If you’re at all familiar with the ancient religion Zoroastrianism, its end-of-days story speaks of every newly resurrected human having to cross a massive river of molten metal. Those who have erred in their ways, sinned and forsaken their morals, will feel anguish as they cross the burning river. Those who have lived well will feel far less pain. In both cases, they will leave the river purified of sin – only, it will be a far more arduous crossing for those who have lived darker lives.
If you’ll pardon my points of reference being a few millennia out of step, this is essentially the function of beta readers in the industry of literature, or fiction in particular, or narrative in general, regardless of medium.
When I originally hammered out this piece, I was neck-deep in the early beta-reading conferences for Elysium Protocol (which are still ongoing), the third Architects Of The Illusion novel, and I happened upon an ethos that you can carry with you through these things: pain is good.
Well, some pain is worrysome (I was glad when my scratchy, sore throat turned out to be the result of an intense five-hour beta-reader conference and not the sign of an impending cold), but I’m talking about a specific type of discomfort: that tightness and slight anxiousness you might feel as your beta-reader is calmly explaining why the stuff you put on the page can’t stand. Why those plot points are shaky at best. Why that big, emotional, cathartic moment lands with a whimper instead of a bang. Why a whole subplot just doesn’t work.
Because if you found the right beta-readers – people who respect you enough to tell you the honest truth, but who also genuinely believe in whatever the work may be – that discomfort is good. It’s healthy. Because that discomfort that you may feel is ego leaving the body and mind.
Ego is one of the worst things that can happen to a creator, because ego leads to the idea that they don’t need an outside opinion. And that is tied into another of the worst things that can happen to a creator: extreme closeness to the material at hand. You need another pair of eyes, especially when your story is far enough along that you’re ready for this step.
Every story needs a beta-reader. Even though it’s technically a voluntary thing, I tell people who are curious about the process that it is an essential part of the process, because I really believe that. When the author thinks they’re ready to send a story off, it’s the sometimes inglorious job of the beta reader to say, “No, you’re not ready, and here’s why.”
It really is a torture-test for your story, much like testing a car’s impact resistance the only honest way you can. And it stands to reason that if there are serious flaws in your story, this is going to smart. If this is a work you’re properly passionate about, you’re going to feel less like the car manufacturer in that simile and more like the crash-test dummy.
In my experience, as someone who’s gone through this process multiple times both as author and as reader, the flaws that arise from this process can very broadly be divided into two categories, and one darkest fear.
Easy mode: incidental flaws. These are things that can easily be corrected right then and there without much critical thought, or if it does require a bit of critical thinking, you can usually hash out a solution right then and there: the occasional typo, a character acting unjustifiably OOC in a scene, an ancillary description that would be better moved to a different scene, awkward dialogue that doesn’t flow, a scene that doesn’t contribute much to the characterization or plot or worldbuilding and thus should be cut or trimmed significantly, a subplot that needs serious work but it’s more-or-less isolated from the rest of the story and can be fixed without screwing up other arcs in the process, et cetera.
Personal example: during the beta sessions for The Great Scourge, I initially had several scenes wherein Ashy first explores the world Everan, which is a lush bioluminescent environment where natural sprawl has overtaken the ruins of an ancient society, with a new and less-advanced society built over it. I did up several scenes, exploring the subterranean caverns and running from alien fauna, and I really thought I had some vintage Metroid vibes going. My beta reader described these scenes as ‘when you’re playing a game and waiting for the cutscene to end so you can grab the controller’. After realizing how little they contributed to the plot or even to the worldbuilding compared to the later Everan scenes, where we do get to see all the cool stuff, I concurred and managed to compress all the important elements of those cut pages into a single smooth, economic scene.
Second personal example: more recently, those beta conferences for EP made me realize that I needed to re-write an entire subplot from scratch, because the rest of the story had grown around it in size and scope and had effectively super-annuated this subplot, and the only real option was to nuke from orbit and start again. Make no mistake, feeling like I had to do this sucked on a level hitherto undreampt of, but the subplot was more-or-less detached from those around it, so I was able to break it down in isolation and work through it rather than have to change huge swaths of the wider story. Once I actually got rolling with the revamp and gave myself permission to experiment, it really drove home just how much of a rut I had been in with the previous build. The new build of this subplot gets wild (and I even managed to tie it more strongly in to a separate character’s arc in the process). I won’t say how or why as it concerns an as-yet unreleased work, but I’m super-excited for you to read it.
