Hey! Look! Lucy Snyder is guest-posting for me this week. She is an amazing, award-winning (five Bram Stoker awards...FIVE!!!) author - you may know her Urban Fantasy novels (the Shotgun Sorceress series) or for Installing Linux on a Dead Badger, or maybe her collection of short stories, While the Black Stars Burn. She's a Clarion grad, a writing coach/instructor, and she's also a damn fine human being I am glad to call friend. Please give her work a look, you will not be disappointed. *More links at the bottom.* -Linda
The Value of First Readers
By Lucy A. Snyder
Very few writers are at a place in their craft and career
where they can write in complete isolation, finish a story, send it off to an
editor, and have that work see print. Most of us need feedback on our work
before it's ready for an editor's eyes.
When you're just starting out as a writer, a good critique
group is enormously helpful. But if the group is really good, your workshop
partners will also be busy writing and submitting their stories ... and once
you start seriously working as a writer, keeping up with everyone else's
creative output can become a challenge. I've known a lot of pros who've had to
drop out of productive critique groups simply due to time pressures.
Consequently, some pros who are in the middle of working on
sold-on-proposal books under contracts with big publishers come to rely mainly
on their editors for feedback. Which by some lights is entirely sensible: your
editor is the most important person you need to please before the book or story
goes to press.
But in the grand scheme, your editor may not be enough. Any
good editor can give you excellent advice about fiction basics: plot tension,
characterization, dialog. All hugely important. But at large houses you may
find yourself assigned to an editor who may not have read widely in the
particular genre you're writing in, and that otherwise excellent editor just
won't realize when elements of your story veer too closely to works by other
authors in the genre. That excellent editor won't be able to say "Hey,
Author X did something like this in That
Book I Just Read ... why don't you try this other thing instead?"
So, it's always a good idea to have other people read your
works in progress. But what do you do when you're just too busy making a living
as a writer to participate in a critique group?
You cultivate a group of first readers (or beta readers, if
you prefer terminology borrowed from the bustling world of fan fiction).
Critique partners are always peers: fellow writers. They'll
have opinions about the mechanics of your story or novel, and they may not be
fans of the genre you're writing in. Critique partners are expected to be tough
and honest, and they'll be coming at you from the perspective that your work
... well, it needs more work.
Your first readers, on the other hand, need not be fellow
writers. They don't need to have strong opinions about the mechanics of a story
or chapter -- you're a working professional writer, remember? You know how to
fix this stuff on your own -- but you do need to be able to rely on them to
tell you honestly when something isn't working. Their job doesn't have to be to
tell you how to fix things, but you need to know that they will unfailingly
draw your attention to problems. Therefore, your first readers need to be
well-read in the genres you're writing in, and they need to have excellent
instincts about what makes for a good story or novel.
Furthermore, they need to be fans of your work. Not in terms
of thinking you're infallible as a writer, but in terms of them fundamentally
getting what it is you're trying to accomplish creatively and being excited at
the prospect of helping you get there. This is crucial. You're done with
critique partners who can hardly hide their boredom at reading horror when
they'd rather be reading literature, but with a heavy sigh they'll read your
stuff because you read theirs. You have a deadline, and you need people who are
enthusiastic about what you're doing, and who are willing to read your pages
and give you feedback when you need it, not when the next meeting is scheduled.
Where do you find good first readers? Sometimes you'll find
enthusiastic peers in the critique groups you've been involved with; it's
simple courtesy to return the favor and critique their work, but typically
they'll understand the whole deadline thing and they'll ask for your help when
you're better able to give it. Other times, you can run into good potential
first readers at conventions, or recruit well-read acquaintances.
But whatever you do, once you've recruited good first
readers, treat them right. They're the best friends your fiction will have.
Acknowledge them in your books, and make sure they get first dibs on your
authors' copies. Gift certificates and other more substantial thank-yous don't
hurt, either.
Lucy A. Snyder is the five-time Bram Stoker Award-winning author
of a dozen books and 100 published short stories. Her writing has been
translated into French, Russian, Italian, Czech, Spanish, and Japanese editions
and has appeared in a wide range of publications. She holds an MFA in creative
writing from Goddard College and is faculty in Seton Hill University’s MFA
program in Writing Popular Fiction. You can learn more about her at www.lucysnyder.com.
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lucy.snyder1
Twitter: @LucyASnyder
