E. P. Beaumont

One of the great things about beta reading other writers’ work is that it gets me out of myself and lets me leave my own stuff alone for a while. Now let’s get down to cases: most writers have a seriously narcissistic streak, and I have had some very unfortunate experiences with people who want me to read their stuff, but find some excuse to duck out of reading mine, everything from trashing mine when it’s my turn, or being unaccountably “busy,” or finding an excuse to end the working relationship before my turn comes around.

Lately, my luck has been very much better, in two respects:

The writing colleagues with whom I exchange beta reading regularly are hard-headed professionals, in the sense that they’re about improving their work and have no illusion that the first draft is the last. It’s the raw material, out of which a final work is carved. And they recognize the same benefits in beta-reading as I do: which is to say, that it’s easier to see the structure of somebody else’s work than your own, and that there are many different ways to write a novel.

That, and a number of pairs of us have set up formal barter arrangements for beta-reading.

I also have some number of beta readers who are not writers themselves, but passionate readers who have developed keen editorial antennae. Many writers confuse editing with copy-editing or line editing, but the most important editing for a novelist is at the grand scale: structure and logical plotting, which are the province of the developmental editor and the continuity editor. And it’s those beta readers I take as role models, because they have no particular esthetic program of their own, only a taste for stories that work.

What do I get out of beta reading other people’s work?

First, thorough immersion in a different approach to storytelling, different material, and often new genres. I’d never written horror or action/adventure before I read my buddy Devin Harnois, who infected me with such enthusiasm for her wild monster romps that I’m trying new things. She writes swift, clean ruthless prose; compare the length of her typical Six Sentence Sunday snippets to mine, and you’ll see what I mean. She does a lot of showing rather than telling, and most of her novels could be adapted to screenplays without extraordinary exertions. My writing looks different to me after reading hers, and I can apply her characteristic virtues (concision, spare and elegant action, muscular plotting) to enhance mine (layering and four-dimensional depth).

Dealing with somebody else’s problems can cast light on your own. Recently, I beta-read the second revision of Devin’s forthcoming novels Taming the Darkness and Not My Apocalpyse, came back to my own work and found that numerous editing and structuring problems had resolved themselves while I wasn’t looking. The structure in her work stands out because it’s different from mine; when I returned to my story, I could see what I hadn’t seen before. Learning to look at scene and chapter structure in someone else’s work teaches you to look at it in your own.

That brings us to another benefit. Working on somebody else’s editing issues is a useful form of procrastination that actually feeds the Muse. Whether with drafting or revision, I invariably hit a point where I literally can’t see what to do next. Going away and working on something else is really helpful at this point; it gives my brain the opportunity to solve the problem for me while I’m  not looking. There’s a natural rhythm to creative work, conscious effort and unconscious digestion, that sets us up for what’s popularly called “inspiration.” Novelists, mathematicians, visual artists, and engineers all attest to the experience of working very hard on a problem, turning away, and getting the answer when they’re not looking.

My favorite method for beta-reading:

1. Go through once, purely as a reader, making preliminary comments on things I notice (as embedded comments).
2. Follow up on a second pass to pick up anything I didn’t discuss before (particularly structural issues like chapter openings and endings, pacing, and plot resolution)
3. Write an overview of the ‘aftertaste’ of the story.
4. Follow up with the writer in an on-line or in-person chat. Dialogue draws out insights that don’t occur to me consciously when it’s me alone with the text.

Starting next week: Interviews with beta readers!

Doing the Beta Bop

Since I’ve been both giving and receiving beta-reading this year, I’ve been thinking a lot about the benefits. I’m going to explore this over a series of posts, including meditations on the mutual benefit of trading beta-reading other writers’ work, interviews with my own beta readers as well as writing colleagues, and conversations about the tricky passage from raw draft to finished work. I’ll be posting these on Wednesdays.

Things that I learned from my betas

It’s a little more obvious what a writer gains from receiving beta reading, so this post explores my own experience with that. Next week we’ll look at the benefits of giving beta reading.

Beta readers are awesome for recognizing patterns that indicate deeper themes and obsessions. Sometimes I don’t see the patterns in my work until someone else points them out. In Necromancer and Barbarian, my beta Truant noticed the vessel of the resurrection as a symbol, a simplification like a drawing or a scientific model; she reassured me that the internal monologue with the short-history-of-the-world wandered in a useful way, remaining firmly anchored to the story. She also pointed out symmetries in Erika and the Vampire: a so-called friend tries to procure the main character for sex, and then for death.

The specific feedback of beta readers suggests structure for subsequent revisions, both in positive and negative directions: by telling what’s there, and by pointing out the stuff that doesn’t work. For example, Erika and the Vampire, which is short by my standards (a mere 10,000 words) should probably read mostly as a series of scenes. I came to that conclusion because it was the scenes, the specific conversations and actions, that most strongly resonated with the readers. Erika’s own thinking about her world and circumstances also came in for commendation, but I want to be sure they’re strongly grounded in a really strong story. I’ve learned to ask myself if am I using narrative summary to avoid pain or conflict; those summaries should bridge from one significant scene, not elide the real events of the story.

That brings us to the question of foreground and background. In the raw draft of Erika, I think I did too much history-essay-type back-story, rather than letting it come out in casual asides. In dystopic worlds, the horror lies in how people casually accept the background, as in “Just that time of day, they would shoot the hostages outside the city wall” and further, “you could set your clock by it, when you heard the first crack of gunfire,”  alongside the picture of someone glancing at the clock and setting an egg timer.

The hardest part of revision is letting go of the first-draft version. I have to treat a draft as free-floating ingredients that can be altered, because I get attached to ‘this bit that I liked’ or ‘this bit that somebody else liked.’ I have to think about the story as a whole living organism that isn’t fully formed yet. The hard part is thinking: it can get even better. Beta readers’ reactions can help me to see the story that’s suggested by the first draft.

Different kinds of beta readers

I have a variety of readers, including ones who hardly ever give me written notes. Beta response doesn’t have to be written to be good. In the case of the beta reader who doesn’t write a lot of comments, we just talk about it after they’re finished, and then I write down what I remember. That’s helpful because generally the things they bring up are the ones that stick in their memory. The aftertaste is a really important part of the effect of the story.

Different kinds of starting conditions

Necromancer and Barbarian has five beta readers in all. Three are uncontaminated, and know only the premise of the story. The other two know the villain by name, and have listened to me carp about him since November.  They read Necromancer and Barbarian knowing who the villain was, so they were judging how well I’ve set it up. In January, I read them the character interview, in full more or less. This is the first time I’ve set out to write anything like suspense, so those two viewpoints are equally valuable.

Next week: What I get out of being a beta reader