Hard mode: structural flaws. These are the more serious flaws: a subplot needs serious work but it’s already been inexorably tethered in with a bunch of other plot points, with less wiggle room than you’d like. A character’s motivation makes no sense, and they happen to be one of the main characters. A character makes a stupid OOC decision whose repercussions end up rippling through half the story and requires far more than a simple spot-clean to fix.
Personal example: Oh, lordy. The beta conference for Seed Of Treachery was a bit of a nightmare. What my beta-reader had the questionable fortune to read was not even close to the published version you might have on your shelf or e-reader. Among its many sins, the villain’s main motivation both didn’t make sense, and lacked real urgency. That said, this was pain-as-potential: within days of that stomach-churning meeting, I had nailed the villain’s motivation and psychology, and was hard at work on parlaying it into a whole new thematic angle that resonated through the entire novel. You honestly have no idea how important this realization was.
Dark Souls no-leveling no-weapons mode: foundational flaws. This, and pray this never happens (especially in a long-form novel), is when your beta-reader has unearthed such a severe flaw with the building blocks on which the plot takes place, that your only real options are to plaster over it the best you can, and press on and publish a work that you understand is severely flawed in a big way, or to take the whole thing back to the embryonic state. This, obviously, is the nightmare-scenario.
Personal example: none yet, and please none ever
As author, you’ll hope and pray that the lion’s share of flaws your beta reader(s) find are incidental. As reader, you hope for the same, because that news is much easier to deliver. Compare a busted taillight to a bollocked transmission.
As self-explanatory as they are, incidental flaws aren’t to be taken lightly. They’re not that painful, because they’re pretty much self-contained in most cases, be it to one line, one scene or one subplot. But they still need to be fixed. It’s a matter of pride in your art and pride in your product.
Remember, a single ‘incidental flaw’ that should have been caught in post can hurt an entire work. (See: that “Marthaaa!” scene in Batman V. Superman. Snyder intended for it to be the moment that humanized Kal-El in Bruce’s eyes, but it was poorly represented and not clearly explained on the screen, therefore it lost its impact and became a laughingstock for viewers. It was an incidental flaw that would have made for an easy fix, just a single extra line in the script to clarify the scene’s intent.)
Structural flaws take us to the wrong side of the street. Structural flaws are a fault line running right through the heart of your story. And the big reason they’re scary to encounter, for the author, is because to fix one of these, you’ll often need to tweak elements which can ripple throughout the rest of your story, sometimes in a big way.
You will immediately fear the thought of accidentally ruining something else a hundred pages away because of a fix you put in to stabilize the first thing. You will become, possibly, so scared that you’re about to spend all your working time running about through your manuscript and putting out fires that you started in the process of fixing the original problem, that you just might reject your beta-reader’s analysis out of sheer self-preservation.
Please don’t at this point get testy or terse with your beta-reader. Remember: this pain is good. The more troubled a story is, the more discomfort you will feel – but, more to the point, the more you need to feel.
Ask yourself, ‘if what I need to do is going to send shockwaves through the story that I was so confident in five minutes ago, how can I ride those shockwaves to make it better, cooler, more exciting, more interesting?’
And as for the nightmare scenario, I don’t really have any examples of works that had deep foundational flaws and had to go back to formula to sort it out, because they either didn’t make it to the published stage, or they got sorted out the long way round – through simply going back and starting again. So all I have for you are those works with severe foundational flaws, who soldiered on to release anyway.
