 4 places to start looking for a beta reader onlineIf you’re one of those writers who loves the editing process, know this: I envy you with all my heart and soul. The more intricately I plot in advance, the less passionately I loathe this most essential part of the craft of writing, but I’m never going to actually enjoy it. I’ve been incredibly lucky, over my writing career, to work with some phenomenal editors, and that process started way back before I was ever published when some absolute heroes that I’m delighted to call my friends read and offered feedback on a clunky old MS I’d been footering about with for over a decade.
I made the changes they suggested and found a publisher for the draft that resulted. That was Edge of Heaven and it went on to be shortlisted for a major award. So… yeah. Critique partners are amazing.
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Once upon a time there was a writer who hated editing. (It's me. The writer is me. Bear with me; this story does have a point.) This writer had a completed novel manuscript that was sorely in need of an edit, and had roped in two excellent friends to provide feedback. Their feedback was insightful, considered, and incredibly helpful, and now that writer faced a new problem: she was going to have to put the feedback into effect. She was going to have to edit the manuscript.
So, she did what anyone would do and procrastinated. The house got very clean, put it that way. And when this writer was finally forced to confront the fact that the novel would not, in fact, edit itself, she decided to game her resistance: she entered the novel, partially edited, into the Irish Writers Centre Novel Fair. The competition only required the first 10,000 words, which were complete, and the organisers would ask for the complete MS only if it was selected as a winner. But selection wasn't until December - three full months away. That was ages. Surely, the writer reasoned, surely she would have completed the edits by then? |
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