The Joy and Wonder of Beta Readers
I’m not impatient, not at all.
I’m just sitting here quietly, as my marvelous beta readers are doing their thing. For the uninitiated, beta readers are all of those wonderful people in your life (or on the web, depending on your preference), who are the first people to read through your novel (who are not you, or some version of you).
Those are the people who will ruthlessly point out anything that simply doesn’t work, that jars, that bores them. They are also, hopefully, the people who will tell you exactly why they love your manuscript.
I’m lucky enough to have a few people in my life, who I know will not sugarcoat it, and will tell me exactly where I might have lost the plot a little bit, or where the stakes are unclear. I have the good fortune of having two local writer-friends, each extremely talented in their own right, and each with completely different expectations/interests. In beta-reading context this works brilliantly for me, as each one of them will focus on a different aspect of my novel, and come up with a different way in which I can improve it.
One of my writer-pals is extremely plot-focused, expecting each page to hook her and bind her to my characters, so that she simply can’t put the book down. Because otherwise, she tells me, she certainly will. So no pressure there. Her no-nonsense approach keeps me on my toes.
My other writer friend writes what one would probably categorize as literary fiction, and she looks for the flow of the language, the mood and the tone. She’s the one to let me know where a sentence needs to be more staccato, and where the tone of the sentence lets me down. I listen to her note-full voice messages with fascination, like I’m invited to take a gander inside her head.
If you write, I highly recommend asking as wide a range of beta readers as possible to look through your manuscript, as they will all find different things which interest and confuse them. It’s the first taste of true readership, and you should savour it, for the opportunity it gives you to improve your work in ways which simply wouldn’t be possible on your own.
Big Picture Edits
I have just completed the “Big Picture Edits” on my last manuscript. My agent, has gone over my book with a fine-tooth comb and came up with an INCREDIBLY LONG list of things that don’t work/could work better/need expanding.
You know all those little lazy bit of writing you think will hide in the awesomeness of your plotting? They will be found out. All the slightly awkward bits of dialogue that you thought “oh, it will be fine“. It will jar on your reader as much as it did on you. And then there were all the little things I did not notice, for reasons varying from “I just love this character and will shoe-horn this conversation in, so it can shine its light upon all” to “well, I meant it to come across like this, so surely since it was in my head, you can see it too, in spite of me not having written a word for it to become apparent?”
All in all, the list of edits was about 100 bullet-points, some of which required barely a new paragraph, some which forced me to rewrite three chapters and add two brand-new ones.
And it was painful, I won’t lie. It took me over two months and extra 20k words But the book ended up being so much stronger as a result. I actually feel like it says what I need it to say now, and the characters are more consistent, more solid.
That’s the beauty of the editorial process, a collaborative one. It’s not meant to be easy.
So suck it up and enjoy the ride.
Writing Scenes of Pain
Now my writing is filled with a whole lot of pain and hardship and difficulties. Misery writes itself, as we all know. But that could lead you to the entirely wrong assumption that I enjoy inflicting pain upon my characters. I do not. The scene I wrote today felt as upsetting to write as it was for my MC(well, close at least). The current WIP is a first person narrative, which adds another level of upset to the whole thing. As I type I channel the sensation of touch, smell and taste into the descriptions, because that’s what my character is experiencing. There is a sense of responsibility here. If you make your darlings suffer, you have to make it good. Suffering not written well feels trite and like a betrayal of this person you have created.
And, unlike in life, suffering has to serve a purpose. We’ve all sat through a badly written show or movie where the protagonist seems endlessly knocked about, but learns nothing, does nothing, and the viewer in the end gets the uncomfortable impression the authors of the protagonist’s suffering are either a)getting some unsavoury sort of satisfaction from the whole thing or b) they keep writing the same thing in the hope the next plotline will eventually reveal itself. Which, as we all know, is the first sign of madness.
But here’s the rub: striking that balance, where the suffering of the MC serves a purpose but not in a too obvious and realistic way is the hard bit. And each time I take from my MC something they love, or inflict physical pain on them, I hope I get it right.
Character sketches
Now for something entirely different… When I write I like to do a few sketches here and there: mostly of my characters and maps, though I have in the past done larger illustrations too. I thought I would share a few of them.
It serves a purpose further than just indulging my love for art. It fixes the characters in my mind. Though they might and often do change within the time it takes me to complete a manuscript, taking the time to pause and commit their features to paper gives me a sense of where they are and where they’re going. And once the manuscript is indeed finished, it’s interesting to look back and see the snapshot of how I imagined certain elements of my WiP at each moment in time.
50 thousand words
Yesterday I reached the 50k words point in my new novel. There is something about reaching that mark that feels significant. Ten thousand words and I feel “wow, I’m writing this thing”, I reach twenty thousand words and I worry how much I still don’t know about this thing I’m writing. Thirty thousand words and the plan for the rest of the novel tends to reveal itself to me, so I can gleefully jot it down. I reach forty thousand words and I begin to question and doubt everything. Is my main character relatable or did I make every single side character more fleshed out instead? Is the plot nonsensical? Can I write? Do I know how to spell “bureaucracy” (generally yes, after a few attempts)?
And then I reach fifty thousand words. And the end is in sight, regardless of how long the novel is actually going to be (my first novel was a whopping 110k words, and the feeling was the same). Suddenly the bullet points of scenes get rapidly deleted, as I run out of the story and the book is done (or the first draft at least).
Now I know this, because this is my third novel. I didn’t know what my “process” was around my first novel. I was beginning to have an inkling with the second one. And now I look towards the fifty thousand word goal like a rusalka looks to a witless young man lost by her pond. I clock it, I pounce, and the rest is easy (if possibly unpalatable to some people).