As a pratical lens on this advice: people are excellent at giving feedback on their problems. They are terrible at identifying how to fix it.
"It felt too long" was right. The solution was not to make the story shorter. The solution was to look at the parts that felt long, and believe that feedback.
If you're building something, and your users tell you it's complicated or it's slow or it's not useful, they're right! The fix may or may not be to make it simpler, faster, or more useful. Maybe it needs to be organized better, or to create deliberate moments of action, or to be used at a different time. The problems are real, but the obvious solutions are not always right.
I’ve heard exactly the same advice re: focus groups. A focus group can give excellent feedback but terrible advice. Probably applies to comment sections in the modern day too.
So if they didn’t like your movie the movie probably is bad. But don’t listen to them about what they would change about the movie. They don’t know anything about the creative process.
A phrase I heard from a tv writer on a podcast was "note behind the note".
The gist of the conversation was about TV execs giving all sorts of bonkers notes all the time that are usually terrible. This writer tried to think about what might have triggered the exec to make a note. Maybe the characters are not engrossing enough, or the plot is too complex, or the dialogue isn't snappy enough. If the exec had been engrossed in the story they wouldn't have made a note. This writer rarely implemented any note from an exec, but did make all sorts of changes in and around noted sections.
This reminds me of the infamous Sid Sheinberg memo to Steven Speilberg and Bob Zemeckis on changing the title of “Back to the Future”.
https://imgur.com/gallery/producers-memo-to-speilberg-during...
“Behind the note”, it’s about emphasizing the goofy fun of the film, rather than the genre elements, and in that it’s right on.
I would never have gone to see a spaceman from Pluto.
This is true for casual users, but if you're getting feedback from enthusiasts or even experts, their solutions are often -- not always, but often -- quite good.
Yes. People who live and breathe your product should absolutely be listened to. Especially when they don't have the super-user tools you do for support (or unconsciously rounding off sharp edges).
> "It felt too long" was right. The solution was not to make the story shorter. The solution was to look at the parts that felt long, and believe that feedback.
smells like LLM
I liked Zvi Mowshowitz' summary of this: If someone tells you what's wrong, listen to them. If they tell you how to fix it, ignore them.
"Your audience is good at recognizing problems and bad at solving them" - Mark Rosewater (Lead Designer of Magic: The Gathering, from his famous "20 Years, 20 Lessons" GDC talk, http://magic.wizards.com/en/news/making-magic/twenty-years-t...)
I heard very similar advice from some investors. They said:
> If you ignore what we tell you its possible we'll fire you. However, if you do everything we tell you to do its almost certain that we'll fire you.
Very useful way to think about politics. Always remember that people have valid concerns you might not understand... but also that their solutions are probably terrible.
Yes! Unfortunately, some people with terrible ideas get elected.
Oh, every day citizens have terrible ideas too. Sometimes even worse. Sometimes our elected officials who "don't get anything done" are serving as necessary filters for those terrible ideas.
It’s exactly the opposite. Most concerns aren’t valid (even if and especially if they think it is) and most ideas for fixing things aren’t even contemplated let alone attempted.
What's an example of a concern that you don't think is valid?
It’s more like you should have 5-10 readers. If they all say the same thing they’re right. If half think the pacing is too slow and half think it’s too fast you are probably spot on.
It's more likely that your pacing isn't consistent and is both too fast and too slow.
There’s a similar situation in game dev. Players are very good at identifying problems - this isn’t fun, this feels too hard, etc. However, the solutions they suggest are often terrible, resulting in broken, unfun games. The same advice applies: Figure out what’s actually wrong and fix that.
Is that level really too hard, or did you just fail to properly introduce a new ability? Is the story boring, or is the story taking away from the enjoyable gameplay?
Totally wrong. Game mods constantly create game experiences that should have been there on day 1 and weren’t because dumbass devs refuse to correctly use the very tools they built.
