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What do writers want from beta-readers?

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CathleenT

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I think the communication point is a very good one. Like greendragon, I've mostly had good experiences (batting the compliment back), but one time it fell apart due to a lack of communication in the beginning. For instance, I want to exchange LBLs. My work will be as good as I am capable of making it when I hand it to you. It will be as cohesive a narrative as I can write, with correct spelling and grammar (when appropriate - we all know dialogue is an exception).

But I went through seven betas on my first novel, and they all had valuable things to add. And if you don't LBL, you're stuck with vague things like 'too many adverbs,' as opposed to 'you've got three adverbs in this paragraph.'

I figure, I'm already there, I might as well note things as they happen to be of the most use. It just strikes me as the best use of time for both of us. But that's the sort of conversation that should definitely happen going into the relationship, I've found.
 
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Chase

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I want to exchange LBLs.

Yay! Big round of :applause:. I figured out LBL isn't lame boring losers or looking before leaping.

Yeah, line by line with inserts on the spot is more helpful critiquing, imo (I recently found out that means I'm mean [and] ornery in my opinion). :greenie
 
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RWrites

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When people ask for critique and beta readers, it's always different. What you have to give is an honest, unbiased critique that tells the writer that they can work on and what they are good at. Sometimes you will get the writer who wants the "I love it, keep going!" and nothing else critique. That's fine and you can give it to them, but if you really want to help them, give them a real critique. I have never had a beta reader for anything, but my dream beta is someone who is honest and will tell me what I need to work on/suck at, but won't berate me because of it. A person who is honest and tough, but will always encourage me to be more specific! To get more out of the author, ask them if they want it soft or brutally honest. if they give little details of what they want, ask them and few questions. If they give you nothing more, give your best critique and if they get mad because it wasn't what they wanted, there's nothing you can do. I hope this helps!
 

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I'm looking for honest, good-intentioned, decent people who love writing, and want to share their knowledge.

So, feedback that is constructive and shines a light on the good, but also highlights what doesn't work...and most importantly...why it doesn't work and how it can be improved.

Dead-end feedback: "This is too blah blah" with no idea as to why and how it can fixed is useless. I can't fix something if I don't understand what is meant.

I like to offer examples of how I might fix something, or to demonstrate what I mean on a particular subject.
 

JustinLadobruk

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My wife is an artist, university trained. Two years of critiquing, rooms of thirty people saying the good and the bad. We just had a conversation about this as I'm trying to parse through what is or is not useful in getting critiques on my work.

Unless the work is irredeemably flawed, a good critique should include one thing right for each thing wrong. All critiques should be in context and include reading the full work. I've had some people throw up their hands and refuse to read a short story over nitpicking the wording of a single paragraph or refusing to move past accented dialogue. If you can't read it through, then you have no reason to comment. You didn't like it; different strokes for different folks. That doesn't mean the writing is bad, that means the reader just didn't like it.

Speaking of which, in consultation with my wife, it is unlikely I will publicly post anything here to be critiqued. Public critiquing is not as useful as I thought it would be. If someone is interested in being a beta reader for me, though, that's different.
 

eqb

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All critiques should be in context and include reading the full work.

Not necessarily. At one writing workshop I attended, we had a couple critique sessions where we drew the "editorial red line" at the point where we had stopped reading. (If we had stopped, that is.) We then gave the author our reasons for stopping. Only if we wanted, did we read to the end and say whether we had changed our mind about the story, or if our original reaction held.

YMMV, but for me, it was a very useful exercise.
 

JustinLadobruk

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Not necessarily. At one writing workshop I attended, we had a couple critique sessions where we drew the "editorial red line" at the point where we had stopped reading. (If we had stopped, that is.) We then gave the author our reasons for stopping. Only if we wanted, did we read to the end and say whether we had changed our mind about the story, or if our original reaction held.

YMMV, but for me, it was a very useful exercise.

My wife: "So someone could read the first line, not like it, and completely miss the rest that is pure gold?"

Me: "Yes."

My wife: "That is the stupidest fucking thing I have ever heard. That's like saying, 'I don't like this corner of the painting so I'm not going to look at the rest of the painting.' In painting, if you have a weak piece, it is usually followed by the strongest parts of the painting to create a rhythm and break. People need a moment to breathe. The weak makes the strong look stronger and the weak look weaker. To not have weak pieces, to throw something out because it has a weak or underdeveloped part, is insane. Writing, books, are visual arts. You might not like a weak part, but that could turn out to be important later on, and you refused to continue."

