On Beta Readers

Yeah, I didn't do it, and I'll not do it again!

Last week, I happened to read this article by Adam Mastroianni on the state of peer review. He notes that peer review has only been standard in science since the 60's, and makes the case that it has not actually improved the field as people hoped. In some cases, peer review has actually harmed scientific progress—the study that linked vaccines with autism was peer-reviewed, after all.

I was surprised to learn that only one paper of Einstein's was ever peer-reviewed. And Einstein took the paper to another journal instead. What makes science strong, Mastroianni points out, isn't finding the weak links, it's reinforcing the strong ones. Einstein's theories aren't better because they've been peer-reviewed. They're better because they've been tested and proven correct.

What especially struck me was the following passage, in which Mastroianni suggests peer review has also harmed the style of scientific papers:

For example, you used to be able to write a scientific paper with style. Now, in order to please reviewers, you have to write it like a legal contract. Papers used to begin like, “Help! A mysterious number is persecuting me,” and now they begin like, “Humans have been said, at various times and places, to exist, and even to have several qualities, or dimensions, or things that are true about them, but of course this needs further study (Smergdorf & Blugensnout, 1978; Stikkiwikket, 2002; von Fraud et al., 2018b)”. 

This blows. And as a result, nobody actually reads these papers. Some of them are like 100 pages long with another 200 pages of supplemental information, and all of it is written like it hates you and wants you to stop reading immediately. Recently, a friend asked me when I last read a paper from beginning to end; I couldn’t remember, and neither could he. “Whenever someone tells me they loved my paper,” he said, “I say thank you, even though I know they didn’t read it.” Stricter peer review would mean even more boring papers, which means even fewer people would read them.

This reminded me of something that's been on my mind lately, since Feast of the Sisters got published. Namely, that I never used a beta reader, and I’m glad I didn’t. The editor was literally the very first person to look at it. I never showed it to a single other human being. Before that, it was all self-edited.

None of the work I've self-published since 2017 has been beta-read, either. I've had a few typos pointed out and corrected those, but other than that, they are published exactly the way I made them. I also still submit short stories to magazines, and those editors are the first to read them as well.

Part of it, I'll admit, is cowardice. I hate the feeling of submitting my work for critique from a friend or relative—and I have friends and family who are willing to be brutally honest. I've never been able to shake off the anxiety leading up to the critique or the indignation that results from it. Somehow I feel far less anxiety over submitting to an editor and getting their input.

The thing about the term "beta reader" is that it derives from beta testing, in which people try out software in order to find bugs, glitches, and quality-of-life issues. If clicking a box in an app erases your hard drive, that needs to be addressed. If you get into a fight in an RPG and the "attack" command doesn't work, that needs to be addressed.

But those are far more objective than the issues that emerge in a work of fiction. Sure, typos and grammatical errors and inconsistencies can pop up. I used to belong to a local writing group, and gotten some good suggestions from my peers. But I've also had a critique from an established writer who didn't know what a vizier was. I've had one reader raise issues of clarity when another reader found it perfectly clear. One thought I should compress a short story into one scene, with all the major events taking place offscreen.

Before publishing Thresholds of the Grand Dream, I paid for two edits, a manuscript critique and a copyedit, each from a different editor. The critiques were helpful in showing me parts that needed livening up, more consistency, or more development. But beta readers aren't editors, and freelance editors aren’t the same as editors that will publish your work. On one hand, that experience was closer to what I would have expected from a professional publisher. With an editor, the goal of a critique is to help you get published. On the other hand, I had to pay out of pocket, and I don't necessarily have that kind of money lying around all the time.

I've looked into critique groups online, but if anything, these present another problem: I'm also uncomfortable giving a detailed critique. With a story that's riddled with flaws, I hardly know where to start. Not enough flaws, I have nothing to say. The other issue is that some of these critique groups pride themselves on tearing a work to shreds. But is an adversarial reading of a text necessarily an honest one?

I think all this emphasis on critique threw me into a cycle of endlessly editing my work. It was never good enough. I had to make it “critique-proof.” It took me about a decade of writing and revising to finish Thresholds of the Grand Dream, and years to start sharing short stories with people. Why? I was trying to read it through a critic's eyes. Through a beta reader's. You know what I'm not doing when I do that? Submitting my work to editors and publishers. Writing other things I could be writing. Finishing the stupid thing.

Maybe it confirmed all my biases, but reading Dean Wesley Smith's post about beta readers really spoke to me, as did his post about critiques. I had to break the cycle and actually write. That's where my weekly stories in 2018 and 2019 came from. I basically had to stop caring whether anyone would like them, and put out what I like to write. And hey, my taste in my own writing is kind of idiosyncratic, I'll admit. But I'm finishing things now. I'm sharing them.

Perhaps, like Mastroianni with peer review, it's time to more people to consider if beta reading and workshopping are all that essential. Novels have existed for centuries, but the Iowa Writers’ Workshop only since the 1930’s. That model of workshop only became commonplace after the 1970’s. The term “beta reader” only dates back to online fanfic communities in the 90's.

I have some older books on writing that don't even bring up sharing your work with anybody besides an editor. Dwight Swain doesn't in Techniques of the Selling Writer. There's no entry in the index for "critiques." He says to keep your own counsel and quotes Herbert Bayard Swope: “I cannot give you the formula for success, but I can give you the formula for failure: Try to please everybody.”

Algis Budrys doesn't in Writing to the Point: according to him, editors are the only ones whose opinions count. James A. Michener’s Writer’s Handbook also skips straight to the editor. Lawrence Block, in Writing the Novel: From Plot to Print, only brings up sharing with "a knowledgeable acquaintance if you're concerned about your lack of expertise in a certain area" (emphasis mine), and says you can ignore if they start to critique it for other reasons.¹ Ursula Le Guin endorses critique groups in Steering the Craft (published in 1997), but she points out that they only came into existence well into her adulthood, and admits that they're not for everybody.

Smaller-scale critique I can handle. This last semester, one of my classes involved writing a weekly two-page paper on our reading. The professor said he found it more valuable to critique papers of this size than a longer, denser one. That seems wiser to me. In my old writing group, our discussions were casual and the critiques relatively light; I think it made suggestions easier to accept. Recently somebody showed me a passage of something he'd written, and I gave him a tip for one paragraph. The biggest critique my editor gave me on Feast of the Sisters was on the first three chapters. I was able to apply it to the rest of the manuscript.

Have beta reading and workshopping improved the quality of fiction? Have they harmed it? I'll admit I don't read enough current fiction to reliably judge—I've mostly been reading work by dead authors lately. This article suggests that there really isn’t that much difference between MFA and non-MFA authors. I’d be interested in a similar look at authors who talk about relying on not just one, but many beta readers.

Is it all basically just a form of gatekeeping?

Has my work suffered? I dunno. Am I just rambling? I dunno about that, either.

I guess if I'm to sum up my attitude toward critique, it is: both of us better be getting paid for it.

1. That said, one of my favorite gags in the movie Hail, Caesar! is when the priest, rabbi, and minister get locked in an argument over the theology of the script they’ve been asked to read, while the Orthodox bishop is critiquing the script as a script.