Excerpts Lie

Here is the strange little ritual we’ve all agreed to participate in.

A writer appears, pale and hopeful, holding a chunk of text like a fragile offering. Not a whole story. Not a finished thing. An excerpt. A paragraph ripped from the body. A scene without its spine. They paste it somewhere public or semi-public and whisper the modern prayer:

“Feedback, please. Be honest, but gentle. I’m fragile.”

Sometimes they phrase it differently.
“Constructive criticism welcome.”
“Feedback that won’t crush my soul.”
“Please don’t be brutal.”

What they are really saying is:
Tell me the truth, but do it like you’re carrying a sleeping animal.

This is not a flaw. This is a survival instinct.

Because excerpts are dangerous. They are naked. They don’t have context to protect them. They don’t have momentum or payoff or the luxury of later chapters explaining themselves. An excerpt is a limb, detached, twitching on the table. And then we ask strangers to judge whether the whole body deserves to live.

Perfectly sane behaviour. Completely normal species.

I see these requests constantly. Writers pasting a few hundred words and bracing for impact. And I understand the impulse. Excerpts are easier than commitment. You don’t have to finish the thing. You don’t have to explain the architecture. You just slide the fragment across the counter and wait to see if anyone flinches.

Feedback on excerpts is a strange, intimate exchange. It is not editing. It is not a critique in the academic sense. It is closer to emotional weather reporting.

“Here is how this made me feel.”
“Here is where I leaned in.”
“Here is where my brain wandered off to make tea.”

And yet, writers often expect something else. A verdict. A prophecy. A definitive answer to the unaskable question:

Am I any good?

No one says that part out loud. We dress it up as craft talk. Prose quality. Pacing. Voice. But beneath the polite language is a raw, animal need for reassurance that the hours weren’t wasted, that the voice isn’t embarrassing, that the desire to write wasn’t a clerical error made by the universe.

So, let’s talk honestly about feedback on excerpts. What it can do. What it cannot do. Why does it hurt even when it’s kind? And why asking for “feedback that doesn’t crush my soul” is both reasonable and fundamentally impossible.

First, the uncomfortable truth: excerpts lie.

They lie because writing is cumulative. A sentence that feels overwrought in isolation might feel inevitable in context. A slow paragraph might be doing invisible labour you only notice three chapters later. A character’s flatness in an excerpt might be intentional erosion.

When someone reads an excerpt, they are not reading your book. They are reading a test sample. A swatch of fabric held under bad lighting by someone who doesn’t know what the finished coat is supposed to look like.

Therefore, when feedback comes back with comments like “I’m not sure where this is going” or “I don’t connect with the character yet,” that is not necessarily a failure. It is often just physics. Of course, they don’t know where it’s going. You gave them the hallway, not the house.

But here’s the second truth, sharper and less comforting: readers don’t owe your excerpt their patience.

They react to what’s in front of them. Not what you intend later. Not the brilliance you’re saving for chapter seven. The excerpt is judged as a moment. A voice sample. A first impression.

And first impressions are brutal because they are fast, unfair and sticky.

This is where the soul-crushing fear creeps in. Because feedback on excerpts often sounds like judgment of the whole self.

“This doesn’t grab me.”
“The prose feels heavy.”
“I’m confused.”

These sentences land with the force of existential accusations.

You didn’t grab me.
You are heavy.
You are confusing.

The mind does that translation instantly. No committee meeting required.

Which is why people ask for gentle feedback. They are not asking for dishonesty. They are asking for language that doesn’t accidentally stab their identity while discussing a paragraph.

Here is the thing many writers don’t want to hear but need anyway:
No feedback is neutral.

Even praise destabilises.
“This is beautiful” creates pressure.
“I love your voice” creates fear of losing it.
“You’re talented” raises the stakes of every future sentence.

Feedback is interference. It changes the system by observing it. You cannot ask for it without accepting some degree of psychic turbulence.

That said, there is a massive difference between useful turbulence and gratuitous cruelty. And too much feedback culture confuses bluntness with honesty, as if kindness automatically means dilution.

It doesn’t.

Honest feedback can be gentle. Gentle feedback can still sting. And soul-crushing feedback is often just lazy feedback wearing a trench coat.

“I don’t like it” is not honesty. It’s a shrug with punctuation.
“This is bad” is not a critique. It’s a drive-by.

Real feedback requires attention. And attention is rare.

Good feedback on excerpts does a few specific things.

It distinguishes between confusion and dislike.
“I’m confused here” is actionable.
“I don’t like this” is a dead end.

It names reactions, not verdicts.
“I lost interest in this paragraph” is information.
“This paragraph is boring” is a performance.

It acknowledges the limits of the format.
“I can’t tell yet, but…” is an honest boundary, not a weakness.

And most importantly, it talks about effect, not intention.
What the text did, not what you meant it to do.

Because intention is invisible. Effect is all we have.