My wife is just seriously blown away that this is how books are critiqued. Case in point goes to a part of a short story that I was told was the reason that people couldn't make it past a description in paragraph 4, but then that very description turns into a major plot point later on. Do we write what is best for the story or what is best for the widest possible audience?
 

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Do we write what is best for the story or what is best for the widest possible audience?

That all depends on your goal, I suppose, and how much you're willing to compromise one thing for the other.

For me, I suffer no delusions about what I'm writing ever getting published, at least not in my lifetime. So that's just not a goal, and therefore there's no choice to be made; I'm writing the story I want to tell.

What occurs after that remains to be seen.



O.H.
 

eqb

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My wife: "So someone could read the first line, not like it, and completely miss the rest that is pure gold?"

Me: "Yes."

My wife: "That is the stupidest fucking thing I have ever heard. That's like saying, 'I don't like this corner of the painting so I'm not going to look at the rest of the painting.' In painting, if you have a weak piece, it is usually followed by the strongest parts of the painting to create a rhythm and break. People need a moment to breathe. The weak makes the strong look stronger and the weak look weaker. To not have weak pieces, to throw something out because it has a weak or underdeveloped part, is insane. Writing, books, are visual arts. You might not like a weak part, but that could turn out to be important later on, and you refused to continue."

My wife is just seriously blown away that this is how books are critiqued. Case in point goes to a part of a short story that I was told was the reason that people couldn't make it past a description in paragraph 4, but then that very description turns into a major plot point later on. Do we write what is best for the story or what is best for the widest possible audience?

I should have added that this exercise was intended to give us insight on how editors read their slush piles. (Or agents, for that matter.) An editor might not read past your first page if the writing is clunky, or the pacing is off, or the author has dropped a metric ton of backstory before anyone could care about it. Now, editors and agents want a polished manuscript, where beta readers are there to point out problems, but if a writer is consistently receiving feedback that their prose isn't working, they might want to sit and take a think about why.

Note #1: Paintings aren't novels, obviously. We process them in different ways.

Note #2: If six readers tell you something isn't working and why, they are likely wrong about the why, but not about the problem.

Note #3: I always write what's best for the story.
 
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JustinLadobruk

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Note #1: Paintings aren't novels, obviously. We process them in different ways.

From a purely neurological perspective, yes.

Note #2: If six readers tell you something isn't working and why, they are likely wrong about the why, but not about the problem.

You see, I have a nice mix of readers either praising or condemning the exact same parts. The same piece of the puzzle, opposite conclusions. An accent praised by some as well done dialogue, and condemned by others as unreadable. A description praised by some as perfection allowing them to see a clear mental image, and condemned by others as too much detail that makes it boring. Depictions of reaction to trauma either condemned as unemotional, or praised as realistic (as in reality in the middle of severe trauma, the emotional part of the brain often shuts down, and everything feels like watching a movie). That breaks down to opinion rather than anything that can remotely be considered objective, or even ignorance.

Note: I use the word "condemned" rather loosely. Just what came to mind.
 

eqb

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You see, I have a nice mix of readers either praising or condemning the exact same parts. The same piece of the puzzle, opposite conclusions. An accent praised by some as well done dialogue, and condemned by others as unreadable. A description praised by some as perfection allowing them to see a clear mental image, and condemned by others as too much detail that makes it boring. Depictions of reaction to trauma either condemned as unemotional, or praised as realistic (as in reality in the middle of severe trauma, the emotional part of the brain often shuts down, and everything feels like watching a movie). That breaks down to opinion rather than anything that can remotely be considered objective, or even ignorance.

Then something isn't working, and it's up to you to figure out why.

I could speculate from here to beyond, but I won't. If you do decide to send me your first chapter, I will do my best to explain what does or does not work.
 

JustinLadobruk

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Then something isn't working, and it's up to you to figure out why.

I could speculate from here to beyond, but I won't. If you do decide to send me your first chapter, I will do my best to explain what does or does not work.

