Feedback is a good thing. A critique group is a good thing. But too many opinions from multiple sources can be too much of a good thing!
Too much critiquing can, in fact, muddy the water and be more confusing than helpful when you're trying to edit and improve a manuscript. I recently paid to enter a couple of contests in order to get some constructive feedback from other writers. It turned out to be almost a waste of time and money because so many of the judges' comments were in direct conflict with each other. While one judge loved the first couple of lines of my story, the other judge was not impressed. One was unsure of the conflict and where the story was headed, while the other loved the multiple conflicts and thought it might be hard to get everything resolved by the end of the story. One judge gave one of my manuscripts a 5; another gave the same manuscript an 8.5 (on a 1 to 10 scale).
I ended up no further along than I was before entering the contest. Which judge should I believe? I didn't know their background, what kind of books they read or write or whether they were published or unpublished authors.
A critique partner recently had a very similar situation -- so much conflicting feedback, that she simply had to put her manuscript away for a couple of weeks because she was so confused on which direction to go.
So what's a writer to do? When it comes down to it, we decided, you have to like your story. You have to like the flow, the characters, the plot, the scenes, the conversations. Reminds me of a song from a ways back -- You can't please everyone, so you've got to please yourself.
Truly, there are hundreds of thousands of books out there, and they don't all appeal to the same people equally. Just because one person doesn't "get it" doesn't mean the next person won't love it.
My thinking is that you take the information you get and study it, listen to what makes sense to you and discard the rest. If you get the same response from two or three trusted readers, consider yourself lucky and go with it. It's so fun when both of my critique partners make the same comment about one scene, character, sentence, word, etc. That's when I know I can confidently make a change that strengthens my manuscript. And that's a good thing!
