Have you ever been in a critique group where someone has disagreed with something in your manuscript? Is your first reaction to totally disregard what the other person says?
When you take your manuscript home, stop and take a few moments to reflect on the feedback you received. Even if the person didn’t get your vision for your manuscript or understand why you wrote it the way you did, could there perhaps be a deeper layer for you to explore regarding that person’s feedback?
Even if the person might be a beginning writer, for some reason, a portion of your manuscript did not quite sit right with someone else. Could there actually be a way that you could reword or revise your manuscript to help work through this issue? Chances are that another reader might feel the same way when they read it, too.
Getting feedback from others in our writer’s group challenges us to reflect on the words, sentences, and paragraphs we wrote in our manuscript. Instead of resenting this, it’s good to accept feedback as a potential spark that can ignite us to look more deeply at our work and see if we can polish it to shine even more.
