Bradel Bookwork – On Pre-Reading (non-EQD) · 3:05am Feb 13th, 2014
When I talk about writing, I usually spend a lot of time on core issues like character and setting, making your words serve multiple purposes, things like that. I think I've got a rather interesting topic for y'all tonight, though, and one I haven't seen many people talk about: pre-reading.
For reference this post was inspired by a tor.com blog about beta-reading and gamma-reading for Brandon Sanderson's new novel, Words of Radiance.
One of the great strengths of Fimfiction as a place for writers, I've always thought, is the way it builds communities. Site functionality helps with that, but I think the community feeling owes as much to the users as to anything else. I've met a lot of great people here, and I've got a circle of friends who I go to when I want help with my stories, and who I try to help with their own stories as well. I think a lot of the writers here can relate to that—and if you don't have a couple folks you can work with, and you're really interested in the craft side of writing, I strongly encourage you to try to make these sorts of connections. We all get better when we work together.
In the last few weeks, I've been dealing with the pre-reading side of writing a lot, both as the author on "Three Nights" and as a pre-reader on a few other recent stories[1]. I discussed some of the difficulty of taking feedback in my "Three Nights" deconstruction post a couple days ago. Tonight, I'd like to talk about the other side—being the pre-reader.
I really didn't have a whole lot of experience with pre-reading before last year. A few years back, formed a writing circle with a couple old friends, where we met weekly to review work we'd done, but I found that I had a hard time giving my friends good feedback, because I didn't want to hurt their feelings by telling them something wasn't working. I'm still kind of hung up on that with my friends here, too, but I've come to realize that the people I work with really do want their writing to be better, and publishing a substandard story is going to hurt a lot more than me trying to make that story better pre-publication.
This—the immediacy of real, outside feedback—is something my real life writing circle never had. We were working on dream novels, and no one was in any danger of seeing our work outside the three of us; not for years, anyway. Here on Fimfiction, all you have to do is click "Submit" and you're pretty much guaranteed some level of outside feedback on the quality of your story. So a pre-reader's job has a lot more practical meaning here than it might in a friendly neighborhood writing circle. We may not be getting paid by the word for our stories, but we've got a lot of different ways to assess whether our stories are as good as we'd like them to be: views, votes (and vote ratio), favorites, comments, approval by outside groups like EQD, and acceptance into the Royal Canterlot Library, to name just a few.
So I've learned that it really is important for me to try to be as discerning as I can when I read a story for someone else. And that can be really hard—because when a story works, it feels seamless; but when a story doesn't work, figuring out where things broke down can be a real pain in the butt. Niel Gaiman had something rather profound to say about that issue, though, and I think it bears repeating:
Remember: when people tell you something's wrong or doesn't work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.
Extracted from The Guardian, "Ten rules for writing fiction", 19 February 2010
As a pre-reader, I try to take that piece of advice to heart. My job is to find what doesn't work, not to figure out how to make it work. I usually can't help but throw out a few ideas about the latter anyway (and I'm very happy to take that sort of input from my own pre-readers as well), but the how-I'd-fix-it advice seems to fall flat more often than not. The there's-a-problem-here advice, on the other hand, is desperately important to me as a writer.
Before I close, though, I want to return to the tor.com post I mentioned above. The author of that post, Alice Arneson, draws an interesting distinction between beta-reading and gamma-reading, and I think I'm going to try to incorporate this into my own process.
I like to write stories and publish them ASAP, and it's still a bit of a chore for me to make myself settle down long enough for the stories to stop popping and sparkling in my mind and return to a state where I can look at them critically. But when I try to do this, and when I've seen other people send me stuff to pre-read, it seems like pre-reading often takes a couple phases. In the first phase, everyone's seeing the story for the first time and forming their initial impressions—and spotting things that just don't seem to work as well as the author would write. In the second phase, readers are basically just checking that the author has dealt with the problems in the original draft. And hopefully, that's that.
Now, that won't be true in all cases. Some stories have stubbornly intractable problems. "Three Nights", as I've mentioned before, proved to be a real beast in terms of figuring out where it actually went as a story. In much airier circles, George R.R. Martin's "Mereenese Knot" basically killed his ability to write his story for years. But in the ideal case, an author can hopefully address reader concerns in one pass. And after that, it's just verifying that everything's working okay under revision.
If that's the case, then the beta/gamma distinction Ms. Arneson discusses in the article makes a lot of sense, at least if you can train yourself to do it. In short, she suggests that beta reads should completely ignore issues like grammar spelling, and focus on the story as a whole, since the whole point of a beta-read is to identify large-scale problems that the author needs to address.
The gamma read, on the other hand, is the appropriate time for going over the prose with a fine-toothed comb and attempting to pick up all the errors—because at that point you know the story and you're mostly just making sure that things work the way they're supposed to based on what's already been established in the beta stage.
I usually try to do everything at once, but frankly, this seems a lot more natural. I think I'm going to try to adopt this paradigm for myself, moving forward, about how I treat pre-reading for authors I work with[2].
