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.
Editing the New Thing and the Sparkly Ideas
I’m waiting for my agent to finish reading through my big picture edits (see the last post) of my adult fantasy novel, let’s call it novel X.
What does one do in this time, except drive themselves mad with anxiety? Well, if you’re me, you have a very long list of to-do jobs. When I was querying and then waiting for my agent’s edit points, I completed my YA fantasy novel, set in the world of Slavic sea myths. And now is the perfect time to do the edits on that draft. The. Perfect. Time. So what do I do? I come up with a shiny Middle Grade novel idea that keeps me up at night and sends me to the reference texts for research.
I bat it away and plow away at the YA novel, which I am enjoying, I truly am. And it keeps coming back. Just one sentence, just the opening line… it whispers in my ear. And twenty minutes later I find I wrote the opening scene.
“No!” I shout and go back to my edits. To the edits of that really hard scene in the middle, where the dialogue just didn’t feel quite right and I need to change that one word but I don’t know to what…
Still, the new shiny idea beckons, as I grapple with the muddle of a scene.
Just the rough outline. It’s in your head anyway. You might as well write it down before you forget. Because you will forget. Remember that short story you dreamt up? The one you don’t remember, because you didn’t write it down?
“It was a stupid idea. All I could remember was a live sea being carved up by aliens.”
Perhaps. But you remembered how it feeeelt…
And so I obligingly tap-tappity-tap away on my keyboard.
But I’m at my favourite café today, sipping a latte and feeling strong! So no more distractions, no more diversions, no more interruptions!
But you have this dialogue in your head already… Maybe you can just…
SHUT UP!
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.