We’re not done singling out the DCEU right just yet. By appearances, Justice League is a fairly milquetoast action blockbuster, entertaining at face value, but its flaws were foundational. It had to formally introduce a full three of six Justice League stars within JL itself, robbing the film of the zip, grandeur and satisfaction of disparate pre-moulded characters meeting up and mingling their chemistry, like the first Avengers and Infinity War had in spades (foundational). The villain was a nothingburger who had zero buildup, hazy motivations and little personality (structural). The studio had frantically played about with the artistic direction of the DCEU so much by that point that the film supposed to tie it all together had no idea what it wanted its tone to be (foundational). One single member of the titular League was more powerful on a base level than all the others combined, such that the only way to make it halfway “work” was to shove him aside until the very peak of the climax (foundational). And also, to cram in all these characters in a film that the studio mandated be no more than two hours (arbitrary executive meddling, but to a point foundational).
In short, by the time they had well and truly committed to making this picture, Justice League’s problems were effectively unfixable by any measure short of a time machine.
While we’re on a comics-adjacent subject, let’s look at another story with deep foundational flaws, but instead of being merely face-value-decent, this one endeavors to deeply offend the reader on all fronts – pacing, message, tone, content – because it was made in bad faith, a vehicle to push an ill-advised end game on behalf of management, rather than to tell a good story. I’m talking about the Spider-Man arc One More D-
I’m talking about the Spider-Man arc One More Da-
I…I just can’t. Let its name not be uttered here. You can find reviews and summaries on this funny little internet of ours that should speak for themselves. But the point to be gleaned from this is that during the beta process, you should also be willing to question your own intentions in creating a thing. OMD was written in bad faith, and that does count as a foundational flaw – fruit of the poison tree and all. The Spider-Man brand survived OMD, because Spidey was by that point an American treasure, albeit a fictional one. If you put out a work in ‘bad faith’, thinking you can insult your audience and get away with it, you shan’t be as lucky. I’m sure we can all think of at least one particular example in recent big-budget media, without naming names.
But we can expand this: you and your beta reader should be able to scrutinize your intent behind specific scenes and design decisions. What I mean by that varies from story to story, depending on the type of story you’re trying to tell. But it’s things like – in this scene, is your character acting this way because it’s in their nature, or because you want to railroad them into making a very specific decision? Tail wagging the dog, as it were? In this subplot, were you so bent on trying to subvert the norms of the genre that you forgot to make said subversion satisfying? And so forth. It’s all just so situational.
I’ve hinted at this already, but what makes a good beta reader? Can it be just anyone, so long as they’re willing to give honest feedback?
Well, that’s up to you. It’s about what your story requires. I am fortunate enough to have someone as a beta-reader who fulfills all the criteria I would say are essential for great beta work: he believes in my work and the world I’m working with (he even turned out his own fanfic at one point), he’s fairly knowledgeable about relevant subjects, and he respects me enough to be honest with me when something doesn’t add up.
For example, I know very little about alcohol and drinking culture, beyond that one time I bought Bruce Dickinson’s Trooper beer just because Bruce Dickinson supervised its creation. During post-production on the first book, I had multiple beta-readers (another good idea if you can swing it!), and one brought up the minibar I had placed in the apartment of one of the main characters. He asked, “is she an alcoholic?” I said no. He asked why she had a personal minibar. I, for some reason, thought at the time that ‘minibar’ was synonymous with a waist-high fridge. As it turns out, uh, no. You’ll notice that didn’t appear in the published copy.
In other words (not just for the beta reading stage of things, but as a creator in general), surround yourself with people who know more than you about subjects you would like to be more well versed in.
All that being said, beta reading isn’t entirely a torture test. Being a set of fresh eyes doesn’t mean those eyes always have to blaze with the well-meaning fires of criticism. At their heart, beta readers aren’t just continuity cops and pacing police. They’re a test audience, and you can learn just as much from what they like as from what they don’t.
In fact, you might find that your beta-reader takes umbrage with a plot point you really love, but they think this other part is awesome and perfect – this other part, mind you, that you just kind of threw in there on a whim. And that’s fine. That’s cool. Some amazing scenes in world-class narratives are there because the creators just ‘threw them in’ (Harrison Ford’s dysentery on the set of Raiders Of The Lost Ark, and his unwillingness to film an involved action scene on that day, landed us with one of the best and funniest scenes in the entire series).
