Processing Feedback: High-Level Feedback
Ivanova is always right. I will listen to Ivanova. Ivanova is God.
High-level feedback is my personal happy place, second only after raw drafting, on parts of the process I enjoy. It’s okay if you prefer a different part of the process, but I want to disclose up front that this is the area I get most excited about. This is the feedback that comes with a “content,” “development,” or “structural” edit.
If you aren’t going through a formal editing process, then the easiest way to succinctly explain high-level feedback is like this: High-level feedback is all the feedback that is execution-agnostic in its focus. Feedback about the structure, world building, character arcs, themes, mood, or plot are all high-level feedback. (If that looks like a rough summary of the Plot and Structure seminar’s topics, that’s not an accident.) All of these things will definitely be received by the audience differently based on how you execute them--execution is everything in writing--but you may not even have a draft with any execution present when you get this feedback.
Generally speaking, you’ll want high-level feedback before you worry about polish of any sort. Perfecting every sentence in a scene you may cut when you change a plot arc can lead to frustration or, worse, leave you reluctant to cut a scene that needs to go. (Depending on your process, motivational and high-level feedback might come intertwined or in alternation.) Word choice, rhythm, style and grammar, none of these elements are relevant for high-level feedback.
This doesn’t mean they don’t matter or that they’re less important than other elements; for some projects, choices made with regard to these elements might be more fundamentally essential to a project’s true purpose than anything high-level. In most cases, however, elements relevant to high-level feedback are established and developed before other elements.
Whether it’s coming from an editor in a formal process or a critique partner in a more casual relationship, it can be hard to figure out what to do with high-level feedback. What does it mean if your plot is so full of holes all your readers stop cold when they hit them? How do you deal with complaints that your ending feels too X or not enough Y? We touched on a lot of the tools and techniques for analyzing and evaluating your work in the Plot and Structure seminar, but it’s not very useful to have a toolbox if you don’t know how to interpret the information you have well enough to understand the problem.
As with everything, what you need to do for your process, or even for any particular project, will be unique. But there are some broad guidelines you can use to help you process high level feedback.
The first thing you want to do is throw out any feedback that doesn’t touch on high-level things.
“You misuse ‘lay’ and ‘lie’ throughout the manuscript,” is a good thing to check on and learn from, but totally irrelevant to the task at hand. Stick it in a file somewhere else and ignore it for now. “I thought we were just getting to the climax and then the book was over, WTF?” is definitely high-level feedback. Keep that nearby. “This scene made no sense and all of a sudden your characters were acting like plot-fairies instead of themselves,” is a little harder to decide. It could be that the execution on that scene needs work. It could be that the plot really does require the characters to behave contrary to how they’ve been developed. If you have a strong sense of whether it’s high-level feedback or not, go ahead and sort accordingly. (Experience will help with that. There are certain kinds of feedback I know I’m inclined to feel mean X, which usually turn out to be Y. These days, I sort them like Y even though they still feel X to me.)
Whether you put ambiguous feedback into a third category to resolve later, here are some useful tricks for deciding how to categorize it:
Does making the suggested change fundamentally alter a core element of the story or how you’ve constructed it? If not, it’s more likely to be down to execution rather than addressing a high-level issue.
Is it related to several other pieces of ambiguous feedback, or to execution-oriented feedback? If so, it might be pointing to a high-level issue.
Are you inclined to think the reader just straight up failed to understand the whole piece, or else they wouldn’t have given you that feedback? As long as that isn’t actually the case, it’s probably pointing to a high-level problem. (I might use this particular diagnostic criterion more than should be necessary…)
Does it feel like something you could fix by tweaking a few details? If so, it might be addressing high-level problems, but you’re relatively safe if you sort it into the other category.
All of this is complicated by the fact that execution can cover for high-level problems. You might have giant glaring plot holes nobody cares about because your characters are so engaging and your pacing is so fast it doesn’t matter. This is where knowing whether the person giving you feedback is a member of your audience can be critical. They might be “right” in so far as they’ve identified an actual failing of a specific element of your work, but utterly wrong in terms of what the work actually needs to accomplish.
Technical perfection may well be the goal of your piece, and what your audience cares about. It might not, and that is a perfectly legitimate and important thing to acknowledge. Before you take any action with any feedback, especially with high-level feedback, question whether addressing the issue serves your goals for the work. “I want this to get me an amazing publishing deal and make a million dollars,” is a career goal, not a goal for the work. Have a goal for your work, then mercilessly discard any high-level feedback that doesn’t move you closer to achieving that goal.
What kinds of trouble have you had with processing and implementing high-level feedback you’ve gotten in the past? What are some tricks you’ve learned for dealing with it? Share in the comments and we can get some practice with thinking through how to work with this.