Game after game you get some half baked feature kept gimped by poor choices of values from the developers, and a bunch of modders have to go fix it to keep the game good.
Rome 2 total war (divide et impera)
Empire at war (thrawns revenge)
Rimworld
Skyrim
Stalker (project gamma)
Blade and Sorcery
And so many more games are just like this!
Actually gamers and modders DO know how to fix the game and it does NOT break the game. Folks like you would argue that the “lethal” difficulty added to ghosts of Tushima “broke the game”.
Star Wars Jedi knight 2/3 are infinitely better when you turn instakilling with light sabers on. I had to do that in the games built in command line.
Game devs are fucking morons. The cello maker is not the cello player. The map is not the territory.
>Actually gamers and modders DO know how to fix the game and it does NOT break the game.
eehhhhhh if I was going to install a skyrim mod at random, I would probably hate it. Even if I did this 1000 times, I would probably hate 99%+ of them. In fact just in terms of volume these are all likely to be porn mods of some description.
Skyrim modding hours, and output, converted into paid dev time would be a disaster. ROI would be negative a few million percentage points.
You seem to be taking examples where an individual player can tailor an experience to be just what they want, and extrapolating it back to presume the developers, who have to make a game for a wider audience, are stupid somehow.
Its a bad opinion, based on nothing and very much in the mode of the modern gamer.
Maybe the developers should've put more porn in. (Hell, a lot of the time they know the game should have more sex, but leave it to the modders because of instructions from above and/or to maintain plausible deniability).
Maybe pick a more restrictive modding engine or cut out obvious fetish and meme material from evaluation? Even gems of games ala Factorio 1.0 aren't really as good as their peak mods ala Space Exploration. If you limited to larger scale overhaul style mods I think your economic argument starts collapsing quickly
Your obsession with volume and porn mods is a classic midwit deflection from the core reality of design competence. You are hiding behind Sturgeon's Law to protect the feelings of developers who cannot even balance their own spreadsheets. Nobody cares about the trash at the bottom of the pile when the peak of the mountain towers over the original vision.
Bringing up ROI is the ultimate sign of a hollow mind. You judge the quality of a meal by the cost of the kitchen staff. The actual taste of the food escapes you. Modders provide the refinement that these developers are too cowardly or too incompetent to implement. Those millions of hours of output you dismiss are the only reason half these games remain on anyone's hard drive.
The wide audience argument is the death of art. Catering to the lowest common denominator produces the exact kind of grey sludge you are currently defending. You mistake a lack of vision for professional restraint. You are the kind of person who looks at a masterwork and complains about the price of the canvas. You have no understanding of how systems actually function. Stick to your spreadsheets. Let the people who actually play the games (the way they should have been played, pushed to their limits with mods, hacks, etc) talk about what makes them work.
Vaguely related, there’s been a trend (thanks to submittable making it easy to add charges to submissions), of some publications offering editor feedback for an additional charge.
Aside from my general policy of never paying submission fees when I submit my writing, this particular service seems especially misplaced to me. I’m submitting my piece because I think it’s good enough to be accepted for publication. Paying that extra fee for editorial feedback is essentially starting from a position of, this isn’t good enough, in which case, there’s no point submitting in the first place.
Having been on the other side of that, there is a point. When an editor writes a rejection letter, aside from the fact that it already means what you wrote was better than 97% of what the editor saw that week, telling you why they turned it down isn't really quite the same level of feedback you get from an editor who has accepted a story and wants to get it over the proverbial finish line. A rejection letter is very broad strokes and first-impression. It's not actually editing. Editing needs a closer read, often a bit of back-and-forth with the author (I should say I learned a lot about editing in my younger days from both David Hartwell and Beth Meacham).
I read about a screen test of The Deer Hunter, in which people said the movie was amazing but the beginning (the hunt, the wedding, etc.) was too long. The producers cut a bunch of scenes and tried again. This time the feedback was, "the movie sucks."