Or it could just be opinion. When two people take the same objective thing and have opposite subjective experiences, that's not a problem, it is opinion. There may be ways to make changes to appeal to both, or there may not be depending on the goal.
 

mccardey

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My wife: "So someone could read the first line, not like it, and completely miss the rest that is pure gold?"

Me: "Yes."

My wife: "That is the stupidest fucking thing I have ever heard. That's like saying, 'I don't like this corner of the painting so I'm not going to look at the rest of the painting.' In painting, if you have a weak piece, it is usually followed by the strongest parts of the painting to create a rhythm and break. People need a moment to breathe. The weak makes the strong look stronger and the weak look weaker. To not have weak pieces, to throw something out because it has a weak or underdeveloped part, is insane. Writing, books, are visual arts. You might not like a weak part, but that could turn out to be important later on, and you refused to continue."

My wife is just seriously blown away that this is how books are critiqued. Case in point goes to a part of a short story that I was told was the reason that people couldn't make it past a description in paragraph 4, but then that very description turns into a major plot point later on. Do we write what is best for the story or what is best for the widest possible audience?
Okay. Well books are different to visual art. You can't get a sense of the whole at one glance, but you can get a sense of whether or not it's been well-crafted, whether it will meet your taste, whether it's ready for consideration pretty early on.

Generally we try to be respectful of betas and readers (and writers) on these pages. Just so you know.
 

eqb

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Or it could just be opinion. When two people take the same objective thing and have opposite subjective experiences, that's not a problem, it is opinion. There may be ways to make changes to appeal to both, or there may not be depending on the goal.

And...okay. You've entirely missed the point of my posts. Given that, I won't bother with your chapter. Best of luck elsewhere.
 

Hbooks

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My wife: "So someone could read the first line, not like it, and completely miss the rest that is pure gold?"

Me: "Yes."

My wife: "That is the stupidest fucking thing I have ever heard.

The reality is, consumers of books can usually sniff out amateurish writing pretty fast. You may have more patience with it, and may pay to fill your Kindle with books that are so-so, but most consumers won't. Don't let this dissuade you from writing any way you would like. Do be aware that if you wish your work to be marketable commercially, you may have to make adjustments. YMMV. As for the comparison your wife made to artwork... eh. I would counter by saying my favorite books do not contain sucky parts. Slower parts, sure. Less amazing parts, sure.

And this is not to suggest every piece of feedback must be taken as the gospel. It is, after all, another human opinion. However, were I to get 5 opinions and 2 of them said a section was wonky, I would probably recheck it. That's 40% of readers who found something off. We, as the writers, are the least unbiased people involved in our own work.

My wife is just seriously blown away that this is how books are critiqued. Case in point goes to a part of a short story that I was told was the reason that people couldn't make it past a description in paragraph 4, but then that very description turns into a major plot point later on. Do we write what is best for the story or what is best for the widest possible audience?

Again, that sounds like a question of marketability. You can write whatever you want for you. If you want it to appeal to other humans, you may have to be willing to accept feedback from peers. This is true across all forms of art. Also, I wonder if this particular issue could have been one of craft. Sometimes feedback can't tell you exactly what is wrong or how to fix it, but is best at just identifying "this place is not working for me" for "X" general reason and it's up to you to fix it.
 
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JustinLadobruk

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And...okay. You've entirely missed the point of my posts. Given that, I won't bother with your chapter. Best of luck elsewhere.

One of two possibilities. Either I did get your point and you don't like my response, or I didn't get your point because it wasn't clear. No loss if you don't read the chapter.
 

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Honestly, mate, you sound like you've got a massive chip on your shoulder. Nor do you sound ready for critique.

There's a benefit to shorter critiques sometimes. If someone is new and starting out, then oftentimes yeah, a critique of early pages is enough to making changes. One of the best betas I ever had only read the first 5 chapters. And that was enough for me to rewrite the novel. Changing my approach to conflict, tension, description, sentence structure, the works. Problems in writing rarely exist in isolation.

Now that I've had somewhat more practice, partial critiques aren't useful for me. I need bigger picture feedback because (for example) I had a couple of chapters which read fine in isolation but had messed up pacing in relation to the rest of the book. In that case, yes, no amount of partial critique was going to help.

