The Value/Non-Value of Feedback

So, I got a comment on my Cosby blog post the day I put it up.  I read it.  And insta-deleted it.

Not because it was particularly disgusting or said something untoward about my mother, but because it was negative.  And I don’t do negative comments.  Meaning I don’t want to hear them, read them, see them, or be actively aware that they exist.  

Passively, sure, I’m aware that they exist.  No one gets universal love.  And that’s fine.  Have your thoughts and reactions.  I just have no desire to open a dialogue with you about those negatives. I would rather go through life not hearing those responses.

Why?  Is my rhino skin not thick enough?  Am I too baby soft to be heckled?

No, I’ve been doing this a long time, I can ignore and brush off the negative.  I can also go on some really awesome counterattacks (uh, come to a standup show of mine sometime). It's just that here, where I'm publishing free ideas and advices, I just don’t want to have to read or respond to negatives.  It’s not… pleasant.  And, ultimately, it’s not helpful.  Either to my personal ego, my professional creativity, or my projects.

I don’t want that kind of feedback at this point, on this stuff.  Especially not from people I don’t even know.

Feedback is an interesting phenomenon for comedy writers. There are all sorts of super tensions that exist in professional comedy writing, things that fight to pull you either this way or that way, elements which are always at play as you mess around inside the comedy writer world.  Feedback is definitely one of those super tensions.  It has incredibly strong positive and negative possibilities.  It can be done amazingly well, and horribly badly.  

On the potentially positive side, feedback can make you better, help you see flaws, help you see fixes, help you expand your skills and improve your products.

On the potentially negative side, feedback can demoralize you, frustrate you, make you question your decisions and your talent.  It can change the direction of a project for the worse, or at least toward something that the feedbacker feels is right, even though maybe others wouldn’t agree.

This is what I mean by a “super-tension.”  There are real upsides in one direction -- ie, we have to get feedback in order to learn, to see weaknesses in a project, and to assuage what we do so that it “works” for an audience.  And there are real downsides in that same direction -- ie, we can get incompetent feedback that either makes us think something is far better than it is, or kills it off before it can grow into what it might have become if we had never heard someone else’s opinion.

So here’s what usually happens for comedy writers, and all writers/creators -- they shut off to feedback.  It becomes too complicated, too unreliable, too difficult to sort through, and, ultimately, it seems better to just surge through on one’s own, riding the white horse of your own creativity through the jungle of judgement, rather than risking opening yourself and your project to the whims of others thoughts.

That’s what happens.  I’ve seen it thousands of times.  

Unfortunately, I’ve also seen that be a problem, thousands of times.  The reality is that almost everyone NEEDS feedback on themselves, and on their projects.  The trick is that they need excellent feedback.  They most definitely don’t need un-excellent feedback -- ie, destructive comments, attacks without merit, criticism without advice on how to fix things, over-compassionate praise, etc.  But we all need feedback.  

I mean, you’ll eventually get feedback.  Audiences will let you know what they think.  (One of the reasons I so love standup is that it’s one of the very few forms where you get to open your product to direct audience feedback during the creation stage -- ie., going on stage to try new bits at open mike nights).  But for most creative work, by the time an audience -- or buyer -- gets to see what you’ve done, you’ve finished it.  You’ve written the entire screenplay, the sitcom, the sketch, the one-person show, etc.  And to change it at this point would be an enormous task.

Enter the real power of great feedback -- it lets you make changes, improve things, avoid problems and failures -- before the audience gets your stuff.

The trick and the challenge is to make sure it's great feedback. Delivered when you want it.  And to keep away all the unuseful feedback.

It's better to do all you can to control the feedback you get than to just open up opportunities for it to happen whenever, wherever.  You're going to get feedback, there are feedback junctures for every creative product, nothing is ever done in total isolation.  There are friends, other writers, editors, potential buyers, teachers, directors, all of whom often give feedback.

It's just best if you can control it.  Mostly.  So it helps you instead of harms you.

So, here’s what I consider to be "great feedback."  It's what I like to see in the feedback I get, and give.

()  Ego-boosting.  I like for whoever is giving me feedback to make me feel good about what I’m doing.  Not that they have to super-love this particular project or product, but they have to not tear down my love of what I do, or my confidence in how well I do it.  Every person who is great at giving feedback knows that their first role is to build the artist up, keep them infused.  

()  Fixing issues.  The greatest feedbacker in the world is the person who has fixes for whatever problems are occurring in your project.  Yes, they have to be good at identifying the problems, but at the end of the day, that’s not all that useful.  If you could fix the problem yourself you probably already would have.  The person who is now reading or seeing your stuff should be able to make great suggestions, get you thinking in new ways, get you way closer to fixing something.  Just pointing at it and saying, “Ewww,” even it you’re right, isn’t really very good feedback.

()  Identifying and explaining positives.  One of the great forms of feedback in the world is the person who understands what you do, can see the super isotopes inside of it that make it work, and can both point to those, and explain them clearly.  Most creative people don’t really understand their own creativity, they just “do” things.  If there is someone who can look at a creative work, accurately distill it, explain its power, and communicate that to the creator, that is awesome.  This is why great critics are so useful -- they don’t tear down, they explain.

()  Identifying and explaining negatives.  This is the area of feedback that is trickiest, because it gets confounded with objective criticism, attack-oriented criticism, and just plain meanness.  Any creator who works in public comes to quickly realize that there will people who don’t like what you do.  That’s to be expected.  What isn’t expected is that those people will for some reason feel it’s cool to voice those negative evaluations to you.  Not in order for you to see a problem and fix it, but to harm you as a creator, to attack your values or your abilities, or to further their own political agendas.  Or just to be mean.  Although I think there’s plenty of room for negative evaluations in the world, I don’t see the value in doing them as “feedback.”  In other words, yes, express whatever you want.  But there’s no value for the creator to have to hear what you have to say.  Not everything is a dialogue, and opening up dialogue with negative reactions doesn’t seem particularly healthy for a creator at any level.  

So, end of the day, feedback is a super-tension.  There are all sorts of issues swirling around it, both positive when it’s done well, and negative when it’s not.  And instead of reacting to bad feedbackers by ducking out of the whole process, going it alone, and losing out on the super-value of great feedback, I advise comedy writers to put some time into thinking how they want to do feedback, to create a strongly positive and effective feedback infrastructure for themselves, and to make good feedback an essential, well-organized, and rewarding part of their work process.