I Can See Clearly Now

For those who follow me on Twitter, you know that I had my annual eye exam yesterday, at which my eyes were dilated. If you’ve never had this procedure done, it’s where the optometrist puts drops in your eyes that forces your pupils to fully dilate—and stay that way—so they can shine extremely bright lights into your eyes and see to the backs of the eyeballs or something. (Technically, it’s called Dilated Fundus Examination.) Anyway, for about five or six hours after the drops are put in, the eyes stay dilated, making near vision almost impossible, and distance vision a little hazy. In fact, for the first couple of hours, I couldn’t see anything closer than about five feet away. And I always end up with a raging headache from straining to try to focus close up.

Of course, since critiquing has been on my mind, this temporary inability to be able to read anything that wasn’t in about 72-point font if it was arms’-length or closer made me think about how hard it is to see things in our own writing that need to be fixed. We’re too close to it. It’s too easy to overlook glaring errors or areas which could use quite a bit of improvement. So, while yesterday I expounded on the idea that we can’t take every critiquer or contest-judge’s comment as law, today I’m going to follow that up by saying:

It’s very important to have several people read your
manuscript and give feedback on it.

I say several people because if you only have one person giving you feedback, it’s hard to make a judgement on whether or not what they’re saying is their own personal opinion that no one else is going to have a problem with or if it’s something that a majority of people are going to have a problem with. If you have feedback from four or five people and only one of them has a problem with a particular piece of your manuscript, then that gives you a better idea of how to weigh that feedback when it comes time for revisions.

And I’d like to follow that up by giving this piece of advice:

Have at least as many non-writers read your manuscript
as the number of writers you have critiquing it.

Who are you writing your story for? Other writers? Or are you writing it for readers? Sure, other writers are (or at least should be) readers as well. But we’re tainted. We have all those nasty rules running around in our heads. And somewhere, even if it’s just on a subconscious level, we can’t help but think, I wouldn’t have written it that way, which pollutes our ability to just be able to look at the manuscript for what it is: a story first and foremost.

Where can you find these “beta readers”? Look around you! How many people do you know who aren’t writers? Friends at church, acquaintances at work, the girl you see at the coffee shop three times a week who always has a different novel in her hands. (I tend to avoid doing the relative-thing. It’s just weird and uncomfortable for me—what if they don’t like it? Will it come between us if they don’t want to hurt my feelings?) If they aren’t sure how to give you feedback, tell them they can do it one of several ways—they can write a “review” of the manuscript as if they were going to post it on Amazon; if they want to be more in-depth, they can dust off their school-days book-report skills and write a book report on it; or they can keep a “reading journal” while reading through it (can be done with Post-its on a hard-copy or the Comments feature in Word if they’re reading it on the computer) and just write down whatever their reactions are when they have them. It doesn’t have to be difficult. They don’t have to do a line-by-line critique for you—that’s what your critique partners (or copy editors, in my case) are for.

If you’re not a writer but you’re an avid reader who’s friends with writers, offer your services as a beta reader—but be prepared to work. This isn’t one of those “I’m going to say only positive things about it because the person was nice enough to send me a copy” situations. If a writer takes you up on your offer, you have to give them honest, constructive feedback. A good rule of thumb—balance every negative (worded constructively, of course) with a positive. (See this post for examples.)

But this doesn’t just go for writing. There are so many areas of our life in which we could use feedback, but we may be too afraid to ask for it—we don’t want to dread it like that annual appraisal at work. One of the best things that helps people lose weight and keep it off is to have accountability partners. I’ve started an accountability group for writers who are trying to keep up with daily word-count goals. (Interested? E-mail me and I’ll send you the information.)

Whether it’s with writing or weight loss or some other area of our lives in which we’re learning, growing, moving, building, studying, having someone else look over what we’ve done and give us feedback is one of the best ways to improve our skills, our output, our objectivity, our outlook on the task ahead of us.

Who do you have that provides that feedback for you? If you don’t have people who do that for you, what can you do to find some?