Musings on critical feedback, defining your readers, and Just Doing It

One thing about writing regularly: you become much, much better at accepting feedback.  That’s because you have to.  You can’t write for a living without people telling you what they think about your work, whether you’ve asked them to or not.

Happily, this ‘feedback acceptance’ thing has fed through into my everyday life, in that I can now take compliments with ease.  I smile and say “thank you”, instead of listing the many ways in which the complimenter is utterly deluded.

I’m also better at taking in the critical, which is great.

Critical feedback is a gift of sorts.  It gives you a chance to change, improve, or completely ignore.  Which option you choose will depend on a few things: do you trust the person offering this feedback?  Have you received similar feedback before, from someone else?  Are they right? (You will know if they’re right, because your soul won’t shut up about it).

The feedback I received for my book, the novel formerly known as Small Fish (TNFKASF), was such a mixed bag that I spent a lot of time working out what to use and what to ignore.  The above questions came in handy, but the most important factor was who had said what.   

When you’re writing a book, you have to know who it’s for.

If you don’t know that, it’ll be devilishly difficult to get started.  But it’ll also be devilishly difficult to know what kind of feedback you should pay attention to.

When I sent TNFKASF to my kind ‘test’ readers, I had an inkling of who might like it and who might not.  My book isn’t a fast-paced, twisty-turny thriller, it’s an introspective character-based ramble.  I like to think it’s pacy in places, though.  Thrilling, rather than thriller.

I felt that the readers who’d like my book would be a bit like me: a deeply sensitive soul who prefers character to plot.  Those people were the ones whose feedback mattered most to me, because they are my readers.

If you know who your readers are, you also know who they aren’t.  That’s a useful feedback-filtering tool.

My writing doesn’t appeal to everyone.  Yours won’t, either.  There’s no need to feel downhearted about that.  We all like and dislike different things, for wildly different reasons.

(For proof, look at a popular book on Amazon and read the reviews).

Critical comments from people who aren’t your readers should be taken seriously.  Some of the major edits I’m making now have come from helpful ‘you-aren’t-my-reader’ observations.  But running feedback through that filter is a great first step.  Your own instincts and intuition should help with the rest.

In other news: does it really take so much mental effort to do things we want to do?

I’ve been doing an online course on behavioural science.*  It’s really good, but I found the chapter on goals and motivation exhausting.  If you set a goal, like exercising each morning, you should:

• set an early alarm,
• put your exercise kit out where you can see it,
• only do 10 minutes of exercise at first, just to ingrain the habit,
• consider ‘stacking’ exercise onto another thing you already do each morning without thinking (that first coffee of the day, for example).

I think this list is mentally exhausting: as well as actually doing the exercise, you also have to complete a checklist of preparations.  To me, it also bypasses the fact that you’re choosing to exercise… that this is something you’ve decided you want to do.

Same goes for the snippet above, taken from someone’s Substack newsletter.  Do you really need “tricks” to read, or do you just need to stop overthinking and pick up a book?

It’s a thought, especially as the time for new year’s resolution-setting rolls around again.

If you want to read, write, exercise, or do more or less of something in 2026, there’s always the no-frills option of just getting on with it.  If that doesn’t work for you, maybe you didn’t really want to do it after all, in which case you can stop beating yourself up about it and do something else, instead.

(Works for me).

*If you’d like to sign up for a 42course – and you should, because they’re marvellous – use the code 607662-42 to get 10% off, no strings attached.