Implementing feedback is daunting. Because real feedback (at least, on your first few drafts) will probably require rewriting and some serious story editing. Unless your feedback was that polite drivel I mentioned before in my post about providing useful feedback, in that case, you may just have a few typo corrections to do.

And, here, I want to stop and make you really listen.

If a beta reader points out a problem, you can harp on about why it makes sense and isn’t wrong for three hours and it won’t make the problem go away UNTIL you make it clear in your story why it makes sense and isn’t wrong. I understand that you don’t want to spell out everything. It feels lame. I agree. But you CAN give hints and seemingly insignificant little indicators that later make the whole thing come together. It’s called foreshadowing.

Now, we can go on.

Characters

I can currently think of three main things that tend to come up – character growth, believability and relatability. Yes, yes, there are more. Please leave a comment.

Character growth

About half my writers got this one for feedback (and I was one of them!!! *gasp*): The protagonist shows no character growth. At the beginning, they had this and that opinion, then, things happened and they didn’t change their opinion. Soooo…what is the point of the story?

I can promise you, every reader likes a different kind of story. But we all feel cheated if the protagonist doesn’t discover something that changes them or their life. Does he discover something about himself? Does she learn something that changes how she treats someone else? Does he find out everything he believed was a lie? Does she finally find it within herself to forgive her parents for divorcing each other? We need some catharsis!

Believability

When your beta readers tell you that a character is not believable because they don’t act the way a real person does in the given situation, it is not just a comment. It’s an obstacle to reading your story.

There’s no glossing over a problem like this. It needs to be addressed by taking the character and defining his or her:

• personality
• motivation
• history
• frame of reference
• sense of morality and
• more.

Then, you go to every single appearance, action, dialogue or thought by this character and make sure that it makes sense considering who this character is and what they’ve been through.

If you think this is a waste of time, be prepared to lose half your audience. Not half their attention. You’re losing half the people who will ever bother to read your stories.

Relatability

If your beta reader tells you that they couldn’t get into the story because they couldn’t identify with any of the characters, you need to ask why. What made the protagonist or supporting characters so off-putting?

The biggest problem here is that relatability is extremely subjective. And, no, you can’t please everyone. But I can tell you this: If more than one of your beta readers have brought this up, you need to do something about it.

Things that put readers off:

• Cruelty and/or being abusive – to others, ESPECIALLY children and animals
• Rape
• There are more, I’m sure. Please leave a few comments.

These are gold for making a hateable antagonist. They are contraindicated for protagonists.

It takes an extremely skilled writer to make a protagonist guilty of these things relatable. So far, I have not come across one.

People want to identify with at least one of your main or supporting characters. If they don’t identify with anyone, they won’t read.

Plot holes

It seems like a no brainer but, trust me, plot holes happen to everyone. If you wrote them, chances are that you won’t be able to spot them. When someone points it out, you may even want to say something stupid, like: “Is it really that bad? Can’t I just leave it like that? Who will notice that, anyway?”

Buck up.

Take that plot hole and kill it. If your beta reader found it, some hateful troll on the Internet will too. And that troll will show the whole world that they found it. Rather fix every plot hole beta readers find and give that troll less to embarrass you with.

No story hook or a weak ending

There are two spots in your story where people form lasting opinions: At the beginning and at the end.

Bad first impressions can stop the reader from reading your story past the first page. You need something tantalising. Narrative summary (descriptive paragraphs) is not tantalising. You need something immediate – dialogue or in-the-moment action. If you don’t know how to come up with something tantalising, ASK your beta reader what would have appealed more to them.

The end should also be satisfying. It needs to answer questions raised during the story. It needs to show that your protagonist has grown. It needs to show that the crisis has been resolved OR resolved enough until the sequel can address it more thoroughly.

More than one of my writers for Phoenix Fire ended their story too late. How does this happen? If you start adding more and more to your story after the crisis. That’s how. Keep it concise. If you suddenly need to add two more chapters because of something that came up after the story hit 75%, you are probably adding an unnecessary side quest. Kill it. Your story needs to end strong.

