I told 47 people what I really thought of their short stories in one night, and only 3 got mad at me

Henry Roberts · 2026-09-15T13:40:04.008516+00:00

Last month I went to a writers meetup in Fresno and the host set up this thing called Honest Hour where you read someone's pages and give them your real reaction, no soft talk allowed. I figured maybe half the room would bolt or get defensive, but I read for 47 people over the course of the night and only 3 of them got mad, and two of those three were mad at the guy next to me, not me. The weird part is the people who got the harshest notes thanked me the most, because nobody in their normal life tells them the middle of chapter two drags or that their ending doesn't land. One woman handed me her pages and said her husband reads everything she writes and loves all of it, and she looked almost relieved when I told her the truth. I left that night feeling like we all walk around starving for real feedback and just keep feeding each other polite nothing. So my question for this group is, when you give brutal honesty to someone in person, do you pull your punches at all, or do you say the whole thing and let them deal with it?

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I told 47 people what I really thought of their short stories in one night, and only 3 got mad at me | Brutal Honesty - Talk Freely