Meredith Barnes of the Lowenstein Agency had an excellent post about how to understand your Beta Reader feedback.
A post that couldn’t have come at a better time.
One of the difficulties in incorporating Beta feedback in a rewrite, is that it’s often conflicting information. When no one can agree what needs to be fixed – how do you make your edits?
For a long time I labored under the process of trying to find a halfway point between advice that ran polar opposite sides of the spectrum. But Ms. Barnes suggests that having opposing opinions on the same topic about your work is actually a good thing.
Holy crap. You mean it was actually a good thing, when three of my readers at got in an open screaming match over something one of my characters did? At the time, I was horrified, believing I’d done something terribly terribly wrong with my story.
It was at an open reading on a script I’d done. My female character accidently kills a mamma boar and then in a fit of guilt, picks up the piglet and intends to take the tiny creature home.
Immediately, one of the guys reading said, “No way. A woman would never do that. It doesn’t fit.”
To which one of the women said, “I would totally pick up a cute baby piglet, especially if I just accidently killed its mom.”
The guys shook his head, “That’s not what women do.”
A second woman said, “Oh, because apparently you know about women.”
And it suddenly became a free-for-all yelling match of slights and innuendos and me frantically trying to wave the group down from flinging insults and prevent any furniture from breaking.
That’s possibly an extreme example but in more recent works, I’ve gotten feedback on things like:
Tone: Too depressing vs. Too Disney (in the same chapter)
Pace: Too slow vs. Too bullet train (same act)
World Building: Too much vs. Not enough
You get the point. You can’t please everyone.
The most frustrating part is when you get rejections from agents on your Fulls and Partials a week apart from one another and they say almost EXACTLY the opposite critique. “Love the pacing” “The momentum didn’t work” “Love the voice” “I didn’t connect with the voice”.
How do you fix it when you don’t get a clear read on why it’s broken?
There are obvious things that readers agree on. If two people suggest something doesn’t work and they might even be using different terms that you, as a writer, have to extrapolate “Too many prepositional phrases” and “the rhythm seems off here” – rhythm and prepositional phrases are intrinsically tied together, especially in fantasy, so the there’s likely a good chance they’re both right.
It warrants a serious look and usually a little tweaking will tighten it.
If one of my Beta’s says, “Your male character seems flat” and I’ve already been thinking of bulking up his presence in scenes – it’s good validation that character needs some work.
The point of all this is, if you’re a writer and stopping by, decoding the Beta feedback just got a lot easier.
Meredith has some excellent ideas and the folks in the comment section also bring up a few good points.
But the good news is – conflicting feedback about the same topic is actually…
TaDa! A good thing.
And I am suddenly, very relieved.
