Beta Reading for Unicorns
You get one perfect moment after you type “The End” on a first draft. As a reward, you are allowed to let out mile-long sigh and close your laptop. Maybe you go for a walk and realize that while you had been typing for months or years, seasons had come and gone, and it’s spring again. The air is clearer. The sun is brighter. Your head feels lighter without the tenacious buzz of ideas for your work in progress.
But after a little while, probably not even an hour, you start thinking again. It’s just a first draft after all and you know you’ll need to go over the whole thing a few times. Do a search of all the adjectives that you overuse. (I have a strict and necessary rule to only use “robust” once per piece.)
Writing, for all the loneliness and frustration, has one key advantage: it’s all up to you. You have to do the work. You have to find the time. You get or don’t get the inspiration. You. You. You. But once you’ve done all that you can, it’s only half alive.
Something written must be read to be complete.
You need a reader. And it can be anyone, but it cannot be you. Not you. Not you. Not you. Ideally, you’d want someone other than your editor to read it once through before you send it to her. And that’s if you’re lucky enough to have an editor. Maybe you just want an editor. In the meantime, you need a reader to catch all the really obvious missteps so that you can maintain a fiction with your professional support, once you get some, that you are the genius they think that you are. You need a dispassionate and uninterested reader who can tell you what they liked, what they didn’t, and best all, what they don’t understand. All the details that you kept in your head while writing, but forgot to put into words.
When I was writing my first book, I kept a notes app page of everyone who ever said those five magic words after hearing about my book: “I’d love to read it!” In my naivety I thought that they actually meant it. A couple did. (Bless their beautiful goodhearted souls!)
Most did not.
I don’t hold it against my friends that they were just being nice. That what they actually meant was that if I ever got published, and sent them a free copy, they’d put it on their bookshelf and occasionally spot it up there and think, “Oh hey, that’s my friend’s book! I must be pretty cool to know someone who got a book published. I’ll read it someday. Just as soon as I finish Netflix. Literally all of Netflix.”
Though, I’ll admit it hurt my feelings to send out my work, my heart, my baby, my opus, send it out into the world on the wings of a very thoughtful email, and then not hear back, not ever. And the next time I saw that person I thought about the fact that they never read my book, or if they started it, they never got far enough to have any thoughts about it, or if they had thoughts about what they read, they never shared those with me even though that was the entire point of asking them to read it.
I tried another tack.
I attended a couple of writing workshops with the express purpose of making friends with other writers. Surely these people, my people will know how important it is to have your work read. I found a couple of really lovely people who very much wanted to meet me in coffee shops to write and complain about writing. What if we do an exchange? I proposed. I’ll read one of your chapters, and you can read one of mine.
“Great,” they said. “Here’s mine.”
Giddy with my success, I’d spend a whole evening annotating their work, finding things I loved but more importantly, things I didn’t understand:
Above, you’ve got the mother stepping into a robe after her shower, but now she is going outside--did she get dressed? Is her hair still wet? It’s winter!
If your one night stand is actually a ghost, as we find out later, it would be nice to add eerie breadcrumbs so that the reader can sense that things are not as they seem. Maybe say that her hair was blowing though you didn’t feel any wind?
I realized that I loved beta reading. I read a ton of books anyways, and my unofficial motto is “I have a lot of questions.” Beta reading means that I can ask the writer all the questions that emerge as I’m reading anyways.
Sadly, my new writing friends didn’t feel the same way. I never got a reciprocal reading of my work. I still met them in coffee shops. “Sorry,” they’d say, “I just haven’t gotten around to yours yet. Can I send you a new chapter?”
