Beta Reader Do’s and Don’ts

The holiday season is always a bit tricky when it comes to blog posts. I generally take the week off between Christmas and New Years, so next week will be another Open Mic, available for whatever people want to discuss (or just for exchanging holiday wishes). I’ll

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Finding Beta Readers

Every so often, I get asked about finding beta readers. This is my take: Step 1: Decide what you want from a beta reader. Some writers want (and need) encouragement—the proverbial “five pages of closely reasoned praise.” Other writers want something specific; they want to know if

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Writer’s groups

The community here has done a bang-up job of making suggestions for finding a writing group in last week’s Open Mic comments, but I’m going to add my two cents here. It’s been a while since I talked about writing groups. And the first thing I have

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Comments from the Writer’s Side (part two)

Generally speaking, pre-publication critical comments fall into two broad groups: reader reactions (“I started skimming right here.” “This whole section confused me.”) and specific suggestions (“Have ninjas leap through the window!” “I think you should cut the grandmother character.”) Both require some thought, but along different lines.

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Comments from the Writer’s Side

LizV said: Learning to judge what feedback to take on board and what to disregard may well be the hardest lesson a writer has to learn. I mostly do it by gut instinct, but sometimes it’s taken me six months to be able to articulate why a

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What I Didn’t Expect To Get For Free

Different writers get different things “for free” – that is, different techniques and skills come naturally to different writers. I learned this early on, but it took years before I realized that I needed to apply that knowledge to more than my own first draft, and years

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Surprises and Themes

A while back, I was talking to an Earnest Young Writer, who informed me with great intensity that the story she was writing had a Theme, and that she couldn’t do anything about certain objections she was getting from her beta readers because that would destroy what

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Getting good critique

That last post of comments segues nicely into this one, which is about critiquing and being critiqued. Good critique is hard to find. There are several reasons for this, starting with the fact that “good critique” means different things to different people. Some folks want the proverbial

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Comments on Wolf’s snippet

Alright, last week I promised Wolf that I’d do some comments on the bit he used as an example. For those who didn’t see it or don’t want to go back and hunt it up, here it is:       “I’ve often wondered—why did your people send only

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