Now that I've said my piece, I'm curious about how you all approach pre-reading. Do you have strategies you like to take when you're working in your own writing groups? Do you have writing groups, or do I just have some crazy idealized image of how we all work, here on Fimfiction? What sort of feedback do you think is most helpful to you, as a writer? I'm anxious to see what you folks have to say in the comments below.
[1] And yes, I know I owe a couple of you some promised pre-reading help. It's high on my priority list right now; hopefully you'll be seeing some motion there in the next few days.
[2] Equestria Daily "pre-reading" is a very different beast. It's basically like trying to deal with the slush pile at a publishing house. You're looking for the gems, but you're not looking for ways to improve people's work. Beta-read and gamma-read issues should all be sorted out by that point, so I consider everything fair game. EQD is in the business of highlighting the best pony fanfiction, and that means we want the total package right upfront[3].
[3] And the Royal Canterlot Library is a whole other can of worms, if a very exciting one.
I think I'm spoiled by having a good pre-reader and editor in the house. A rather unexpected benefit of marriage, turns out!
I would really love to connect with some more folks though. Always getting the same second perspective can still be limiting, and he's often pretty busy. I've used one of the editor groups here to find a little help, but it's been hit and miss.
Finding people who can tackle the grammar, spelling and punctuation, the gamma-reading kind of stuff you're talking about, hasn't been hard. People who can actually look at the story though and point at things that are or aren't working seem to be much harder to find.
1828479
Yeah, that's very much my feeling as well.
Then again, it's not all that hard to do the gamma stuff. Picking apart stories... is a lot harder than it seems at first blush.
I see it as my primary job to find the little bits that don't work, the big bits that don't work, and the medium-sized bits that don't work. Secondary is to find the bits that work, but could be even slightly better. If I'm doing my job, and if no one else has gone over it beforehand, most stories will bleed. In other words, this is my anthem:
Though I do note the points where something works really well--it can be useful to told that you should keep doing something.
I disagree with Gaiman's statement to some degree. The most important thing is to explain exactly what the issue is, but it can help to give some pointers in a direction that would fix it, especially if you're working with an inexperienced writer. (With that said, you need to be able to account for the author's unique style, making suggestions that match how they write rather than how you write. And if you don't know how to fix something, be clear that you don't know, and don't be afraid to bounce ideas back and forth with the writer.)
Then again, I seem to have a much more technical approach to writing than most writers or editors. When the objection is "This sentence doesn't work," the proposed solution is often a single sentence in the style of the editor. I like to propose a couple different variants, and if possible, I point out the commonality that makes them work where the original didn't, giving the author more grounding for how to create his or her own variant.
As for beta versus gamma, I find that my capacity to notice errors decreased every time I read the same passage. If I notice errors the first time through, but don't mark them, it is very likely that I won't notice them the second time through. (This is part of why I'm so insistent that authors give their stories a couple passes before they come to me--I want to make sure I'm not putting my attention towards issues they could fix on their own, lest I miss issues they don't know how to fix.)
That Neil Gaiman quote, that's basically the way I did things. Thing is, I thought I was doing wrong, and had been deliberately trying to improve on making suggestions to the author in question. Huh.
1828755
Well, like I said, I actually like suggestions. And they can be helpful, especially to get you another viewpoint on something that you might have been missing. It's like having binocular vision. You can see your way around problems better when you can see how your story bends around them and what other shapes it could take.
But at the end of the day, the author has to figure out what does and doesn't work for the way they're writing a story, and while getting those additional views can be very helpful, I think in a lot of cases, you don't wind up going with any of them. You just use the information to figure out how to do what it was you wanted to do anyway, but you do it better.
I'm going sometime to write a short blog post--I may have already written it--on the importance of fixing grammar before sending things to a pre-reader. I can't ignore grammar or spelling. It's like hitting a big wave when you're sailing a small boat. It stops me dead in the water.
The bigger problem is how many fimfiction writers think that's what pre-readers are for--to catch their grammar mistakes. And then there are the writers who intellectually believe that pre-readers are there to catch story problems, but the only advice they ever take is grammar and spelling corrections.
Ideally, a pre-reader should get a story outline before the writer writes the story. Sometimes that doesn't work, especially for short stories, for which I may be driven by a feeling more than by a plot outline.
1829238
Hmm. It occurs to me that this may be a difference in intended audience type of thing. I'm taking the process for NYTimes bestseller type novels and trying to extrapolate to what people are doing here. I assume that Words of Radiance, even in beta form, showed up pretty clean. I'm generally capable of suspending my usage alarms if they're not constantly going off, but a lot of the things I encounter here trigger them way too much for me to be able to do that.
There's not really anything I can do but agree on "things should be clean when they go out to pre-readers" and "what pre-readers are for", and hope that I'm not the type of person who refuses story advice. I'd been a little afraid I would be, but I think "Three Nights" helped me get past that.
Now that's an idea I really like.
I need to print this out and hang it on my wall.