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Comments (69)

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  trjordan
  As a pratical lens on this advice: people are excellent at giving feedback on their problems. They are terrible at identifying how to fix it."It felt too long" was right. The solution was not to make the story shorter. The solution was to look at the parts that felt long, and believe that feedback.If you're building something, and your users tell you it's complicated or it's slow or it's not useful, they're right! The fix may or may not be to make it simpler, faster, or more useful. Maybe it needs to be organized better, or to create deliberate moments of action, or to be used at a different time. The problems are real, but the obvious solutions are not always right.
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  mwigdahl
  I liked Zvi Mowshowitz' summary of this: If someone tells you what's wrong, listen to them. If they tell you how to fix it, ignore them.
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  Silamoth
  There’s a similar situation in game dev. Players are very good at identifying problems - this isn’t fun, this feels too hard, etc. However, the solutions they suggest are often terrible, resulting in broken, unfun games. The same advice applies: Figure out what’s actually wrong and fix that.Is that level really too hard, or did you just fail to properly introduce a new ability? Is the story boring, or is the story taking away from the enjoyable gameplay?
• dhosek
  Vaguely related, there’s been a trend (thanks to submittable making it easy to add charges to submissions), of some publications offering editor feedback for an additional charge.Aside from my general policy of never paying submission fees when I submit my writing, this particular service seems especially misplaced to me. I’m submitting my piece because I think it’s good enough to be accepted for publication. Paying that extra fee for editorial feedback is essentially starting from a position of, this isn’t good enough, in which case, there’s no point submitting in the first place.
• GMoromisato
  I read about a screen test of The Deer Hunter, in which people said the movie was amazing but the beginning (the hunt, the wedding, etc.) was too long. The producers cut a bunch of scenes and tried again. This time the feedback was, "the movie sucks."
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  raincole
  I've found the traditional publishing industry really interesting. It's so hard to get approved or even noticed from the gatekeepers[0]. Even getting a rejection from an agent can take months. And agents are just the very first gate. Being agented can be lightyears away from getting published.And after so many layers of gatekeeping and due process, what got to the shelves are like, uh, Kiss of the Basilisk. I mean it totally makes sense in from a marketing perspective, but the whole situation is a little bit funny.[0]: used as a neutral term, not a negative one
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  fastaguy88
  Well, perhaps Orsen Scott Card does not need editors’ advice. But odds are you do.
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  -warren
  This is a great blog post and very sound advice.I, however, miss twitter's "twitterness". 140 characters and a link.
• Finnucane
  Having been on the other side of that, there is a point. When an editor writes a rejection letter, aside from the fact that it already means what you wrote was better than 97% of what the editor saw that week, telling you why they turned it down isn't really quite the same level of feedback you get from an editor who has accepted a story and wants to get it over the proverbial finish line. A rejection letter is very broad strokes and first-impression. It's not actually editing. Editing needs a closer read, often a bit of back-and-forth with the author (I should say I learned a lot about editing in my younger days from both David Hartwell and Beth Meacham).
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  grvbck
  > You don't need advice from editors on rejected manuscripts.Continues to tell us how he did listen to the advice because the editor actually had a point that made the story better, got the book published and won him an award.
• neko_ranger
  It's only a failure if you give up and stop moving
• anon
  undefined
• bitbytebane
  [dead]
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  virgil_disgr4ce
  [flagged]
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  vynase
  There’s one person I really wish still posted here. He’d light this place up.
• tim-tday
  I don’t need advice from Orson Scott Card.