Now let’s talk about the writer’s side, because that is where the real chaos lives.

Writers ask for feedback on excerpts for many reasons, and not all of them are craft-related.

Sometimes they are lonely.
Sometimes they are stuck.
Sometimes they procrastinate finishing the thing.
Sometimes they want permission to keep going.
Sometimes they want permission to stop.

Feedback becomes a mirror they hope will tell them which choice hurts less.

But here’s the trap: excerpts are too small to answer big questions.

No one can tell you from 500 words whether your novel works. They can tell you whether those 500 words hold attention, create mood, suggest competence, or repel them on a gut level. That’s it.

When writers interpret excerpt feedback as a referendum on their future, the pain becomes disproportionate. A comment about pacing turns into a verdict on worth. A note about clarity mutates into shame.

This is not because writers are weak. It’s because writing bypasses our defences. The text feels like us. Especially in early drafts. Especially when the voice is close to the bone.

When someone says, “This doesn’t work for me,” the body hears, “You don’t work.”

That’s why “feedback that doesn’t crush my soul” is such a common plea. It’s not melodrama. It’s an accurate risk assessment.

Now, a mildly inconvenient truth for everyone involved: your soul is already involved. It walked into the room with the excerpt. No disclaimer can escort it out.

What you can do instead is change how you frame feedback. Both when you ask for it and when you give it.

If you are asking for feedback on an excerpt, clarity helps more than fragility.

Instead of:
“Please be gentle.”

Try:
“I’m specifically wondering about the voice.”
“I want to know if the opening creates atmosphere.”
“I’m unsure about clarity in this scene.”

This gives the reader a job. Jobs reduce cruelty. Vagueness invites projection.

And if you are giving feedback, especially to someone clearly bracing for impact, restraint is not censorship. It’s precision.

You don’t need to fix everything. You don’t need to prove your intelligence. You don’t need to diagnose the entire book from a page and a half.

You are allowed to say:
“This part stayed with me.”
“This sentence snagged.”
“I wanted more grounding here.”

You are also allowed to say nothing at all, which is still vastly underrated as a humane option.

Now, let’s talk about the sarcasm, because it always shows up eventually.

Writers often ask for feedback “with mild existential sarcasm,” half-joking, half-hoping humour will soften the blow. Sarcasm becomes a buffer. A way to pre-empt pain by laughing at it first.

“I know it’s probably terrible.”
“Feel free to destroy it.”

This is emotional armour disguised as confidence.

The danger is that sarcasm invites escalation. Someone will always take it as permission to go harder. To perform wit instead of care. To mistake irony for resilience.

The truth is that most writers are not looking to be roasted. They are looking to be seen.

Seen does not mean praised. It means read with intention.

When feedback works, it feels oddly grounding. Even when it points out flaws. Especially when it does. Because it confirms the text exists outside your head. That it landed somewhere. That it made a mark, even a messy one.

When feedback fails, it feels annihilating, useless or both. Either the reader misunderstood you so thoroughly that you feel erased, or they skimmed so lightly that nothing they say connects to the work you thought you shared.

This is why feedback culture exhausts people. Too much of it is either careless or inflated. Too sharp or too vague. Too personal or completely disengaged.

And yet writers keep asking for it. Because writing in isolation is worse.

Here is the quiet truth no one advertises:
Feedback does not make writing easier. It makes it lonelier in a different way.

Before feedback, the struggle is private. After feedback, the struggle is shared but misunderstood.

You now carry other voices in your head. Some useful. Some irrelevant. Some corrosive. And part of becoming a writer is learning which ones get to stay.

Not all feedback deserves equal weight. Not all readers are your readers. Not all confusion is a problem. Not all dislike is a flaw.

An excerpt that repels one person might magnetise another. An opening that feels slow to someone craving plot might feel lush to someone craving mood.

When you ask for feedback on excerpts, you are not asking for the truth. You are collecting reactions. Patterns matter. Singular opinions do not.

One person confused is noise.
Five people confused in the same place is a signal.

One person bored might be a taste.
Everyone bored is probably pacing.

The soul gets crushed when we treat every reaction as a revelation.

And finally, the part no one wants but everyone needs.

No feedback leaves you unchanged.

Even the kindest reader will rearrange something inside you. That is the cost of letting someone touch the work. The alternative is silence, which has its own particular violence.

Ask for feedback, yes. On excerpts, on drafts, on fragments pulled from the wreckage. But ask with realistic expectations.

An excerpt will not tell you if the book is good.
It will not tell you if you are a writer.
It will not answer whether you should continue.

It will tell you how a moment behaves in the wild.

That is enough.

And if your soul feels a little dented afterwards, that doesn’t mean you failed. It means you made contact. Writing is contact. With language, with readers, with the parts of yourself you’d rather keep theoretical.

The goal is not to avoid being crushed. The goal is to become crush-resistant without becoming numb.

Which is slower. And harder. And worth it.

Even if we complain the whole time.

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