Again, if you don’t know where that is: ASK someone you trust, AKA your beta reader. If they don’t give you a solution that appeals to you, ask someone else until they give you something you can use or you hit an ah-hah! moment.

Stilted or unnatural speech

This isn’t quite as big a sin as the stuff above but it can make your story really hard to read. If your reader is expecting good writing, this will put them right off.

Soliloquies

If your characters tend to talk for more than 4 lines at a time, they are essentially giving a speech every time they open their mouths. People don’t talk like that unless they’re being interviewed or addressing a large congregation of people.

Sit down and listen to people talking. Write down everything they say, from full sentences to false starts to wordless utterances. They give away a lot about what they are thinking through non-verbal cues (body language, harrumphing, coughing, facial expressions etc.). Their word choice might reveal enough to put you under a pretty specific impression of their intentions.

Jargon

These are topic-specific terms or – if my jargon is leaving you blank – fancy words. If your beta reader says they couldn’t keep track of all the story-specific words, you may be overdoing it.

You don’t need to reinvent the wheel. For instance, unless the animal they are riding is an insect-like creature or an antelope with the feet of a bear, I’m sure “horse” will do. We already have words for ‘day’ and ‘night’. If you start calling them ‘light’ and ‘dark’ in your book, you’re just setting yourself up for awkward prose.

Sci-fi settinge lend themselves to all kinds of futuristic tech. Yes, this stuff should have names but, if you make the names obscure (e.g. “OrgonnnonXII” for an AI bot that has a green stripe on its torso) and difficult to pronounce or remember (e.g. “Xhi-BVotholYn” or something similarly obscure), your are hampering your own story.

If you need to differentiate between two cultures and you want them to use different words for the same concept, make the words familiar-sounding enough that your reader doesn’t feel brain whiplash every time they come across it. “Ch’kta, o bishni” is a lot harder to remember than “G’day, mate” or “Greetings, my good sir”. If it is actually important to the plot that you have this kind of unmistakable phrase, then, use it. But if you have five of these crucial phrases in one story…I don’t think you understand what “important to the plot” means.

In A Song of Ice and Fire (AKA A Game of Thrones), we come across “Valar morghulis” – “all men must die”. Why isn’t this too difficult? Because we come across only three important High Valyrian terms (“Valar morghulis”, “Valar dohaeris” and “dracarys”) across all of the books (each of them well over 500 pages).

Awkward or stilted speech

Unless the character who’s talking is identified by his awkward phrasing, you should use normal sentences, normal speech, normal words. As much as Shakespeare is praised for his clever play on words, normal people don’t talk like that. People who use flowery speech tend to be the butt of jokes because other people think it’s ridiculous to talk like that.

Overuse of names

“Hi, James!” Basil said.
“Basil! Good to see you!” James replied.
“How are you doing, James old pal?”
“Well, as always, Basil. Why did you say my name again?”
“I don’t know, James. It just keeps coming out of my mouth.”
“Basil, I’m scared. It feels like someone is forcing me to say your name.”

Catch my drift? People use terms of endearment like “dear” and “pal” and “sweetie” when they talk to each other…if they refer to each other while talking at all.

“Hi!”
“Basil! Good to see you.” James smiled.
“How are you doing, old pal?”
“Well, as always. How’s your wife?”

See, no more creepy, weird overuse of names.

***

There are so many things feedback can point out, I simply don’t have the energy to cover all of it. I welcome comments to fill out the list and advice.

If you take home nothing else from this post, remember this: Implementing helpful feedback takes real effort. If you put on “track changes” (it’s a review function in Microsoft Word) while you do story editing, it’s going to look like a bloodbath. Don’t let that scare you. Making mistakes does not make you a bad writer. Refusing to correct mistakes beta readers point out because you don’t feel like it does, though. As does pretending to correct mistakes by changing two words that have nothing to do with the problem.

You can do this. Just take it one sentence at a time.