Zen and the Perfect Beta Reader

Growing up wanting to write was easy for me.  I just locked myself in whatever refuge of the moment I could find and started jotting down scenes in my spiral notebook.  I was about eleven or twelve years old when I remember I started on my first scribblings.  Something about flying an experimental jet -- this was around the time that Clint Eastwood starred in Firefox -- so I count myself lucky that author Craig Thomas and Warner Brothers Studios didn't sue me at such a callow age.

Ernest Hemingway with sons Patrick and Gregory in Finca Vigia, Cuba, circa 1942; ( Source: Ernest Hemingway Collection, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library; photo in the public domain)

Years later I found a stack of those drafts in a dusty box on a shelf, and littered among the entrails of dialogue, I noticed that I actually wrote this line:  "He looked at her with his eyes."  I read that several times over and thought, holy fuck this shit was bad.

Hence the need for beta readers all these years later.  They are today's literary DEW line, the censor chip that keeps you from getting laughed at, assaulted, or lambasted in a death-by-Facebook-post screed.

Another reason for beta readers is the changing landscape of digital publishing, where now any Tom, Dick or Ibrahim can go to Amazon or Goodreads or what-fuck and broadcast their self-styled ravings to the world.  Traditional publishing, despite its quasi-caste system of selection and induction, at least offered the hallowed halls of venerable editors, those learned men and women who helped a budding writer navigate prepositional phrases, onomatopoeia and other words that are really hard to spell.  Relying on your own sense impressions is far riskier these days because the myopia toward your own shortcomings will burn you down the road.  It will cost you either readers, or worse: the lost impact of an intended emotional effect.

Maybe you feel you don't need one.  Maybe you like to write and run it off your inkjet and just throw open a window and toss your stuff out to drift down to the waiting masses like scraps of confetti.  In which case you probably don't need any kind of filtering process, just a blog and the directions to the nearest Amazon KDP signup page.  More power to you.

But for the rest of us who are either too narcissistic or too dense to recognize our own faults, that quasi-private fourth wall is a critical component of story engineering.  It can range from realizing that you're using the word now too often, to finding out that you completely missed wrapping up the story thread of a particular character.

Now here, the matter mustn't be bungled, as Tom Wolfe wrote of proper death notifications in The Right Stuff.  You don't want to land a beta reader who doesn't know what the fuck his or her job is.

Do you know what that job is, though?  If you want to screen your readers carefully, you need to know what you're looking for.

But am I taking you on a philosophical jaunt, prescribing idealized qualities and quoting Spinoza and Walzer like those arrogant sacks of shit who permanently roost on college campuses to toil on their seventh master's degree?  Fuck no.  Extolling the so-called virtues of pedigreed knowledge and tallying the sum total of a person's worth based on how much ivy grew on the walls of their overpriced institution is not my thing.  A beta reader could come from any walk of life: butcher, baker, chicken sexer.  If you're going to be that picky about your beta readers' typology, you're going end up writing for an audience in the single digits.

Which is not to say that you want to land just any pig off the farmer's market, either.  Let's go over what a beta reader should not be.  I'm not asking anyone to be elitist here.  Consider these less as qualifications and more as red flags.

• The ones who are "just so busy right now."  Probably the loomiest of red flags that ever loomed.  These are likely the people who tell you constantly that they love to read in order to appear erudite in the waiting line at Starbucks, but you never see a book in their hands and they like to text while you talk to them as if they're afraid of missing out on something more financially beneficial than the conversation you're having.  Strong though the temptation may be to ask them to peruse a few chapters, resist that impulse.  They'll give you the same pat excuses they use for every dimension of their lives.  The rule of life in general applies here as well: if you have to beg them, it isn't worth it.
• The ones who are "still working through it."  Let's be blunt, these people may have started reading the first few pages but they have no intention of finishing your magnum opus.  Maybe they agreed to read your stuff just so they could see how crappy your writing might be and laugh about it with their friends on Facebook; maybe their efforts are well-intended and they are kind-hearted; in either case, if they can't provide feedback they are not helping your predicament.  If they are in the latter category, they may feel a little hurt when you tell them that you want your stuff back; the best bet is to just say you rewrote the material entirely and they needn't worry about reading any further.
• The ones who sound like they know more than you do.  Run.  With these, you just fucking run.  These people read Catcher in the Rye and will wax on about the cultural zeitgeist of Holden Caulfield's isolation in the post-World War II economic boom.  They watched 2001: A Space Odyssey and will compare Kubrick's epochal, antiseptic approach to futurism with Blomkamp's grittier ethnocentric pathos in District 9; they will assure you that they've "kept up" with Stephen King's latest works but all they can remember is that really scary clown.  This last motley set of cohorts is particularly pernicious because their brand of venom poisons you with self-doubt and extorts you into thinking you've made major blunders in writing style, dialogue, scene arrangement, etc.  They question everything without a fundamental understanding of the genre you're working in or the general wheelhouse of the creative writer.  These loose-cannon editors may have some tidbits of helpful advice for you, but they take it too far and ultimately it may cost you your motivation to keep writing.

