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Mar. 2nd, 2025 12:21 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thedarlingoneI am more and more coming to the conclusion that writers are the wrong people to give feedback on writing.
I'm both a writer and a beta reader. I'm a skilled writer; I've been practicing for nearly forty years at this point, which is saying something since I'm not yet forty. But beta reading is the one I see as something like a calling.
I haven't had a beta other than myself since LJ imploded. Most people, I'm told, can't beta their own work. I believe it; it's hard work to make that mental switch, and I'm very tired of it.
Leia brings some of our work to a monthly writing group she attends sometimes. It's a pretty average writing group -- a collection of acquaintances with aspirations to write. One of them has a poetry degree, another brought a piece of technical writing done for work recently. Everyone wants different things out of the group and the general reading comprehension level is abysmal. They bring Gdocs and leave comments on each other's writing.
And they're so bad at it. Recently someone left over two dozen comments on a Star Wars piece that mostly amounted to "I would have done it this other way", with a couple nods in the direction of "You need to use The Star Wars Catchphrases" (as someone who has read every Legends / old EU book set from 4 BBY to 19 ABY, I absolutely refuse to use The Star Wars Catchphrases if there's any other option). A while back, the person with the poetry degree criticized me for using parallel structure because I had, in their view, too many uses of the word "the" for one sentence.
I don't think this group is an outlier. I think nothing about writing provides useful practice in reading or giving feedback.
Beta readers are almost extinct, at least in the fannish ecosystems I've been anywhere around. I know people who have one partner beta, who may beta for that one person or for a few, but they've almost all had the same partner beta since the LJ days. I don't know of anywhere new betas are entering the economy.
(A few months back I did hear of an ecosystem I am very much not in, an origfic ecosystem where it's considered de rigueur to have something like fifteen beta readers and compensate them all with gift cards, but none of those were what I'd call real betas -- it sounded like they were all writers doing the same type of badly thought out feedback as any writing group, just for money as well as for feedback on their own work. And just like most writing groups I've heard about, they were discouraging some of the writers from continuing, including by actively tearing down each other's work.)
I keep thinking about trying to write a guide for how to give feedback, how to live up to the calling of a beta reader. I have barely any brain bandwidth these days and I feel like my nonfiction writing is suffering the most, but I have such strong feelings about what writing feedback is for.
Ideally, you'd want people trained in reading comprehension and critical thinking. Those of course are in rare supply these days. You'd also want someone who doesn't have a strong writing voice of their own, or who can switch it off if they do -- this is the biggest reason I think writers are actively bad at giving feedback on other people's writing, because of course they're thinking about how they'd write it. A good beta can write enough to give suggestions on how to word things more clearly, but they're a shapeshifter: the job is to bring out the author's own voice, to offer the phrasing they would have chosen themselves if only they'd thought of it.
But the biggest thing that I don't see coming from literally any feedback options these days is simply: you want them to keep writing. If you make someone want to stop writing, you have failed as a beta reader. So I think it's paramount to point out whenever the story does something well, when you like a turn of phrase, when something is vivid or does what the writer was going for. And that's a completely different viewpoint than any current philosophy of "feedback" that I hear going around.
(Someone on Tumblr was recently praising the standard prestigious-writing-workshop model where you have to sit in silence having your work badly analyzed by other writers. The only "benefit" that model provides, in my opinion, is to thin the field by weeding out anyone who doesn't have the impenetrable self-opinion of a mediocre white man, and especially anyone who's creative enough or culturally different enough to say something not instantly grasped by the sorts of mediocre white men previously funnelled into the group.)
I'm very tired. I have an excellent co-author, but she cannot beta her own work, and I don't expect her to. And switching gears all the time to beta myself is really wearing me out. I just want there to be a culture of beta readers I could turn to where someone could tell me "yeah this worldbuilding is clunky and repetitive, here are the spots you could streamline it at" but also "the story is working and these parts are especially interesting", and *not* tell me to shoehorn in "I know" as the only possible response to "I love you". (Those characters aren't even in this story!)
I don't know what it would take to build such a culture. Probably a lot more energy than I've got. Teh Youth don't even know what a beta reader is; I had to explain to a very well-meaning and polite youngster a couple years back that it was nothing to do with either omegaverse or character/reader shipfic.
I'm both a writer and a beta reader. I'm a skilled writer; I've been practicing for nearly forty years at this point, which is saying something since I'm not yet forty. But beta reading is the one I see as something like a calling.
I haven't had a beta other than myself since LJ imploded. Most people, I'm told, can't beta their own work. I believe it; it's hard work to make that mental switch, and I'm very tired of it.
Leia brings some of our work to a monthly writing group she attends sometimes. It's a pretty average writing group -- a collection of acquaintances with aspirations to write. One of them has a poetry degree, another brought a piece of technical writing done for work recently. Everyone wants different things out of the group and the general reading comprehension level is abysmal. They bring Gdocs and leave comments on each other's writing.
And they're so bad at it. Recently someone left over two dozen comments on a Star Wars piece that mostly amounted to "I would have done it this other way", with a couple nods in the direction of "You need to use The Star Wars Catchphrases" (as someone who has read every Legends / old EU book set from 4 BBY to 19 ABY, I absolutely refuse to use The Star Wars Catchphrases if there's any other option). A while back, the person with the poetry degree criticized me for using parallel structure because I had, in their view, too many uses of the word "the" for one sentence.
I don't think this group is an outlier. I think nothing about writing provides useful practice in reading or giving feedback.
