FEEDBACK
GET FEEDBACK DESIGNED FOR BETTER CREATIVE MOMENTUM.
Creative work is complex. Character, plot, environment, tone, stakes, humour style - all interwoven - all being communicated at once.
At some point most writers either a) want to share the work because they’re excited about it, or b) want to share the work because they’re worried about it.
Neither of those are the ideal moment to seek feedback.
The moment to open up for feedback is when you know what you are trying to achieve with the project and you’re interested in finding out how well you are doing in that endeavour.
Because of the nature of creative work we almost always develop blind spots with our own material. Places where something is missing, has been repeated or miscommunicated, in a way that we can’t actually see ourselves.
You have gotten feedback in the past. Maybe from competitions or from professional readers. Sometimes it reads like a set of personal opinions packaged as ‘notes.’ Or, predications about how the industry would theoretically respond to your writing with suggestions about how to adjust the material based on those projections.
These notes can easily feel hard to take - or frustrating. Everything is subjective. Speculation about how easy or hard something will be to sell is exactly that - speculation.
Most importantly, even when there is value in that kind of feedback, it often lands with a thud. It’s not energising. It spells out all the ways you got it wrong and emphasises how much work is required to make it better.
That’s not what’s happening here.
“…my work had already been through three mentoring programmes, through creative writing scholarships in the UK and had nearly been longlisted for a novel competition, yet it was still sitting in the drawer with little prospect of being published. I knew there was something wrong with it, but I couldn’t quite grasp what it was.
Reading Portia’s feedback was like opening a new gate within a confinement. I could suddenly see what was lacking in the construction of the character and what needed immediate refinement. Portia’s feedback creates a sense of urgency while remaining encouraging and refreshing. For emerging writers like me, I highly recommend her service.”
Bang Wang, UK
Sometimes you’re polishing dialogue but the character’s key relationships feel fuzzy and this is muddying what could be vivid dynamics. Sometimes you're sure you need to restructure the first act but the tone of your writing shifts in a way that’s disorienting. That tonal shift doesn’t need to be flattened, it needs to be better defined. Sometimes you're searching for a better ending when the opening hasn’t introduced the story clearly enough to get the reader fully invested.
The longer you continue in that direction, the more attached you become to those choices. And the work grows more complicated, because you've built layer upon layer on top of a problem that was never identified.
Good feedback doesn't just seek to improve the current draft. It can change the direction of every draft that follows. Clear observation delivered in a way that also holds you, the writer, inside its comprehension of the work, can save months of rewriting, boost confidence and encourage the momentum that carries a project to completion.
This feedback is a focused response to your work, specifically to how it’s landing. I describe what I’m getting from your writing. What I think I understand clearly. My perception of the characters and why I perceive them in that way. Where I get confused. Where I think the writing is working hard. Where I think it could be working harder - and why.
It's a description of what's on the page and what could be there.
➜ Crucially it’s factoring in you as the context.
Most feedback services view the work in isolation - and this does a real disservice to the writer. Especially with a work in progress, you need to be factored in. You’re the human doing the writing. Your enthusiasm for the next draft, your stamina for onward motion, your sense of where you’re achieving your aims and where you can refine the writing, is key.
The most valuable feedback interrupts you at the right moment, rearranges your assumptions and asks questions that train your focus. This is crucial because it can be incredibly easy to refine things that are already working. But this makes it harder to see the stuff that really needs attention.
£100
HOW IT WORKS
You send in your first 10 pages and you’ll get notes back that cover:
✱ Big picture estimations
✱ Character analysis
✱ Writing focus (2 - 3 specific edit suggestions)
✱ Key questions, carefully chosen, designed to encourage your next draft.
Why the only first 10?
➜ Takes less time, which keeps the cost down.
➜ Means you can pressure test an idea by writing just the opening 10 pages.
➜ Limits the exposure if you’ve written a full draft but don’t feel ready to share the whole thing.
“Portia's feedback is thorough and insightful. Most importantly her feedback helped to elevate what I was trying to say. Feedback from others will often come as a wish list of things the reader would do in their story, rather than give insight into what is or isn’t working, based on what I’m attempting. Portia's ability to understand what I'm going for and to help point me in the direction to improve it has proven very helpful.”
Joey Pelletier, US
YOUR READER
I’ve been writing all my life. I first started trying to write screenplays about 20 years ago. For a long time, what came out was inconsistent and confusing. This wasn’t fun.
Now, I write with ease and enjoy a lot of the process.
Over the years I received many different kinds of feedback. It almost always required a lot of ‘decoding.’ The readers rarely acknowledged their subjective take on the work and phrased the feedback as if it was objective. This frustrated me - so when I started teaching filmmaking to university students, I was always careful to organise my response in a way that owns my perspective.
My opinion, overall, is that the healthiest creatives are the true authority of their own work. My goal as a coach is to help you move toward that place by offering considered, well designed feedback as a crucial part of that process.
wondering how what you’ve written is landing?
✱ Time to find out ✱