Incidentally, it’s important to put yourself in a certain headspace during the beta process. Say with me the ‘beta copy prayer’: give us the confidence to defend those elements we feel are absolutely essential, and to have the openness of mind to accept the idea of altering those that are not, if the beta reader has rooted out an issue or seven. And, most importantly, to be able to tell the difference. Amen.
And it’s okay to disagree. This is not a shellacking from middle management. They are not your boss demanding a report, or a publisher demanding changes, or a parent scolding a child. A beta-reader, ideally, is like a good interviewer in one regard: their job does not involve trying to insert themselves, but rather to facilitate the person whose work is being read, or the person being interviewed. (I can confirm that they do teach exactly this in journalism school.)
What I mean is, you are not your beta-reader and they are not you, so it may come to pass that they might just not love a scene, without there being anything really wrong with it otherwise. It happens. I don’t even love every song from my favourite bands. Who does?
For example, during the beta conferences for the second Architects book, The Great Scourge, my beta-reader singled out one scene as feeling too much like Frankenstein. I replied that it was meant to be a reference, because the themes in Shelley’s novel were one of many important influences on parts of that character’s arc. So he didn’t necessarily dig that all the way downtown, but the scene was left pretty much as-is. (I believe the exact words were, “Okay, so make it more like Frankenstein!”)
I suppose at the end of the day, you have to find your own balance as to the dynamic between you and your beta-reader(s), not too soul-crushingly critical, but also honest enough to know when something is amiss. Perfectly balanced, as all things should be.
And don’t forget to lighten up the mood from time to time. Because even though this is hard work and should be respected as such, and given the time of day as such, you’re both there to better the same story. Don’t be afraid to poke fun at your characters, or to imagine funny scenarios playing out. Fun is not something that one considers when balancing their story, but at the end of the day, this should make you smile.
And the bigger your budget, and the bigger your networking pool, the more access you’ll have to people whose literal job it is to do this all the days. And now there’s even beta-readers who will laser-target focused areas of your story: there are simple proofreaders for grammar and typoes, there are ‘sensitivity readers’ who will read your manuscript and advise you on, say, if you’re presenting an ethnic group in a worrysome light, or if your fantasy-society is accidentally falling into racist tropes. (Better to have one of those people to tell you about those issues before you go to print, lest the cancer known as ‘cancel culture’ decides to turn you into today’s Main Character Of The Internet to feed its own self-satisfied, art-eating gluttony.)
(Hi there. Dropping back in with an edit in 2021 to clarify that when I say ‘cancel culture’, I’m talking very specifically about the instances in which twitter mobs have attacked small-time authors over perceived errors in a soon-to-be-released manuscript, like if the author accidentally depicted a fantasy race in a way that parallels real-world stereotypes, and the backlash becomes so vitriolic that the author cancels the release entirely. That is the thing I hate. I’m not talking about, say, Rowling getting backlashed for being a hardcore TERF or Cara Gugino filling out the whole bingo card of gross views to have in 2021 America. Those are simply the natural consequences of being an asshole.)
That said, you can have all the money in the world, all the connections and audience in the world, and some of the best and brightest talent working to make your vision a reality, and all the beta-readers in the world won’t matter if you decide, damn the torpedoes, you’re just going to charge full burst ahead with a single beyond-stupid idea.
Or, if I haven’t convinced you yet of the essential nature of the discomfort that comes from confronting your work’s flaws during the beta process, allow me to re-position my point slightly.
You can either have a beta reader, one who means the best for you and who believes in your story, explain to you in controlled conditions the potential flaws and issues. And if you decide to let ego eat your reason and push your work through without it, I’m sure the internet will be more than happy to elaborate on these things for you once it’s too late to take back. I’m sure they’ll be just as constructive and helpful.
(By the way, I intentionally wrote this article with a slew of silly, stupid flaws: I started with an obscure religious reference, but then I abruptly changed up the metaphor midway through to crash-test dummies and stuff. The tone of the article gradually got more casual and then I started paraphrasing Thanos for some reason. Did you catch all this while you were reading? Then there are a lot of writers out there who could use a good beta-reader like you.)