The art of supportive feedback

Next Monday I'll be back to tutoring my long-standing creative writing group after the summer break.  The group were students on my Adult Education taught classes nine - or is it ten? years ago.  Some of them endured two years of my 'how to' teaching, and still wanted more.  I guess that means I must have been doing something right.  And I think that one of the things that kept them coming back was getting supportive feedback.

Back in my corporate job days, it was always impressed on us that feedback must be supportive.  We were introduced to techniques like the 'sandwich' method of giving feedback.  Using this, you start your feedback with some of the good things about someone's work, then move on to things that are not so good.  Finally you end on an up note with more good things.

I think this technique is particularly appropriate for giving feedback to writers.  When we put our work out into the world for scrutiny, we're handing someone a piece of our heart and soul for review.  A savage, destructive critique of a beginner writer's work can shut that writer down for ever.  I once had a student on one of my courses who hadn't written for thirty years because someone ridiculed her poem.  The tragedy was that, as usual in these cases, she was a brilliant, talented, writer.  I'm proud that I coaxed her into writing again.

I've had to learn over my decade of tutoring students how to pitch my critiques at the right level.  If someone really is a beginner, it's not appropriate to give them a nit-picky critique about one misplaced comma.  It's to show that writer the nuggets of gold in their work.  I have to give them the freedom to experiment with their writing, to discover their voices. Worrying about presentation comes much later.

As writers, we have to evaluate the feedback we receive, and the qualifications of the person giving it.  Each of our voices is unique, and there's room for all of our stories out there.  So we must resist the temptation to compete with each other through blasting each other's work with savage critiques.  I got a dose of this at Easter, and it wasn't pleasant.  But checking out that author's debut novel, published by a small indie press, it doesn't seem to be setting the SF world alight.  So I wonder if there wasn't some element of competition in the critique.  

Don't do this.  We're all in this game together, and we need every bit of useful feedback we can find.