I often solicit feedback from anyone who’ll read, look at, listen to or watch my work. Over many years I’ve learned a fair bit about receiving this criticism. Perhaps the most important thing I’ve learned – and this can be applied to opinions in general – is to consider the source.<\/p>\n
What someone says about your work really does say more about them than it does about the work. Does that mean I should just toss out any opinion I don’t like? Not at all! It just means I have to consider the source, and in addition to that, ask the right questions.<\/p>\n
General feedback is where you’re going to get most of the critic’s own personal tastes weighing into the mix. So asking specific questions is a good way to get at the information you need. Again, considering the source, I may ask someone if they understood a storyline; if it wasn’t too confusing; if a certain character came off as shady or down right evil; whether or not an ending was both satisfying and a surprise or not. By getting specific about the points in the work that I may be concerned with, I can skip notes like “I didn’t think it was that funny,” or “it was too gory”. Points like that may still be relevant but only when considering the source of the comments; humour is very subjective and “too gory” for a fan of romantic comedies is a little different than for a fan of horror films.<\/p>\n
It can be very difficult to get close to anything resembling objective feedback, especially when dealing with acquaintances. And if all you’re looking for is a thumbs up or down on whether it’s “good” or not, then forget about honesty. The biggest struggle is often extracting that initial objective opinion from one’s self. Once we can do that then we can acknowledge and assess the weaknesses in our work and seek out the feedback that’s going to help remedy it.<\/p>\n
And remember, if you’re soliciting feedback you’re asking for it. So suck it up and respect the person taking their time to contemplate what you’re giving them to contemplate. Negative feedback is still much more gratifying than no feedback at all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Considering the source and asking the right questions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-182","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news-from-the-studio"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tylergibb.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tylergibb.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tylergibb.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tylergibb.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tylergibb.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=182"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/tylergibb.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tylergibb.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=182"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tylergibb.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=182"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tylergibb.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=182"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}