I've found the traditional publishing industry really interesting. It's so hard to get approved or even noticed from the gatekeepers[0]. Even getting a rejection from an agent can take months. And agents are just the very first gate. Being agented can be lightyears away from getting published.
And after so many layers of gatekeeping and due process, what got to the shelves are like, uh, Kiss of the Basilisk. I mean it totally makes sense in from a marketing perspective, but the whole situation is a little bit funny.
[0]: used as a neutral term, not a negative one
I have noticed some publishers are changing the way they do things, sliding into writer spaces and looking for books that are nearly ready to be published but havent found their way onto the slush pile, because no human can actually digest a slush pile anymore.
Everyone and their LLM is flooding them with slop every day, it's no wonder it's hard to get any feedback whatsoever.
And even if you do get selected, you may fail for reasons that have nothing to do with the quality of your writing.
As far as I can tell it's nearly impossible to get picked up by a major publisher now unless you're bringing a very large social media following.
If you've got the social media following, your book can be really bad and it'll still get published (examples... abound). The book hardly matters, guaranteed sales via an audience you bring to the table (so, no work for them) is what they're interested in.
I mean, it was already nearly impossible, but now it's nearly-impossibler (nearlier-impossible?), with the social media following being almost necessary to make it even a very-long-shot instead of a no-you're-definitely-getting-rejected.
The best possible position is to have a breakout self-published hit. An author with that can hand the boring difficult expensive parts - print and distribution - over to a trad publisher, and keep the rights to ebooks, audio books, movies, and the rest, hiring negotiating talent as and when it's needed.
For breakout authors, publishers will often get in touch directly.
Agents are basically - well, I don't know any more. There used to be a point to them, but now they're running a kind of cottage industry of pointless gatekeeping for wannabes who will make pennies even if they are picked up.
It's not the same industry it was fifty years. It's not even the same industry it was twenty years ago.
A lot of wannabes haven't worked this out yet. They still think a proper author goes through proper channels, and is properly anointed with a proper agent and a proper contract.
And then most of them are surprised to discover their properly published book sells less than a thousand copies, and it's off the shelves almost immediately - because that's how print works unless you're a Big Name - and they can't give up their day jobs.
Well, perhaps Orsen Scott Card does not need editors’ advice. But odds are you do.
"Don't try to make a living writing genre fiction for established publishers".
The money in literary fiction is even worse.
You are basically working for exposure until someone puts it on a screen.
Someone should have edited him all the times he was spewing homophobic garbage.
Or when he wrote https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire_(Card_novel), lol.
This is a great blog post and very sound advice.
I, however, miss twitter's "twitterness". 140 characters and a link.
I am not sure how this is "sound advice".
Maybe in this case the editor's comments were not helpful, and maybe OP is right for that. I do not see how this generalises to a rule "do not take advice from editors that reject your manuscripts".
For one, in scientific publications, when you get rejected based on reviewers' comments, chances are if you send the manuscript to another journal the article will be sent to the same reviewers, and if unchanged will be rejected again. Not taking advice into account, as a general rule, sounds like very bad advice.
And he's clearly not talking about scientific journeys. Glad he didn't ask how HN thought before he posted this :)
> You don't need advice from editors on rejected manuscripts.
Continues to tell us how he did listen to the advice because the editor actually had a point that made the story better, got the book published and won him an award.
Yeah I think the lesson is that specific suggestions for what to do aren't as helpful as just hearing how someone else experienced your work, and then drawing your own conclusions about how to fix that.
Bug reports should describe the problem but often shouldn't try to prescribe a solution.
It's technically correct in that you don't always need it, but it can be useful if offered.
It's only a failure if you give up and stop moving
There’s one person I really wish still posted here. He’d light this place up.
Did Orson Scott Card ever post on HN? Does anyone know which username?
Someone you get nuked to hell here for mentioning.
I don’t need advice from Orson Scott Card.