In my last entry, I mentioned that I would list the reasons one is not supposed to show an early draft around. I wrote about some of those reasons, but I didn’t actually mention the one that convinced me the most. It was something Sol Stein wrote in a book I’ve quoted before: How to Grow a Novel. Last time I referenced this book, it was about something he said that I found destructive and really disagreed with. Conversely, this point made a lot of sense to me, and I think it bears repeating. I’ll refer to his key point down the page a bit.
They say there’s no such thing as bad publicity, though I suspect there are exceptions to that rule. But I can definitely see the logic to the idea that there is such a thing as harmful feedback. Knowing the difference is key to an author’s success, especially an indie writer, who serves as his/her own gatekeeping editor and publisher. I am by no means the expert on this stuff, but I’ve read a few things that made sense to me, and seen a few things happen, and I’d like to highlight a couple of them here.
The basic idea is that there’s feedback and then there’s feedback…and not all feedback is created equal. There are different factors that contribute very heavily to the value of a given, to use the Hollywood term, “Note.”
One factor, for example, is the appropriateness of the material for the reader. Is the reader part of the book’s target audience? If not, the feedback given might be exactly the opposite of what the book needs. I remember when a friend of mine was showing a near-final draft around to beta readers, one of them absolutely hated it. Turned out the reader had no idea there was a horror aspect to the material, and was also very protective (overprotective, IMO) of his/her kids. He/she thought the YA material was way too harsh for them to be reading (not that they did read it) and ended up going so far as to give the book a low Amazon rating and review when it did go up for purchase. The bottom line was that he/she wasn’t in the target audience. And kind of a douche, frankly. Not that I have strong opinions or anything.
Another factor is the amount of attention the reader commits to reviewing the material. Sometimes when we scan and skim and gloss over a chunk of text, we miss things that are key to the story (and the quality of the writing). We might get the wrong idea about a character or event, or misinterpret our own failure to follow plot points as a problem with the plot being convoluted or dull. If an early reader is just looking at it as a favor to the writer and isn’t into it, the resulting feedback can be sparse, confusing, or just plain wrong.
Good friends can be a problem as well. The whole time a friend is reading your stuff, he/she might be thinking, cool, my good bud Gryphon wrote this, and it’s pretty good considering he’s someone I know. A friend’s feedback can be biased in a lot of ways, including softballing to save your feelings. Or by contrast, it might be excessively harsh in order to avoid the appearance of bias, or just because you tend to be hard on each other…the way some friendships are. Well, most of mine. Anyway, I think the most common scenario is, “wow, cool, you wrote this? I like it! I want a signed copy.” (But it’s an ebook….)
The most important factor, I think, and the point Stein was making above all, has to do with the idea of treating writing as a craft, writing a book as a project/process, and publishing as a business. On page 156 of the aforementioned book, he says:
Friends and family are the least objective people in the world for manuscript reading purposes. … They are so pleased to see your words on paper, they will exult, they will praise, and they will mislead because your prospective readers … will be judging your material by the emotional charge they get out of reading it [as opposed to] out of knowing you wrote it.
He goes on to mention, perhaps more importantly, that:
The editing of fiction is a high craft that takes years to learn, and you can’t expect friends and relatives close at hand to substitute their intuitive reactions for experience.
As indie writers, or at least independent-minded writers, we often think in terms of bucking the system and the way publishing has worked in the last couple of centuries. The reality, of course, is that a lot of the professionals who’ve worked in the business as writers, editors or hands-on publishers have developed experience and expertise that’s extremely relevant and meaningful, especially to inexperienced novelists like, say, me. The same applies to people who have fought their way through the indie system.
What I’m talking about is that if writing is a craft and publishing is a business, there are right and wrong ways to do things, or at least righter and wronger, or certainly more/less likely to be successful. This means that there are a ton of things you can do in the structure and content of your novel that experienced professionals can see right off the bat will not work well for the typical readership. Feedback from a professional editor who has spent time studying the craft is very different from feedback from your office-mate (assuming he/she hasn’t been through the workshop circuit or the publishing grinder). By different, I mean better, or rather, more likely to be useful and result in improvements, not just changes.
Of course, most indie writers don’t have ready access to professional story editors, at least not for free. And anyway, not everything an editor says is necessarily right, or right for you. The way I see it, though, the closer you can get to professionally-minded feedback, the better. And there are definitely degrees and in-betweens. For example, other writers, especially those who have studied the craft by reading lots of books and ideally taking workshops, are more likely (IMO) to give useful feedback than the average bear. I’ve heard that’s one of the top value points workshops deliver: meeting and befriending (or at least allying with) other writers who can trade considered critiques with you. I haven’t done any workshops, at least not yet, but this makes a ton of sense to me, and it’s the number one reason I’m thinking about doing one (a big one, ideally) in the next few months.
So…showing an early draft to friends might be a good stroke, but it also might mislead us into taking the wrong direction with our rewrites. Worse, generalized negative feedback might be devastating and drive us to despair. To my mind, feedback is only useful if it comes with clear suggestions as to how to fix the perceived problem. This generally means being able to tell with some level of accuracy what specifically is missing. Is the tension being built too slowly or too quickly? Is it being built inconsistently, in peaks and valleys? Is there not enough conflict in the dialogue, and in which scenes is the problem most pronounced? And also, which scenes/chapters/exchanges of dialogue read like the work of a professional? Positive feedback is a lot more wonderful if we know both where and why we’re doing everything, or something, right.
Naturally, there’s a lot to be said for just “I like it” or “I don’t” when it comes from enough target audience members. Still, it seems to me that we might as well use the craft, and thoughts from its other practitioners, to get as far as we can before the public even gets a look. It’s always possible to get lucky and pump out a bestseller (or literary classic) without paying attention to any of the rules (or breaking every one of them). But I don’t see any harm in listening to the voice of experience, or at least training, whenever I can get it.
No comments:
Post a Comment