Sifting the feedback

I've done the most nerve-wracking part of the Dunford weekend, reading out my first page to the big group.  I got lots of feedback, and now I have to start sifting through it.

When I teach creative writing I tell my students that feedback needs to be constructive.  If something doesn't work I need to know specifically what's wrong.  It's relatively easy to get good feedback on structural issues, but it's when we get to genre conventions that I have problems.

Nearly every time I read an SF piece to a critiquing group that doesn't read the genre they want to know what date the story is set in.  Any avid reader of SF will know that very often stories don't bear a date.  And if the story is a sweeping space opera spread over half the universe it's likely to be so far in the future that dates are meaningless.

Another good reason for not giving dates is to avoid the trap of your technology looking out of date by the time we reach that date for real.  I'm not good at imagining strange new technologies, I'm better at extrapolating from existing science, and that means that my stories are set in the near future.  I think there's even more scope for embarrassment if you're making near-future predictions.

What this means is that I need to sift the feedback I get for relevance.  And that includes taking into account what genres the person giving the critique writes in and what they read. I'll give much more weight to a critique from a person who reads or writes SF than I will to somebody who only reads women's contemporary domestic stories.

As writers we have to sift the feedback we're given and take on board the most useful.