Dear Writer,
Congratulations! We are pleased to inform you that you have made it to the fourth round of Feedback. Our organization received thousands of submissions this year, but your work truly stood out to us as worthy of tweaking and changing and fixing and killing and resuscitating and redoing and killing again and, oh wait, it’s back, please, dear God, no, please PLEASE let it just die already. Okay, wait I can give this one last go but also I want to cry in the bathroom — just kidding; I already did. Not once, not twice, not thrice, but four times.
We understand how grueling rounds of Feedback can be, but also, we don’t really understand, so we’ve decided to invite you to our (maybe?) final (but probably not?) fifth round of Feedback. Before you advance on to the next round, we just have a few more questions for you to answer:
- Do you remember the work you submitted for your first round of Feedback? To be honest, we don’t really remember it or why we liked it, but something about it stood out to us. Maybe you could recapture that but in a fresh, new, and memorable way this time? Just the parts we liked but can’t remember right now.
- We really appreciate what you did (or tried to do) with your fourth round of Feedback, don’t get us wrong, but maybe you could try something similar, just with more tension baked into it, like a tension-filled pie? Just dial up that tension to 350 degrees and Let. It. Bake! But also, please be careful that it is not too tense. It must be tense but in a… relaxed way. We don’t want to make anyone uncomfortable! Please explore this through the lens of tense-relaxation.
- You had a line in your second round of work… WORK IN PROGRESS, PLEASE DISREGARD. It feels like there’s something here worth exploring: work…in progress…it’s a pretty deep and incisive thought. Can you say “meta”? Anyway, just think about it.
- Have you seen this music video about animated carrots? It has nothing to do with your writing, but maybe it will inspire you. Actually, write something like this music video featuring animated carrots.
- Bad idea, don’t use this idea (seriously), but what if you just, like, took your idea and changed it entirely to my idea? Haha, this is seriously a bad idea, don’t use it. Just do something like it. Or else.
- You know what on second thought, just use my idea because it is mine and not yours.
- Ah yes, I see you’ve already created new work based on the animated carrots ask. Brilliant! But my intern said carrots are kind of out now so let’s avoid entirely. Hopefully, you didn’t spend too much time on it!
- I know we’ve been talking about this work like it’s a piece of writing, but what if it was, say, not a piece of writing? What if, instead of submitting your writing, you performed an interpretive dance that expressed the idea through movement? Or, like…did something with a rubber tire, or created an idea based off of a partnership with Lyft? You know what, what if we just turned the whole thing into a carrot? Lol that would REALLY turn heads…
- I really do like the “idea” of your work, but the way it was executed feels off to me. Why? Look, it’s your writing and it is your job to figure that out! I won’t sit here and hold your hand!
- We completely understand that you’ve spent a lot time on your first, second, third, and fourth rounds of Feedback, but unfortunately we’ll need you to work the weekend on your fifth. Why? That information is confidential, but it probably has something to do with our own sad need for personal control, or just because we’re inconsiderate. Lol!
Following the fifth round of Feedback, your work will either survive as some barely recognizable piece of something so different from your own initial vision you’ll wonder if you just straight up blacked out while making it, or it will enter the last, ultimate, and most likely round of feedback: Death. Death is typically reserved for those who put their whole heart into their work and almost, almost almosttttt saw it live, but instead saw it disappear into an email chain that probably ended with something like, “at least we gave it our all!” or, “we definitely need some drinks after this!” and a GIF of Kristen Wiig on an airplane in Bridesmaids.
We wish you all the best in the next round!
Sincerely,
The Feedback Committee