When I first started writing I aimed to please as many people as possible. I was that friend at a party who wasn’t sure of himself and so got everybody else’s drinks and felt rejected when nobody wanted to talk to him. I changed what I did to suit this imagined reader I had in my mind.

I guess I have trouble sticking up for myself, or what I believed to be the best way forward. This type of attitude makes it difficult to take notes – if you’re unsure of yourself, you’ll never really stand for anything and so let everybody walk all over you. I’ve been blessed with some of the best editors in the world on my two novels – but imagine if I hadn’t been.

I group writers into two different troubled types when it comes to taking feedback. They are:

Everybody else is right about my story because I suck so bad – woe is me, I’ll never succeed as a writer – everything I write sounds like the textual equivalent of dog diarrhoea.
My words are precious gemstones and everybody commenting is probably stupid – you don’t understand the story, you don’t understand that characters, your comment is from a place of privilege, you are wrong.

The best way forward, like so many things in life, is right in-between these two extremes. Both are thin-skinned – the reactions are just different.

When a person offers you a note, first of all, thank them for taking the time to think about your story. Second, listen. Third, take a look behind what they’re saying. If they say a certain scene doesn’t work, they didn’t feel excited by the final shootout, this could mean many things. Maybe the character work isn’t deep enough preceding the shootout. Maybe your descriptions of action could be tighter. Maybe you could use more crisp, shorter sentences, to arrive in the reader’s mind like gunshots.

How does this apply to Snake Island? Snake Island is the first novel that I got a note on that I didn’t take.

A very well meaning, very intelligent, very kind early reader gave me a note: they felt a certain part of the story was unrealistic. Sorry to be so un-specific, but I don’t want to give away spoilers. And I saw their point. It is unrealistic. But it was also one of my favourite things. So instead of removing the scene I loved so much, I set the scene up better. I added things so that when the time came for the lack of realism, the reader was already set up. I listened behind the note, you see. And it’s now one of my favourite moments from the novel.

Speaking of the novel, reviews have started to trickle in. So exciting seeing it enter the world! Check out Simon McDonald’s review here. In this review he likens Snake Island to No Country for Old Men, something I’m holding dear to my heart. All that effort for such kindness. It’s so rewarding!

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Look, it’s actually in somebody’s hands!

You can also pre-order the novel in a variety of places, including The Nile, for a really great price.

Thanks for sticking with me. Would love to hear your comments and thoughts below! Have you ever taken a note poorly? How do you approach the difficulty?