Fostering Creative Writing Feedback Based on Strengths, Not Weaknesses

A guest essay by J. Greg Phelan, the founder of book inc.

Mariam Chagelishvili

---

Hurray! Another indie lit person doing business things. We are about to switch things up a bit to organize this newsletter. We’ll do a whole announcement once Mariam has finished the art. But for a sneak peak, we are changing our guest essays section to, “Smart People Do Words Sometimes”

You can find this section in the nav on our homepage or by scrolling through the front page content where we’ve now sectioned things out.

In our guest essay today, book inc. founder J. Greg Phelan discusses his experience workshopping his novel in writing workshops and an MFA program and details how changing his approach to critique allowed him to finish his projects more successfully.

What if we approached workshopping and giving feedback to one another differently? What if we focused on the writer’s strengths instead of their weak points? Would the feedback still be useful?

---

---

Back in the early days of the Internet, I started a consulting company to build web applications. The technology was developing so fast that it was like learning to ski on an expert slope. To succeed, we had to keep improving–that meant constantly studying the industry and our competitors to adopt what businesses call best practices. Simply put, we actively sought out what worked for others and continuously updated our approach to do that.  

After selling my company, I took a break from consulting to dedicate myself to finishing a novel I’d started years before. I saw no reason I couldn’t apply the same dedication and hard work I’d used to be successful in running a business to my writing.  

I rented a tiny office in an old Victorian a mile from home and got to writing. After six months of working on the novel alone, I hit a wall.

I realized that I didn’t have the ability to make the novel what I wanted it to be. So, I did what I used to do:

I investigated what other writers did to be successful. What were their best practices?

---

Workshops seemed to be a popular way to hone your craft and connect with writers, so I decided to sign up. I assumed my experience and skills in presenting to clients would help me be successful at sharing my work with a group.  

As you may have guessed, it didn’t work out that way.

I found being workshopped harrowing.

I had trouble sleeping the night before my piece was to be discussed. As soon as the group began sharing their comments on my work, I felt my cheeks get hot and my heart race, desperate to defend myself from even minor criticisms. With all the cortisol pumping into my veins, it was difficult to take in what people were saying.  

At first, I chalked up my extreme reaction to inexperience, trusting I’d eventually get better at receiving feedback––and giving it, too, as I saw the other writers adopt a familiar defensive stance when I critiqued their stories-in-progress. And I did get a little bit better as I attended more workshops. At least I was no longer surprised by the punch-in-the-gut feeling each time. And, however painful it was to hear the feedback, some of it must have sunk in. My writing skills did improve.  

Still, I couldn’t help wondering if attending workshops was an effective way to make progress as a writer. One off-handed comment could set me off on a drastic rewrite where I’d change the structure or point of view or abandon a project entirely. And as far as connecting––like me, the other writers seemed too preoccupied with their own work and how it was received to be of much help to each other. We seemed to have little vested interest in each other’s success.  

Seeking a better way forward, I enrolled in a low-residency creative writing MFA, hoping my workshop experience would improve with a more rigorous and defined curriculum,  accomplished writing faculty, and committed students. And it did raise the bar.

The instructors were skilled and insightful, and the students were more motivated. Still, the workshops often seemed to be more competitive than supportive, the feedback geared to scoring points with the instructor rather than being helpful to the writer. Not the best practice I was seeking. I got so much conflicting feedback at times that my work languished.  

Then, I had the good fortune to be in a workshop with Brian Morton, an unusually kind and skilled writing teacher (and fantastic writer, too) committed to maintaining a positive tenor in his workshop discussions. That made a big difference. The students were less defensive, more generous to each other, and more helpful. And Brian’s annotations on my manuscripts were especially useful. Instead of offering criticism, he pointed out what was working and encouraged me to build on that.

He honed in on the potential in my work. His approach gave me newfound confidence and fueled me to keep going.  

---

After the workshop was over, I asked Brian why he’d adopted what seemed to me a  radical approach compared to other workshops, focusing on what was right rather than  what was wrong, and he seemed genuinely surprised by my question.  

“I’ve found that writers are self-critical enough,” he said. “What they really need is  encouragement.” 

Simple, but very true. I sensed this was the best practice I’d been seeking.  

Soon after I graduated, I seized the opportunity to teach writing workshops myself.  Emulating Brian’s approach, I approached stories-in-progress as not filled with problems to be solved but with the potential to be highlighted, employing specific comments about what was working to help the writer move forward. I encouraged the participants in my workshops to do the same. I believed (and still do) that if, after being workshopped, the writer feels energized to keep working on their story, the group has done its job.  

As I realized, though, keeping a workshop positive is far easier said than done,  especially in a culture that believes self-improvement depends on diagnosing and fixing what’s broken.

What’s more, many writers I’ve worked with over the years insist they don’t want or need encouragement.

Tell me what’s wrong, they say. I can take it.

But that’s not how making art works. I learned this the hard way.

However much I wanted others to tell me what was wrong with my work and give me solutions on how to fix it, I needed to figure out my own path forward. To make decisions that are pleasing to me.  That’s what art is. You and me, we’re the deciders.  

