked?

3. Investigate your emotions: Why do you feel attached, emotionally, to a character, plot or something else that readers are asking you to change?

4. How can you incorporate changes in a way that serves your voice and style?

When I give feedback as an editor, I often say: “I may find something that need improvement. But how you address that issue is up to you. You will probably find a solution I wouldn’t have thought of, and that’s okay.”

One way to approach receiving feedback is to ask your critique partner to ONLY ask you questions. This can help frame the feedback so your job is just to answer those questions while revising. When I edit, I ask lots of questions. It’s not that I’m confused (although I might be) but that I want the author to think through the answers and figure out ways to put those answers into the book itself.

In the end, only you can decide what to change.

Ignore Prescriptive Advice (Unless It Works)

How do I deal with people wanting to change my book?

Prescriptive advice is advice that provides a prescription to the illness of your book. It’s when someone suggests how to solve a problem or answer a question. For example, your reader might say, “I would have written the ending like x” or “I think you should take out y character” or “You shouldn’t do z, >insert random reason why<“.

In poetry, prescriptive advice can be hugely useful. I ask my students to frame any prescriptive advice as questions: “What if you wrote this poem in second person?” or “What if the poem was free verse instead of rhyming”? These are revision exercises that the student can try out to see if they make a better poem. After all, there is no harm in trying an idea out if it interests the writer.

They are often less useful in fiction, though. The balance here is in knowing why you made a choice. For example, you might be writing in third person. This point of view works great for creating distance between the reader and the character. But it can feel more distant. Point of view can impact the plot. A third person point of view allows you to explore how different characters see the same situation. A first person point of view forces the reader to only know what that main character knows.

But being asked to completely rewrite your book’s point of view? Well, that kind of advice should be taken very carefully, if at all.

Re-vision Your Writing

How do I approach making big changes to my book?

If you have very large revisions to make to your writing, it can feel daunting. To make big changes, break them down into smaller points. You might also go chapter by chapter in a more linear approach.

Big changes include things like rewriting a plot, removing a character, deleting entire chapters, deleting settings, significantly cutting word count, and so on. These are the kinds of changes I deal with all the time as a freelance editor. When I do a developmental edit, I look for big-picture issues. I give reactions: This character feels unimportant to the plot, this chapter was slow in terms of pacing, I couldn’t understand why this event mattered, etc. I leave it up to my writers to figure out how to make those changes, although I do often give suggestions.

For example, if you want to entirely change the structure of your book:

• Consider making a new, reverse outline based on what you’ve already written. A book map can prevent you from getting lost.

• Work chapter by chapter, making notes as you go in case you need to go back later and change something you already looked at.

• Make a list of events in the book and make sure each one is tied to the character’s arc and emotional story.

• Figure out what your character wants and make sure every chapter is tied back to that goal.

Let the Work Be Done

How do I know when I’m done revising a book?

“A work is never completed except by some accident such as weariness, satisfaction, the need to deliver, or death: for, in relation to who or what is making it, it can only be one stage in a series of inner transformations.”

— Paul Valéry

This is something I dive into specifically in my poetry revision workshop, but I’ll leave you with some general thoughts on when a work is done:

• It’s done when you’re sick of it

• It’s done when you feel it’s done

• It’s done when you’ve gotten feedback, revised it, and gotten more feedback, then revised it again

• It’s done when you say it’s done

• It’s done when it gets accepted…except then it might need more edits

• It’s never done and maybe that’s okay

• It’s done when you trunk it

• It’s done when it’s published…except when you revise it and put it into a collection later

• It’s done when it’s done

I’ll describe it this way. If you look at your work and think, “I’ve done my best here, and I can’t do anymore,” then it’s done. Send it out. Now. Not tomorrow, not next week. Right now.

You Are the Ideal Reader for Your Book

In the end, feedback is very useful for a writer. But the reality is, we all write in some form of isolation. This means we rely on our imaginations and creativity to spur us forward. The most important person to please is you, the writer. Trust your intincts about what changes to make and how to make them. Feedback is just one tool in the writer’s toolbox that helps you see your book from another perspective, but your vision is what matters.

Incorporating feedback into your fiction writing is a skill that develops over time. When I first started out, I hated getting feedback and hated revision. Now, I’ve developed my own personal process that works for me. The goal here is growth. Write what you love, love what you write.

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Browse Upcoming Workshops from Holly Lyn Walrath

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TIME: Asynchronous, Self-paced via Writing Workshops Dallas
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DATE: 4 Weeks Starting May 5th, 2025
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