Creativity through criticism
I tended to argue the case for the original drafts of work I submitted for workshop sessions during my MA course. I’d then reflect on the feedback I’d received and find I agreed with many of the points against which I’d argued in class. The process of arguing often put me in the position of defending the indefensible and making changes to my work wherever this applied was an easy decision. While I benefited from their feedback, my contentious reactions gained me a reputation as someone who couldn’t take criticism — although I could and did, just not without argument.
In his biography of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson[1] found that robust exchanges of views on projects can prove productive. Isaacson recounts early Apple software engineer Bill Atkinson‘s[2] experience of Jobs’ abrasive style:
One day Jobs barged into the cubicle of one of Atkinson’s engineers and uttered his usual “This is shit.” As Atkinson recalled, “The guy said, ‘No it’s not, it’s actually the best way,‘ and he explained to Steve the engineering trade-offs he’d made.” Jobs backed down. […] But the story had a coda, which Atkinson also found instructive. Eventually the engineer found an even better way to perform the function that Jobs had criticized. “He did it better because Steve had challenged him,” said Atkinson, “which shows you can push back on him but should also listen, for he’s usually right.“[3]
The extent to which Jobs was ‘right’ here is likely to have had less to do with his insights on the particular function on which the software engineer was working than with his willingness to criticise. Being forced to justify and explain his choices made the engineer reevaluate his approach and, in so doing, improve it. Jobs’ criticism was the catalyst for the improvement process.
Matthew Syed[4] notes that when:
[…] ideas are not checked against the feedback of criticism, they have nothing to respond to. Criticism surfaces problems. It brings difficulties to light. This forces us to think afresh. When our assumptions are violated we are nudged into a new relationship with reality.[5]
This is recognisable as a classical dialectical process[6] in which conversants contrast a proposition (thesis) with a counter-proposition (antithesis) to arrive at an outcome that combines the two (synthesis). Writers’ groups take the proposition of the draft material on which they’re working and offer counter-propositions in the form of feedback. It’s then the featured writer’s job to work on the draft material to produce a synthesis of it as originally composed and the feedback from the group in the form of another draft.
This process, of course, doesn’t happen in a social vacuum and needs to be negotiated as cordially as possible. Following Steve Jobs’ example of declaring someone’s work ‘shit’ is unlikely to make for a positive creative and critical process. Jobs was in the privileged position of both being the boss and viewed as a visionary leader so that his employees were ready to indulge his incivility — Atkinson explained to Isaacson[7] how his engineering team learned to ‘interpret “This is shit” to actually be a question that means, “Tell me why this is the best way to do it.”’ In a writers’ group, such a reaction could be taken only as a brusque and offensive dismissal of the work at hand. It couldn’t even be said to amount to ‘criticism’ as this requires the critic to offer reasoned argument for the response. Writers’ groups need to foster an atmosphere in which criticism is encouraged without being intended or taken invidiously.
Liz Lerman’s four-step process
The choreographer Liz Lerman[8] has developed a four-step critical response process to help ensure that feedback sessions are a positive experience. It begins with ‘Statements of Meaning’ from those offering feedback. This is an invitation to make affirmative comments that reflect what the responders found most engaging about the project. Next comes the ‘Artist as Questioner’ stage. Here the person seeking feedback focuses on the goals of their work to help responders understand its aims. This leads to the ‘Neutral Questions from Responders’ step in which those who are feeding back ask ‘informational or factual questions’ about the work. At this point they may also test opinions while not allowing their views to show — ie they should not express their opinions in their questions. The process concludes with ‘Permissioned Opinions’ when responders offer their views with a brief indication of their nature — ‘I have an opinion about…’ The work’s creator then chooses to accept or decline the offered feedback.
The process has gained traction in creative industries and academia and informed our workshop practices at Southwest Scriptwriters. It is better suited to groups with fixed memberships that can familiarise themselves with the process and agree to follow it habitually. Southwest Scriptwriters is an open forum and it’s rare for the same group of people to attend any two meetings. Sticking to Lerman’s process would entail explaining it and the reasons for applying it at every meeting. We tried to make sessions less confrontational by embracing Lerman’s emphasis on questioning — primarily by encouraging writers to express the answers they’re seeking about their work at the start of the session — and found too that treating scripts as examples of their particular form and asking what we all can learn from these examples helps deflect the critical glare from a lone writer.
Finding a ‘mature’ way to hear comments
Imposing strict protocols on a collective creative process is, though, a questionable practice. Syed[9] points to research led by Charlan J Nemeth[10] on brainstorming where the longstanding doctrine is that participants should not criticise each other’s ideas. Nemeth tested this rule with groups of student volunteers in the US and France that each spent 20 minutes generating ideas for easing traffic flow. Researchers gave some groups no guidance on how to do this and told others to follow the convention of letting all ideas pass unchallenged. The remaining groups were to freewheel but also debate and criticise suggestions. ‘The basic finding,’ Nemeth concludes, ‘is that the encouragement of debate — and even criticism if warranted — appears to stimulate more creative ideas. And cultures that permit and even encourage such expression of differing viewpoints may stimulate the most innovation.’
