Do Unto Others

Friend Dale Sproule has an interesting piece up about the search for beta readers. Reading it, I realized I've never even tried to find a beta reader.

Don't think I'm being arrogant; it's just that for more than three decades now—since my fiction-writing career began, really—I have workshopped pretty much everything I've written. A workshop session is, to me anyway, like concentrated essence of what I understand beta readers to provide. Put it another way, if the workshop is any good at all you're going to need a fairly thick skin.

I'll leave the details of what's involved to another post, because really it's a separate topic. What I want to say here, now, is that workshopping provides one benefit that no number of beta readers can, no matter how good they be or how well-attuned to what you're trying to do with your writing.

The thing about workshops is that they're reciprocal. You aren't just hearing from others in a sort of in loco editorentis, you're providing the same service to the other members. And it is in the process of providing that service to others that you do yourself the greatest possible favour:

You learn to view your own work with the same critical eye you apply to the work of others.

It's a truism that writers are the worst judges of the quality of their own work. Like most truisms, this one has a lot of validity. When we're not convinced we're geniuses we're overwhelmed with the mediocrity of our every utterance, or we're on the verge of succumbing to a case of Imposter Syndrome of cosmic proportions.

Judge somebody else's work, though? We're all over that. Once you've spent a few years reading and learning the craft of writing, it becomes fairly easy to spot flaws or mistakes in a piece of writing from—well, from pretty much anybody who isn't you. And the longer you do this sort of thing, the more time you devote to workshopping, the better you get at it.

Until, one day, you start seeing your own work as if it was written by somebody else. The infelicities, the inadvertent overuse of a word or phrase, the clunky characterization, all begin to pop out of the manuscript as you read it. Even better, so do the resolutions required to make a better story. With enough practise, you begin to see your own work the way an editor will, and so fix problems before than can trip you up before said editor.

I'm not saying that having good beta readers go through your work won't eventually teach you the same ability to edit yourself. But the key word is eventually. If you're lucky enough to find a good workshop (subject for yet another story), you'll get to this point much, much faster.