9 Effective Ways to Handle Negative Feedback on Your Novel

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Article by: Clara Maidment, freelance writer at Globe Soup.

For aspiring fiction writers, the journey of completing a novel is full of twists and turns. One of the most likely to derail the beginner writer is receiving negative feedback. While it may be disheartening, dealing with critique is an essential part of honing your craft and evolving as a writer. Constructive criticism can provide valuable insights that refine your storytelling abilities and take your work to new heights. However, it can also make you feel like throwing in the towel completely. In this article, we will explore effective strategies for navigating negative feedback on your novel, helping you to transform criticism into a catalyst for growth instead of a reason to give up.

Sleep on It

No one wants to hear negative feedback. It’s especially hard to hear when you’ve spent hours mulling, procrastinating, and berating yourself for not being good enough. Then, when you finally manage to get something down on the page - a chapter, a first draft, a second draft, your finished novel masterpiece - someone comes along and doesn’t immediately love everything about it. It can be tough, even heart-breaking, but is it as bad as you think it is? Unlike an argument, negative feedback is something you should sleep on. Your gut reaction to anything not 100% positive about your novel may not in fact be completely rational (shocking we know). Read it, take a break from it, and sleep on it. Go back to it in the morning.  It might not be as bad as you think.

Seek Clarity

Be sure that what you’re interpreting as negative is in fact negative. The little devil that sits on your shoulder will sometimes make you hear things that are not there. Are they really being negative or is there something more constructive to be found? Perhaps they said something about your writing that seemed blunt or overly harsh. Perhaps it was something vague and unactionable that frustrated you. You may have misinterpreted their feedback and it wasn’t intended to be negative at all. Try to get clarity. Seek details. The more clarity you can get the better. It’s possible they misunderstood something that meant they didn’t ‘get’ your novel or your chapter. If you can find out what that was maybe you can change it, if they genuinely just ‘missed’ it maybe you don’t need to.  

Get Alternative Opinions

It’s never a good idea to have just one person feedback on your novel. If you want it to be the best it can be, you’re going to need more than one reader. The best readers for your novel are ones whose opinions you respect, but who won’t hesitate to be honest with their feedback. Hopefully with time you’ll build a group of readers whose opinions you trust, but until then, don’t let one bad review get you down.  

Keep an Open Mind

Okay you don’t like it. They’ve said something mean about your favourite character. They’ve said that epic monologue (the one that you believe is some of your best writing) is too long. They’ve said that they just don’t get it. It’s annoying, it’s painful – but do they have a point? It’s hard to be impartial about something you’ve poured your heart and soul into but try to keep an open mind. Do you really need a whole chapter dedicated to your heroine’s inner angst as portrayed metaphorically through the sleeping patterns of their magical cat? Perhaps not.

Focus on the Positive

As writers it’s easy to focus on the negative. You might receive five rave novel critiques but it’s the sixth bad one that keeps you up at night. Use the negative critiques to get better, but don’t forget to appreciate the nice things that people said about your writing and make sure you take the time to let those positive vibes sink in.

Stop Conflating Novel Feedback with Your Self-Worth

They didn’t like your novel – so what? Remember that negative novel feedback is about the work, not you as a person. Detaching your self-worth from the criticism will allow you to hear it more objectively and improve your writing without feeling personally attacked. (Unless it’s a semi-autobiographical novel whose main character is based on you – then it is possible that you are being personally attacked…)

Use It

When we open ourselves up to feedback, we always hope to hear that the sun is shining out of our proverbial back, side, and cover pages (ahem). Sometimes though, parts of our writing just suck. And that’s ok. No one was born an amazing writer. You gotta hone your craft. And to do that sometimes you have to hear that something isn’t working. It hurts, but now that you know, you can make it better. That’s the whole point of feedback. So, suck it up, swallow your pride, and get back to writing.

Don’t Give Up

This could be called reason 7B but it’s an important one, so I’m giving it a whole number of its own. Don’t give up. Homes and libraries are filled with authors, heroes and heroines who succeeded in the face of adversity only because they carried on regardless. So, make sure you’re the hero of your own novel by powering on and take inspiration from these writers who know what they’re talking about:

“Perseverance is not a long race; it is many short races one after the other.”

- Walter Elliot

“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better."

- Samuel Beckett

Ignore It

Yes, you can really do that. Just because someone says something bad about your novel doesn’t make it true. Even if they hate it, it doesn’t mean everyone will. People have different tastes and they like different things. Even novels that have made the bestsellers lists are still hated by some people. If you have all your readers saying the same thing then it’s probably worth considering making some changes, but even then, if you don’t want to - then don’t! It’s your novel and the only person you need to please is yourself (and maybe your editor, but that’s between you and them).  

At the end of the day, it’s just an opinion. If someone looked at the new red jumper you were wearing and told you they hate green jumpers, would you be upset and offended? Probably not, because your jumper isn’t green. And if they insisted your new jumper was in fact green, would you be offended then? Doubtful because now you’re thinking that person a little off and who cares what they think anyway, right? If you think your novel is good and you like it the way it is, who cares if someone thinks it’s ugly and green?

Sometimes you really do know better.

Clara Maidment is a mother of two children, sidekick to two dogs, a producer, travel writer, master of chaos and partner to the most patient man in the world.  When she’s not dragging the family on weird and wonderful adventures she can be found banging her fingers on the keyboard and head against the wall.