The creative dynamic in a writers’ group workshop is, of course, different to that in brainstorming sessions on traffic abatement. Everyone involved in discussing road congestion is likely to have a more equal stake in the topic than a group exploring an example of an individual member’s writing. A writing workshop is a brainstorming session, though — spawning ideas for improving the featured work — and it’s likely that Nemeth’s findings apply here too.
Encouraging critical debate can create its own orthodoxy that seems to allow those feeding back to comment with impunity. Lerman[11] writes that she:
[…] had a sense that there was a supposedly mature way to hear comments of others: keeping silent, writing private letters in my mind but never sending them, and, if something really stung, letting time heal the wounds. To respond in this “mature” way to criticism meant quietly taking it, rather than attempting to engage in a dialogue, since to respond at all was somehow deemed either defensive or a violation of an unspoken boundary.[12]
This experience led her to ‘wonder what would happen if critical sessions were […] in the control of the artist’ and she began to develop ‘The Critical Response Process as [a] formal system that would address this goal.’
The danger here is of skewing critical sessions too much in the opposite direction of that to which Lerman originally objected. Nemeth[13] notes that the claim for the instruction not to criticise when brainstorming is that it addresses ‘issues of evaluation apprehension[14] and social loafing.’[15] Evaluation apprehension describes individuals’ reluctance to venture opinions in a social situation in case of being judged negatively by others, while social loafing is the tendency to put less effort into a collective process than one might invest alone. Although Lerman’s Critical Response Process might make feedback more palatable for its recipients, it compounds the above pressures on those asked to offer it. Not only do they face the usual social pressures around giving feedback, but their responses will also be measured by the criteria of the process itself: Are their ‘Statements of Meaning’ affirmative enough? Are their ‘Neutral Questions’ really neutral? Will the ‘artist’ give them permission to voice their opinions? As well as this raft of additional contributory factors to evaluation apprehension, Lerman’s process tends toward more social loafing. Making an objective assessment of another’s work is difficult enough without needing to frame insights within the above prescripts. Jumping through Lerman’s hoops to offer supportive feedback makes the activity seem too much like hard work and increases the temptation to shirk it.
Efforts to put the critical response process in the control of its recipient may well, then, produce less insightful feedback than that garnered in an open debate. And debate is not well served by restricting the views of any party. Lerman’s experience of feeling required to respond to criticism in a ‘mature’ way by ‘quietly taking it, rather than attempting to engage in a dialogue’ accords with my own in my MA class — although my efforts to ‘engage in a dialogue’ might well have been so surly that my fellow students could only conclude that I ‘couldn’t take criticism.’ Fostering an atmosphere in which everyone involved can contribute freely requires a different notion of ‘maturity’ than that inferred by Lerman.
Interviewed by Syed for a BBC Radio 4 programme on learning from mistakes,[16] Cleese observes that:
Because of our egos we are so alarmed about the idea of getting something wrong. But it just depends — if you can create a little daylight between yourself and your ego so you can look at it and watch it, and I can sometimes see a little flicker of my ego. And almost before I recognise the emotion, there’s a flicker of something — it’s almost physical. And you suddenly realise, “Oh, I’m getting cross.” […] Because otherwise you’re so enmeshed with your ego, there’s no chance you can do something about it. You have to be able to stand back from it, and begin to view it objectively without an emotional attitude towards it.'[17]
Eschewing an emotional attitude will allow you to disentangle yourself from your ego sufficiently to:
[…] go away, decide how valid the problems are… and fix them yourself. The people you have asked will probably suggest their solutions too. Ignore them completely. Smile, look interested, thank them and leave, because they have no idea what they’re talking about. Unless they are writers themselves. Then… listen carefully. But at the end of the day, you and only you must decide which criticisms and suggestions you accept.
While you’re considering all this don’t ask yourself who is right. Ask which idea is better.[18]
Cleese’s way of receiving criticism is similar to Lerman’s impression that the expected ‘mature’ reaction is to ‘quietly take it’ except that Cleese shows a determination to refuse to be wounded by the feedback. This refusal comes partly from the realisation that a work’s author is the ultimate arbiter of the validity of its criticism and partly from accepting that the criticism might help. The more mature way of processing feedback is to focus implacably on identifying the comments that will benefit you work, and, as Cleese says, this is a matter of choosing stronger ideas, not of conceding to those who suggest them. Striking this balance calls for a writers’ version of the Serenity Prayer[19] beseeching the Almighty to grant the serenity to ignore feedback that will not help, courage to accept the comments that will, and the wisdom to know the difference.
Notes and references
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