As a writer, it’s important to have humility – no matter how enthusiastic you are about your work, there’s no guarantee that it will land the way that you want it to with your readers. So I share my stories with “beta readers” who are, presumably, the kind of people who like to read what I want to write, and I use comments from beta readers to help me edit my stories before submitting them to editors or publishers.
I used to ask almost no questions of the beta readers BEFORE they read it, as I neither wanted to prejudice them about the story nor wanted to draw their attention to features that they might not have noticed. But, over time, I have started adding questions – perhaps in part because my research in social robot navigation exposed me to better ways to ask questions of people, and perhaps just through my own experience.
I settled on the following questions that I ask beta readers:
- Is this the kind of story you like to read?
- What did you like about it?
- How could it be improved?
- Would you like to read more stories in the same universe?
- Is there anything that could be clarified to make it stand better alone?
- Are there any questions that it raised that you’d love to see answered in another story?
The first three I think are generic to all stories, and are the ones that I started with:
- First, if your story isn’t the kind of story that your reader wants to read, their comments might not be about your story per se, but may actually be a subconscious critique of its genre, which can be actively misleading if you try to apply them to a story in that genre. I found this out the hard way when I gave The Clockwork Time Machine to someone who didn’t like steampunk – many of their comments were just dissing the entire genre, and were useless for figuring out how to improve my particular story.
- Second, it’s important to know what people like about a story, so that you don’t accidentally break those things in your edits. If one person dislikes something, but two others like it, you might be better off leaving that alone or gently tweaking it rather than just taking it out.
- Third, no matter how big your ego is, you cannot see all the things that might be wrong with your story. (Unless you’ve won the Nobel Prize in literature or are a New York Times bestselling author, in which case, I especially mean you, because you’ve probably become uneditable). Fresh eyes can help you see what’s wrong and where you could make it better.
But these questions weren’t enough for someone who writes series fiction: my stories refer to a lot of background information, and set up ideas for other stories, yet should stand alone as individual stories:
- Do you have a good vehicle? Have you set up a framework for telling stories that people are interested in? This goes beyond whether an individual story is satisfying, and to whether the setting and storytelling method itself are interesting.
- Does your story stand alone? Are you pulling in backstory which is not adequately explained? This is information that should either be taken out, or woven into the story so it is load-bearing.
- Does your story pull people in? Even if the story stands alone, you want it to either hint at questions to be answered in other stories or to answer questions from previous stories.
So far, these questions have worked well for me and my science fiction serial stories. Your mileage may vary, but I think that if you avoid asking anything specific about your story, and focus on the general functions that your story should fulfill, then you can get a lot of profit by asking beta readers ahead of the read.
-the Centaur
Pictured: A gryphon made of books in a store window in Asheville.