That doesn't mean feedback isn’t important. It’s critical for writers to understand how their stories-in-progress are experienced by others. Not by getting criticism from fellow workshop participants acting as amateur editors but feedback from fresh readers exposed to the story for the first time––what they connect with, what compels them to keep reading, what they’re curious about, what they’re expecting to happen, and what surprises them.  

As a workshop leader, my challenge was to provide a solid framework for this positive feedback exchange that would help all of us maintain our focus on what was working in the story without backsliding into what was not and trying to fix it. I needed to develop a best practice we could rely upon to accomplish that.  

I lucked out when I found a gifted therapist who happens to work with writers and other artists: Dr. Dan Tomasulo, the Academic Director at the Spirituality Mind Body Institute at Columbia University. Dan introduced me to positive psychology, a decades-old field founded by Martin Seligman and expanded by Dan and many other psychologists who were disheartened with the ineffectiveness of their profession to help stem the tide of anxiety and depression.

Their key insight was: what if, instead of diagnosing weaknesses and trying to fix them, we help our patients identify strengths and how to cultivate them?

---

This approach works. Positive psychology researchers have proved that identifying and cultivating strengths not only lowers incidences of anxiety and depression but on strengths also builds resilience, joy, and a sense of agency. Adding to the good news, the benefits are long-lasting.  

Naturally, I got excited about the potential of positive psychology to help creative writers. So much so that we launched Book Inc., a writing collaborative that incorporates positive psychology and other best practices to foster a strength-based approach to writing memoirs and novels. Our core curriculum is a two-year sequence of courses that we offer as a practical, low-cost alternative to an MFA, starting with year-long Memoir and Novel Incubators, with our Book Revision Lab and Book Submission Lab in the second year. Another key differentiator is that the program leaders, our Peer Artist Leaders, write along with the participants. 

We start by having our writers do a free character strengths survey offered by the VIA Institute on Character (a nonprofit dedicated to the application of strengths-based research). Discussing the results of the survey lays the groundwork, getting the writers thinking about how to identify and cultivate their own strengths as well as each other’s.  

We also don’t exchange our writing right away, but draft and revise alongside each other, building trust and community as we gear up to share each other’s work.  

As we ramp up to our reading rounds, we provide in-depth training on how to give and receive feedback, instructing our readers to identify what is working as specifically as possible, through annotations on the manuscripts, filling a worksheet with guided questions about plot, theme, setting, and characters; and through a live discussion. The combination of these three channels helps the writer understand how their story was received, giving them a variety of tools to build on the strengths of their story to realize the commercial and artistic potential of their work. 

---

book inc. is in our fourth year, and early results have been promising. Since 2020, we’ve drafted and shared 55 memoirs and novels, read by at least two readers each who have given detailed strengths-based feedback. We’ve also shared and given feedback on 181 revised drafts. One of our writers received a prestigious PEN America Emerging Voices Fellow. Many others are submitting their memoirs and novels that they started and finished during the program to agents, indie publishers, and contests.

Even more encouraging is how enthusiastic our writers have been about getting and receiving feedback in our supportive, collaborative environment focused on strengths.  Our approach has been very motivating for our writers to get their books drafted and revised, especially the live session when readers discuss your book-in-progress.

“It was like listening to a podcast with two people who really enjoyed my book,” one writer said.  

That struck me as a great characterization of how I felt when my novels were discussed by my readers. Gone were my hot cheeks, racing heart, and defensiveness I felt in my old workshops, replaced by a sense of gratitude and pleasure that my readers got my story and they genuinely wanted me to succeed. Without expending all that energy to shore up my defenses, I was open to hearing what my readers had to say, filling pages of my notebook with insights and ideas inspired by their feedback––an invaluable resource I frequently draw upon during my revision process.  

Yes, sometimes, even with other writers rooting us on, we can still get stuck. That’s part of the writing process, too. But with all the energy we receive from our fellow writers,  especially the positive feedback during the reading rounds, we're able to push through and keep going. I have. Since our inception, I’ve completed one novel and am well on my way to finishing a second. It’s the most productive I’ve been since I started writing. 

I’m not as angsty, either. “You seem to be enjoying yourself,” my wife noted with some degree of incredulity, as it's not easy to be married to a writer. 

She’s right. I am enjoying myself. Yes, you could write memoirs and novels on your own, like I did in my little office for many years, not sharing my work with anyone. And you can hone your craft by getting critiqued in competitive workshops and MFA  programs, which I also did. But writing alongside a community of other writers who actively help you identify and cultivate your strengths that’s a lot of fun. And much more effective, at least it has been for me and our growing community of memoir and novel writers.  

Making art in this world of ours is challenging enough. We writers could use all the encouragement we can get. In fact, we thrive when we do so.  

---

J. Greg Phelan is the director of book inc, a writing collective offering an two-year  alternative to the MFA for memoir and novel writers. His writing has been published in  The New York Times, America, The Millions, and other publications. He recently  finished a coming-of-age novel which takes place in the canyonlands of Utah, in the  summer of 1964. 

---