Hooray for feedback!

Question of the day:  Is negative feedback good?

Being an engineer, I can unequivocally say that, yes, negative feedback is good.  If you have a system with only positive feedback, it quickly spirals out of control and explodes, or at least lets all the magic smoke out of the circuits so that they no longer work.

With that in mind, I'd like to share some feedback I recently received.  More than once.

Craig, you talk too much.

Now, it's a good thing that someone, or I should say, multiple someones, provided this feedback to me, because I never would have considered it on my own. 

Writing is about using words to express ideas, so if you have complex ideas to express, doesn't that mean you'll need a lot of words?  Not necessarily.  Writing is just as much about selecting the proper word to fit the need, using an economy of expression.  Apparently, I should work on that.

My last post was meant to give an excerpt of a chapter I wrote as part of a short story coming out in Outward Bound next week.  I had hoped to break it up into ~1,000-word chunks and post it over the course of a month or so.  However, I found that there wasn't a clear place to break until almost 2,500 word into the chapter.

So I wrote a few notes to introduce the story, and then plunked the whole opening into the blog post.  The feedback I got was that the post was too long, and no one would likely spend the time to get to the end.

Oddly, I received the same feedback from my partners in crime.  For our fifth book, we had decided to publish a number of short stories to expand on what was told about certain characters central to our other four books.  Five stories were assigned, and each one was to have been 10 to 15 thousand words. 

When I turned mine in, it was nearly 30,000 words, and the feedback was that I needed to work on the "short" part of short story writing (see last post).

Feedback acknowledged, and I will definitely work on that.

-Craig