Beta readers are critical to getting early feedback and making broad changes before getting down the nitty gritty detail of editing the content of a novel. My latest beta reader heaped praise on the story. She said she was “riveted,” and said she really can’t wait to find out what happens in Book Three (which is funny, because I’m curious about that too.) Lest you think she’s some friend who's s too nice to tell me the truth, I chose her because of the glee she takes in knocking people down a rung and then watching them react. Among the things she hates: Publix and dolphins. Lest I paint her as someone with no soul, she loves Florida and pretty much every other animal. She’s the sort of friend whose biting criticism of anything makes my Facebook feed worth reading (she also is definitely not the A&E editor of this publication) (editor's note: sigh.) Some of her suggestions surprised me:
She said the main character needed to sleep with more of the female characters, in addition to his main love interest. This after I actually took some flack for all the sex my character had in the first book (a whopping two women — he’s not James Bond.) Now one isn’t enough?
She declared her dislike for the main love interest, who I took some effort to make more sympathetic in this book. I can’t decide if my reader is just jealous of her, or if I really need to have this character save a puppy (or kill a dolphin.)
She informed me that cell service is good in the Everglades now, where I need my characters to encounter dead-zones. I suppose I’ll have to send them to T-Mobile instead of Verizon to make sure they have terrible coverage.
I came away from our meeting with some great ideas, such as combining a couple of characters into one, eliminating a location in a particular scene (her head was spinning with location changes) and actually reducing some of the dialogue (which I get compliments on, and had been diligently adding more.) The lesson here is that the first draft of a novel gets big changes. See, after you finish that first draft, you may not have written the book you think you wrote. Beta readers will tell you if you’re getting the reactions you expect and want from a reader. Are you villains villainous? Does your sidekick need to get booted? Is your hero a weenie?
As a writer you’ve got to be ready to let characters go, cut scenes you spent days writing, and (dramatic musical emphasis) change the ending.
Now, everyone is different. When I write my first draft, I use an outline and I write scenes fast. Despite that outline, unexpected character appear out of nowhere, and later I wonder, “Whatever happened to that guy?” I was talking to another writer the other day who is releasing his third book this summer. I’ve found his first drafts to read much more like a second or third draft. Surprisingly, he doesn’t outline much, but he does have a complex science fiction plot that leaves him with some pretty specific constraints when it comes to continuity. A minor change could trigger a chain reaction that results in months of rewrites or blow holes in the premise. He’s careful and his first draft is much closer to final than mine. It’s his third book, so perhaps I’ll be able to say the same for my next book.
Editing isn’t exciting. You start with a book and after months of work, you end up with a book. The beta readers provide the outside voices we need to tell us if we’re hitting the right notes. Make sure you pick people who read. Make sure they know you want honesty. You might be tempted to give the first draft to your girlfriend/boyfriend/spouse: I let my wife read the first draft of The Grandfather Clock, but I haven’t let her read the next book. She’s the perfect beta-reader: she reads like crazy, she reads fast, she’s brilliant and she doesn’t seem to mind hurting my feelings at all. What I didn’t realize is that she won’t read anything twice. To this day she hasn’t read the final version. As far as she knows, it’s an unreadable mess with a moronic main character and a lot of poorly written French. When someone of good reputation says, “Hey, I really loved Jon’s book,” she answers, “Wow! Really?” It’s fine, we’ve got two kids to raise. Time is too precious to read the same book twice — even if your husband wrote it.
Like I've said before, you need to have thick skin in this business.
By day Jonathan Kile is a peddler of petroleum products, navigating a Glengarry Glen Ross
landscape of cutthroat sales. By night he assumes the identity of novelist and child-wrangler. Jonathan’s first published novel The Grandfather Clock is available on Amazon. He's writing his second and third novels, blogging at Well-Oiled Writer and cursing his editor. You can email him at jkilewrites@gmail.com.
This article appears in Jun 9-16, 2016.