Beta readers are almost extinct, at least in the fannish ecosystems I've been anywhere around. I know people who have one partner beta, who may beta for that one person or for a few, but they've almost all had the same partner beta since the LJ days. I don't know of anywhere new betas are entering the economy.
(A few months back I did hear of an ecosystem I am very much not in, an origfic ecosystem where it's considered de rigueur to have something like fifteen beta readers and compensate them all with gift cards, but none of those were what I'd call real betas -- it sounded like they were all writers doing the same type of badly thought out feedback as any writing group, just for money as well as for feedback on their own work. And just like most writing groups I've heard about, they were discouraging some of the writers from continuing, including by actively tearing down each other's work.)
I keep thinking about trying to write a guide for how to give feedback, how to live up to the calling of a beta reader. I have barely any brain bandwidth these days and I feel like my nonfiction writing is suffering the most, but I have such strong feelings about what writing feedback is for.
Ideally, you'd want people trained in reading comprehension and critical thinking. Those of course are in rare supply these days. You'd also want someone who doesn't have a strong writing voice of their own, or who can switch it off if they do -- this is the biggest reason I think writers are actively bad at giving feedback on other people's writing, because of course they're thinking about how they'd write it. A good beta can write enough to give suggestions on how to word things more clearly, but they're a shapeshifter: the job is to bring out the author's own voice, to offer the phrasing they would have chosen themselves if only they'd thought of it.
But the biggest thing that I don't see coming from literally any feedback options these days is simply: you want them to keep writing. If you make someone want to stop writing, you have failed as a beta reader. So I think it's paramount to point out whenever the story does something well, when you like a turn of phrase, when something is vivid or does what the writer was going for. And that's a completely different viewpoint than any current philosophy of "feedback" that I hear going around.
(Someone on Tumblr was recently praising the standard prestigious-writing-workshop model where you have to sit in silence having your work badly analyzed by other writers. The only "benefit" that model provides, in my opinion, is to thin the field by weeding out anyone who doesn't have the impenetrable self-opinion of a mediocre white man, and especially anyone who's creative enough or culturally different enough to say something not instantly grasped by the sorts of mediocre white men previously funnelled into the group.)
I'm very tired. I have an excellent co-author, but she cannot beta her own work, and I don't expect her to. And switching gears all the time to beta myself is really wearing me out. I just want there to be a culture of beta readers I could turn to where someone could tell me "yeah this worldbuilding is clunky and repetitive, here are the spots you could streamline it at" but also "the story is working and these parts are especially interesting", and *not* tell me to shoehorn in "I know" as the only possible response to "I love you". (Those characters aren't even in this story!)
I don't know what it would take to build such a culture. Probably a lot more energy than I've got. Teh Youth don't even know what a beta reader is; I had to explain to a very well-meaning and polite youngster a couple years back that it was nothing to do with either omegaverse or character/reader shipfic.
no subject
Date: 2025-03-03 07:33 am (UTC)I've experimented with becoming a beta reader. But, because my initial editing experience is all from within the scientific academic communities, it doesn't mesh well with fiction. I'd love to have the opportunity to develop the skill, but I absolutely understand writers who don't want someone to be learning on their work, and thus being decidedly unhelpful. I hang out in the beta please community (I'd have to check what it's actual name is) but there hasn't been a request that I can fill at a time when I have spoons, so, eh.
And there is a really good professional writer piece about that horrid critique session approach, which I remember being enlightening reading. I'll see if I can remember who it was by, and link it.
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Date: 2025-03-03 07:48 am (UTC)The article is The Ghost of Workshops Past: How Communism, Conservatism, and the Cold War Still Mold Our Paths Into SFF Writing by S. L. Huang, published on August 17, 2022
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Date: 2025-03-03 07:03 pm (UTC)I vaguely remember that when I was getting into betaing, one thing I did for practice was to go through actual published short stories from anthologies and do a sort of fake beta pass on them. It's imperfect because of course you can't ask the author questions and it's (hopefully) already been through a professional edit, but I think it gives good practice, especially since you can do multiple passes in different ways and kind of train yourself to notice, like -- here's the pass where I did a full "this is how I would have done it" like some writers in feedback groups tend to do, here's one where I only did "this passage or phrasing confused me", noticing the differences in how you handled it each time.
Thinking out loud, I wonder if a community for some sort of beta-reading practice could be beneficial? I feel like it might need to be pretty heavily modded to counteract the influence of Milford as default, but putting up a short public-domain or volunteer-submitted passage maybe once a week and everyone being able to kind of... submit homework of how they would beta it, read each other's beta passes, and discuss the different takes and viewpoints that would come out of that?
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Date: 2025-03-04 01:00 pm (UTC)Oh, I like your ideas on teaching people to beta read. Hmm. I'm going to have to let that sit at the back of my head and see what comes out of it.
I also kind of want to read the references for that article! I decided against it, because it sounds like a rabbit hole I could get lost in for a while, and I can't really justify the time at present. But if you find it, I'd be interested in knowing.
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Date: 2025-03-05 05:15 am (UTC)I think that getting beta readers requires a space which promotes organic conversation about your fic and fic like it in the same space as the fic itself (i.e. forums), so you can form relationships founded on the idea of the fic being cool and interesting and worth talking about and then you can ask those people to beta-read for you and this is an enthusiasm-provoking shiny thing rather than a chore only performed for the sake of reciprocity? I don't know how much they get out of it, but they seem enthusiastic about it, their credits are usually pretty glowing.