Notice the stages of beta reader evolution here?  The first bunch has to be forced to read your stuff at gunpoint; the second group procrastinates and never seems to get around to an actual review; and the third group, you won't be able to get them to shut up.

What about professional editing services, you say?  Well, I grew up in the days when the gifted Lawrence Block wrote the fiction column for Writer's Digest (and that was quite a while ago).  His advice on this topic then still rings in my ears today: if you want to make a decent living at writing, the whole point is for folks to pay to read your stuff, not the other way around.

I'm sure I'll be pissing off many a self-employed professional who hangs up a shingle and bills you to read the tea leaves of your latest novel in MS Word.  But I grew up learning the craft of writing and then learning that other craft of self-editing.  You're a writer and that makes you the ultimate artisan; you are expected to be well-rounded, to know your shit.  I would never cede control of my work in the early stages of development to someone who operates a fee-based service.  You may lose the authorial voice, leech out the style that makes your writing unique, and ultimately feel like it isn't what you were trying to write in the first place.  The narrative has to feel right to your ears first and foremost.

So, here is the $64,000 question (fuck, I'm old if I can still reference that): who should you get as a beta reader?  The answer is simple: someone who reads for enjoyment.  The quiet readers.  They don't brag about it, they don't hit you over the head with their reading preferences, but you see them reading a book more often than not.  They are very different people from the self-anointed priesthood of American letters I described earlier.  If you have friends or associates who are quiet readers, you risk nothing by just walking up and asking them to check out your work.

However, if you're a shut-in or just don't feel confident enough to have anyone know that you are writing anything, I recommend -- highly recommend -- that you do this: go to a bookstore or park bench or someplace where you have seen people reading on an e-reader of some sort and introduce yourself as a writer.  Ask them if they'd be willing to read a couple of sample chapters of your work.  Most e-readers today allow for reader-to-reader or email-to-reader delivery of writing, either as attachments or in formatted text.  At worst, you'll get a polite no, and at best, you will have found someone who may end up being a fan.

I don't have much to say about writer's retreats other than I think, unless you are an established and commercial success who is using them more for networking opportunities, they can be expensive bed-and-breakfast forays.  I also don't have much to say about writer's circles where everyone takes turns reading everyone else's stuff because, though it may be helpful for some people, I think the socializing becomes the centerpiece and the work is forgotten.  It all depends on who runs them and how well they abide by any ground rules, but writers are a cautious, private, distrustful lot to begin with.  I don't see much coming from such a regimented process.

One last word.  How many beta readers are enough?  Here there will be fractious debate, acrimony, threats to lock people up in the basement and subject them to the repeated gesticulations of Gustav Mahler.  The truth is you only need one; that's probably all that you'll have time to focus on, just one.  I'm not saying you can't pull off two or three beta readers at a time, but after a while, juggling the various opinions and feedback coming over the transom will get frenetic and possibly burdensome.  Start out with one and see how it goes, maybe.

No advice on beta reader selection will help you, though, if you haven't finished a fucking thing.  So if your novel or short story or screenplay is still in the throes of infancy, knocking around inside your brain, then hammer it out now.  Make it become a whole thing, pull it screaming and kicking into this world.  It's time.