I would add to previous posters' point about agents and editors skimming the first 5-10 pages. Yes, in an ideal world they'd read all the way through, but we don't live in an ideal world; hence their decisions are made swiftly on early portions. (You get more leeway with editors if you're agented--most will read three or four chapters at least.) In probably 90% of cases, though, how a passage reads in the early pages is a good indication of the rest of the book. Not always, but most of the time. If a MS has a voice that doesn't appeal to the agent/editor, that isn't going to change. If it's riddled with errors, the writing probably needs work. And so on and so forth.

There is a place for reading smaller sections and whole works. Denying that one or the other is completely without merit is simply odd and short sighted.

Good luck with the beta search.
 
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mccardey

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My wife: "So someone could read the first line, not like it, and completely miss the rest that is pure gold?"

Me: "Yes."

My wife: "That is the stupidest fucking thing I have ever heard. That's like saying, 'I don't like this corner of the painting so I'm not going to look at the rest of the painting.'
It's more like saying "I am/am not prepared to spend the next few hours in a close examination of this painting".

Beta-reading (like reading in general) takes time. A good beta-reader (like readers in general) can decide pretty quickly whether they're the right person to invest that time, and whether this book is the best one for them to invest that time in.
 
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bleacher1099

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Perhaps it's better to ask the person whose work you're betaing what they expect from you. No one member will want the same thing. In the handful of times I've betaed, I always ask the writer what sort of feedback they are looking for and how blunt they want me to be.

The thing is, anyone whose goal is publication needs to get used to receiving blunt, uncensored feedback, without getting defensive about their work (I actually had this conversation with a co-worker yesterday). Because trust me, editorial feedback can be very, very blunt (but it always has the best interest of the story at heart).

Having been a beta reader for several people, two who have flourishing published writing careers, I agree. Set out the parameters of what's expected right away along with turnaround time for chapters/paragraphs, etc. Maybe the more you discuss what each other's goals are in the beginning, it might not be such a hard ending? It sounds like you're honest and truthful and that's what a beta reader should be, so keep up the good work I say!
 

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Generally from my beta readers what I’m looking for is comments about what they thought of the story and the characters. I like them to share their reading experience with me, their thoughts so that I can tell whether I accomplished what I wanted.

If they can fix my grammar/spelling/possible ocasional misuse of words that’s fantastic, but it’s usually something I don’t demand since it’s not “a service” I usually give to people when I beta read, since I don’t feel confident doing it and I’m afraid I might mess up something that’s already good. I can tell if a sentence is jarring, though, and like it when they tell it to me.

I HATE rude beta readers. Those that think that constructive criticism is completely destroying the author. I have had a couple of those. Once I swapped manuscripts: I beta read this MASSIVE 500k fantasy novel for a guy who was extremely vain. I gave him comments the best way I could, I was polite and I work hard to make his book the best it could be.

When he beta read my YA fantasy book he only pointed out all my gramma mistakes and when I asked him what he thought of the plot and/or characters he literally said he didn’t give a f*ck about my characters and wouldn’t bother commenting on them or the plot. So that’s been my experience.

Manners. Be polite to the authors who are seeking help. That’s what I’m looking for in betas, which isn’t sugar coating. It’s just basic human decency.
 
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Hmm... their natural thoughts. Would they put the book down mid way through chapter 1 if they were perusing a book shop? Would they recommend it to anyone? Grammar mistakes, swampy passages that could do with rewriting. Parts they enjoyed in a book. Parts they found boring. Which chapters they like more.
 

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I think it is the writer's job to say what they are looking to gain from the beta-read. Having been on both sides, it varies a lot.
 

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When people ask for critique and beta readers, it's always different. What you have to give is an honest, unbiased critique that tells the writer that they can work on and what they are good at. Sometimes you will get the writer who wants the "I love it, keep going!" and nothing else critique. That's fine and you can give it to them, but if you really want to help them, give them a real critique. I have never had a beta reader for anything, but my dream beta is someone who is honest and will tell me what I need to work on/suck at, but won't berate me because of it. A person who is honest and tough, but will always encourage me to be more specific! To get more out of the author, ask them if they want it soft or brutally honest. if they give little details of what they want, ask them and few questions. If they give you nothing more, give your best critique and if they get mad because it wasn't what they wanted, there's nothing you can do. I hope this helps!

Yes, slaughter my work and serve it on a big heaping pile of honesty. Lol
 
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