The care and feeding of first readers

I promised a while back that I’d post on training first-readers (or beta readers, or critiquers, or whatever you personally call them). I already talked about the difficulty of finding good crit, so I’ll try not to repeat too much of that.

Working with first-readers starts with finding some folks who are  a) articulate people whose judgement the writer trusts, or is at least willing to listen to, b) willing to read and comment on your work, in exchange for similar commentary on theirs or dinner or whatever you arrange, and c) willing to listen to and, for the most part, live with whatever limits the writer sets, however idiosyncratic. In addition, it is usually helpful if the would-be critiquers read and are fond of whatever sort of fiction the writer writes. My mother would have been very nearly an ideal critiquer for me, except for the fact that she disliked and therefore didn’t read SF or fantasy, which meant that she had no familiarity whatsoever with the conventions and tropes of the field. This ended up making her critical comments practically useless – for instance, she’d object that a character’s reaction to an event was unrealistic because the event was so strange, when in fact the character’s offhand acceptance was supposed to show that in this particular fantasy world, that event was an ordinary, everyday occurrence. On the other hand, comments from someone who is unfamiliar with the field can be enormously helpful, precisely because they question things that folks in the field take for granted. It depends on the writer.

Once one has a couple of first readers lined up, the next and possibly most important thing one needs to do is some serious self-examination in order to figure out what sorts of comments one will actually find both useful and acceptable. Good comments tend not to get listened to if they are phrased in a way that infuriates the writer, or if they cover something the writer already knows is a problem but has set aside for now. Spelling and punctuation are good examples – some writers want to leave those for a last pass; some prefer to get as much fixed up front as they possibly can; some think they don’t matter at all. This can be a deal-breaker, if the writer thinks it doesn’t matter, but the beta-reader finds incorrect punctuation annoying and therefore can’t stand not to point it out.

After you have figured out what your limits are for critique, you need to tell your first-readers what those limits are, clearly and unambiguously. Doing critique – and getting critiqued – is all about being clear and unambiguous. The story can be subtle and nuanced; the comments need to be clear. If the writer can’t see where the problem is, or what the problem is, he can’t fix it properly. What constitutes clarity is something that varies from writer to writer. Some need the comments to be fairly gentle; others require being whapped upside the head with a two-by-four. Figure out which category you fall into, and tell your first readers. Then remind them, if they step over the line.

There are several jobs that first-readers can do, but some of them are mutually exclusive. It is up to the writer to decide whether the important thing is to get the proverbial “five pages of closely reasoned praise” or five pages tearing the prose into tiny shreds to be reconstituted later. I do recommend, however, that beta readers always be encouraged to point out things they liked – places where they laughed out loud, or cried, or couldn’t put it down; lines they loved; paragraphs or scenes they found especially vivid or moving. Otherwise, some of the writer’s best stuff can inadvertently disappear in the rewrite.

It may be useful – or necessary – to point out to your critiquers that it is not their job to rewrite the story, nor is it the writer’s job to agree with and correct everything according to their comments. This is more likely to be a problem if one is working with several critiquers via e-mail, where no one sees anyone else’s remarks and it’s easy to forget that other people may disagree. In a face-to-face crit group, where there are likely to be several very different takes on the story vigorously expressed, it’s generally less likely to happen.

Finally, the writer needs to remember that the critiquers are putting in a lot of time and effort to read and comment. If the writer never bothers to correct any of the problems pointed out, the first-reader is likely to begin to feel that there is no point to making comments, and slow down or stop. This doesn’t mean you do everythingthat your beta-readers suggest or comment on; it does mean that if you find yourself constantly rationalizing that A’s favorable comment cancels out B’s unfavorable one and vice versa, you need to stop and think whether you actually want comments from A and B or whether you just want them to say “Loved it; want more.” Either is valid; what is not valid is wasting your critiquer’s time if all you really want or make use of is those four words.

In a couple of days, I’ll do a post on the nitty-gritty of actually doing the crit. This one’s too long as it is.