Is a feedback, or merely an opinion?

Last week Dawn and I were talking about feedback - talking about it in the context of my visit to the independent booksellers trade show and the strange phenominom that once you have written a book people feel like they know you. They touch you, they talk to you in a sort of presumptious way ("You know what you should do? Here's what you should do...."), they analyze your book's title right in front of you as if you're either blind and deaf or not present at all.

It's a bit much and as I was trying to figure out how to process all this I said something about staying open to feedback and Dawn broke in and said "Well, you know, they're not giving you feedback. They're just giving you an opinion."

We began to mull over the difference between feedback and opinions and came up with these things.

1. Feedback is solicited. You pass out a chapter at your writing group or ask a friend to read through your manuscript. This is totally different from strangers who just come up and start jawing at you.

2. Feedback is specific. It speaks to certain flaws or strengths within the work - "The dialogue at the top of page 29 doesn't feel realistic" or "Maybe this chapter should end with the image of the melting ice cream." It doesn't reside in general statements like "I loved this book" or "I just didn't get it."

3. Feedback is directed toward a work in progress. You solicit feedback because the book/story/article is unfinished and the things you hear might help you make the work better. Once it's finished, published, and in the bookstores, it's too late for feedback. All anyone can give you at that point is opinion.

4. When you take all three of these points together, it's clear that indeed the sole purpose of feedback is to make a work better. The person giving feedback isn't trying to force the writer into changing their story or shifting POV or in any way writing the book that they secretly wish they could write. The person giving feedback wants to make this book more of what the writer envisioned, not change the writer's vision. Opinions, I suspect, are more about what the reader wishes was on the page.

So...you know the old rant about opinions. They're like assholes - everybody has one. And this is true, that you can't let opinions hurt you very much because they're not really about you, they're more about the person who is speaking. That's hard to remember in the heat of the moment.

Next time someone offers me their opinion, I'll smile and nod and say "Thank you for your opinion." But I'll also try to let that opinion run over me like water. Because unless their thoughts about my book are a) solicited b) specific c) timely and d) truly in service of the quality of my work, they have no relevance. There certainly are a lot of words in the world aren't there?

Inhale. Exhale. Repeat.