Constructive vs Deconstructive criticism

There is a skill to giving constructive feedback.

A lot of people use the “heart beat” diagram method: start with a neutral opening, rise to give the “what you liked” about it, then face the “what you didn’t like about it”, and finally finish with an overview of “what is good and the strengths”.

Constructive feedback is designed to help, assist, and provide guidance. If handled properly it can be a great asset or bonus. It is designed to deconstruct someone’s work to help them make it better, not trash it into the nearest landfill and shatter their dreams.

A note at this point on dialogue: Unless something is glaringly wrong, I don’t give much feedback on dialogue because two best friends from identical families, with identical religious and social backgrounds, peer groups, class mates, life experiences and outlooks on life who are as identical as identical can be in thought, word, deed, and action…..will absolutely write dialogue differently every time. Dialogue edits are to be used to trim excess dialogue down and not to trash someone else’s dialogue because everyone in the world sees / imagines dialogue differently. It’s what makes us human. So if you’ve been asked to critique someone’s work and their dialogue makes you cringe, try to find out why it makes you cringe instead of just slamming their dialogue writing abilities.

Negative feedback is, as mentioned above, from someone who doesn’t care if they hurt you, want you to fail, or are dismissive of your efforts because they may have some long term agenda like “I’m a writer, if I criticise this writer they’ll give up and that means one less competition for me”. Usually, negative feedback writers aren’t very good at writing feedback!

The idiots who merely trash your work aren’t worth dealing with: look to compare with any criticism you get from an official forum (competition etc) and you will usually find it is written in a professional, balanced way.

The process of feedback is, of course, designed to highlight flaws or weaknesses in your product (script, music, artwork, what have you) and to that end represents one part of the two way street called “feedback”.

Why is it two way? Because the recipient (the artist) has to deal with that feedback too, and feedback should be written to encourage, not destroy.

The problem with the recipient artist is, quite often, they poured their heart and soul into this project and whilst they would like to hear the feedback of “WOW! WHY HAVEN’T WE HEARD FROM YOU BEFORE? HERE’S A CHEQUE AND A CONTRACT FOR…” the truth is often more like “I liked the premise and the opening but found a couple of the supporting cast weak and without direction, and the end was not handled in a satisfactory way” etc.

Yes, it’s your baby, and we know you love it, but feedback is that awful stage of getting a response to your work and it’s, dare I say it, a necessary stage so if a writer / artist / etc sends you work and asks for feedback and your feedback is less than congratulatory, they should at least be polite and thank you for your time.

Nothing irks a reviewer more than spending time reading and deconstructing someones’ work only to have them (after reading your feedback) snub you, and the inevitable stony silence that follows when you didn’t rave about it. So the bottom line here? If you can’t take criticism, you might be in the wrong business.

Above all, all artwork is subjective, as is feedback, so listen to what they have to say, but be aware they might not necessarily be right. Your work might not be “for them” and it could just be as simple as that.