Peer Review

We’re a month into the 2025-26 Story work Groups, and I thought I’d share some thoughts I sent out to each group before we began this year. It can be challenging to know what to say to a fellow writer, when asked to read their work. But being part of a group and forming relationships with other writers whom you trust, writers who, over various drafts, come to deeply know your story in its ongoing drafts, is invaluable. And can make all the difference in hard times, when giving up seems the only option. I know I always feel better after meeting up with the people with whom I share work – their observations pull me out of the hole I had dug myself, and give me the necessary distance to see beyond my own self-criticism.

But what to say to another writer about their work, and how to be truly useful?

Here are the guidelines for the StoryWork groups I run. A list of 8. I hope you will find them interesting, and also that they will encourage you to form supportive peer relationships which are also specific and detailed.

 So, here goes!

1)        The purpose of giving feedback is not to correct.

2)        I’ll say it again. The purpose of giving feedback is not to correct.

3)        The best person you can be for any writer is an innocent reader, new to these words. Like a child with her eyes wide open, eager for an experience, eager to be told a story.

4)        In Story Work groups we start with the ‘green’, which stands for the sections, paragraphs, sentences in which you, the reader, were happily progressing, steady on the road, not necessarily knowing where you were going but happy to find out, getting small clues from the passing road signs. Green is NOT good, like an A+ on your report card. Green is a feeling. Of immersion in the story. Whole pages can be green – and this is what you are passing onto the writer, whatever elements of what you read in this submission were green. What drew you in, what kept you going, what made you wonder or expect something in the story ahead? In what places did you forget you were supposed to be giving feedback? Any elements, small or large, that made you smile or cry or laugh or worry, any elements that kept you turning the pages because you recognised the people, the world, as you know it and thought, yes, I want more…

5)        Another element very useful to reflect back to writers are the hints you pick up along the way about the story ahead – story arrows, I sometimes call them, which once they are launched, set up a promise to readers, that they will see these arrows land. Little hints about the future, and the past, about who these people are, where they are, what they want, should be woven throughout the story, and it’s really useful to note your experience of them on the manuscript as you read – i.e, ‘does this mean her mother is dead?’, ‘I’m now suspecting this character used to live in this house?’

6)        The next thing to communicate is the ‘amber.’ These are the places where you slowed in your reading, where you were tripped up, unsure. Where the road wasn’t clear. Where the fictional dream you were inhabiting was interrupted. This could be because of the way a sentence is constructed, or something you don’t understand about what someone said, or who was saying it, or it may be that you can’t see where a character is, where they’ve moved to. All kinds of things can turn the reader’s experience from green to amber, but the most important thing to remember about identifying amber sections, is that it is not a matter of taste. It is only a matter of clarity – your lack of clarity and your desire to see more clearly so you can stop being distracted and get back into the story.

7)        Which leads me to the last important point. In my work as an editor and a teacher, I am not here to make you write the story that I would, or in the way I would. The longer I have done this work, the more effective I hope I have become at seeking out and discovering who this writer sitting in front of me is, what they want this story to mean and say, and helping them write the best possible version of that. And that is your job as a peer as well. To lean into the sort of writing, the sort of stories this writer tells, or wants to tell, and do your very best to help them achieve this. The more I work in this industry, the more I see that these are the stories that find a home, the ones in which the writer has been deeply and specifically true to themselves, their voice, their knowledge of the world and what it is to live in it. And so we fellow writers are here to help them achieve this, by asking questions and then hopefully suggesting ways in which whatever they have expressed as their wishes in terms of this story, might be more deeply and clearly realised.

8)        This is privileged, lucky work. Enjoy it! Learn yourself from the feedback you give to others. Get lost in story. Let it surface. And never think that your first try at a story, a sentence, a page, a chapter, is the limit of what can be. Stories rise slowly, mysteriously. And if you’re patient and turn up for them, they will come.