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How to Use Beta Readers Skillfully

January 4, 2021

The term “beta readers” refers to people who read your novel before you publish it. They can be invaluable in helping you find problems in your fiction. That is, if you know how to use beta readers in the first place.

You see, most authors have a rather flawed idea of what a beta reader does. For many authors, a beta reader is someone who tells you whether your book is “good or bad”. If you don’t find that idea stupid, you really need to see my post on “good and bad” books.

Indeed, one reason why authors use beta readers is simply to get an advanced rating or review. That’s fine – as you’ll see later, getting advanced reviews for my fiction is basically the only reason I’ve personally used beta readers – but that’s not what a beta reader is there for.

In today’s post we’ll take a look at how to use beta readers skillfully. That is, how to use a beta reader to actually identify problem areas and fix them, rather than just hear “I liked it!” or get a 5-star review.

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How Writing Perfectionism Kills Creativity

December 21, 2020

Writing

experience, perception, perfectionism, writing

I’m not really a perfectionist. I’m a jack of all trades and master of some, but I don’t care about perfection. In some sense, I consider it a part of the artistic process for a work to have imperfections – we’ll get back to this, it’s crucial. And so, writing perfectionism is something I reject.

But it wasn’t always like that.

I used to spend hours on a single paragraph; whole nights on trying to figure out – in vain – what the perfect chapter would look like.

But then years passed, life happened, and I became more experienced. I also became more skillful, to be sure, but realizing the harms of writing perfectionism is about experience, not skill.

In this post I’ll try to offer some of this experience and show you how writing perfectionism kills your creativity and harms your work. To be a perfectionist writer is to assign quantitative aspects to an inherently qualitative endeavor. Or, in plain English, a perfect answer can only exist for questions like “How much is 5+5?” and not for “Should my antagonist be more subtle?”

Writing as art involves affect, not perfection. In other words, it’s precisely imperfection that gives meaning, affect, and ultimately value to the work.

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Inevitable Narrative: How to Detect what Is Necessary in Your Fiction

December 7, 2020

Fiction Writing Tips, Writing

characters, ending, narrative, plot, writing

Learning how to detect what is necessary in your fiction allows you to write an inevitable narrative. A narrative that is inevitable is structurally solid and leads to a sense-making ending.

Therefore, it should be fairly obvious that learning to see what’s necessary and what’s not when writing is very important. To put it simply, without having an inevitable narrative you will likely have problems with narrative pace as well as a problematic ending.

Moreover, a non inevitable narrative… inevitably creates problems with over-explaining and exposition. The reason? If something that shouldn’t be there actually is, you tend to (sometimes subconsciously) rationalize it with superfluous content.

In this post we’ll take a closer look at inevitable narratives. I’ll show you how to decide what is narratively inevitable and what isn’t, as well as how to structure your narrative in a way that precisely favors its inevitability.

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