A Place to Find Useful Feedback for Your Novel

Every year, we’re lucky to have great sponsors for our nonprofit events. Scribophile, a NaNoWriMo 2015 sponsor, is offering all NaNoWriMo participants free basic membership. They asked writer Sid Jain to share his experience with their critique community:

I discovered Scribophile through NaNoWriMo 2015, after my novel limped to 15,000 words before the month ended.  I realized I couldn’t finish it in a vacuum. I had been sending my writing to friends, who mostly ignored my messages, but sometimes replied with a quick “nice work.” It became clear I needed to look elsewhere to get feedback on my writing.

I joined a story-exchange site, posted a chapter, and waited. A “like” trickled in. Somebody put my chapter on their to-read list. Crickets chirped. My morale slumped. I knew my story had potential, but I also knew I needed other writers to read it first. I needed someone to tell me how to improve my work.

What I needed was Scribophile. Scribophile promises critiques of your writing by other writers. At first, I was skeptical. Having been involved in a critique group for music composition, I knew the concepts of “crit for crit” and of forming mutually beneficial relationships. But I had also seen them devolve into back-scratching fawn-fests with few gainful responses. Scribophile claimed otherwise: “Scribophile is famous for the detailed and helpful critiques our members exchange.” I dove in. 

I immediately felt Scribophile was unique. The karma point system that drives the process of giving and receiving feedback, in a nutshell, works. You get enough of a head start to ensure that only a few critiques of others’ writings will allow you to post your first piece. That piece will immediately appear on a highly visible main page, and you’ll get a quick evaluation from at least three other writers. 

The feedback on my first work was so overwhelmingly useful and so unexpectedly quick that the first bit of writing I did after reading those critiques was orders of magnitude better than the work I had posted. The feedback was an excellent mix of praise and criticism. This reinforced my belief in my ability while also showing a glimpse of the technical skills I needed to master to improve my work. To show you the level of detail critiques at Scribophile provide, I, on average, received an eight-hundred-word critique for a three-thousand-word chapter.

Receiving helpful criticism on my writing was what brought me to Scribophile, but interacting with other members outside of the critique-write paradigm is what keeps me there. Networking with writers at various stages of their journey has been a humbling and encouraging experience. While I’ve only been here a few months, I’ve already forged bonds between like-minded writers on similar writing journeys.

Getting feedback has been invaluable, but providing feedback has been an educational experience all on its own. Finding ways to improve someone’s writing allows me to reflect on what I think good writing is, and being able to articulate that in words is extremely educational.

If you, like me, have been finding it difficult to get someone to read your work and provide useful feedback, then you owe it to yourself to give Scribophile a try!

Sid Jain is a biotechnologist at a biopharma company in North Carolina. His science-fiction mosaic novel, in the vein of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas and Ghostwritten, follows five characters on a future Earth colony in a transformative age of their planet’s history. The novel is tentatively titled Monolith, and a sample chapter is available on Scribophile to preview.