Author: Harriet Phoenix

It’s a common question among new writers: do I really need to get a second opinion on my writing before I submit it anywhere?

Yes. Yes you do.

Even if you’re a professional proofreader or editor, you still need someone else to glance over your baby to tell you what is and isn’t working. Maybe you love that comedy character… but he adds nothing to the plot and yanks the reader out of the story. This passage might be some of your best writing… but it jars with the rest and screws up the theme of your story. That fountain you described in loving detail is a colourful piece of scene-setting… but the way you brought it up implies someone’s getting pushed in, which leaves your readers feeling cheated when no one does. You probably won’t spot these things. You need people to tell you.

I recently finished a short story for a competition and sent it off to a couple of University friends for their opinions. They both liked it, but one had questions about a particular object the main character obtained partway through; what happened to it?

Now, I was perfectly clear on when and how the object gets lost. Somehow, though, that information wandered off between my brain and my fingers and didn’t make it onto the page. Like the object in the story, it just sort of disappeared.

Beta readers are also the perfect person to tell you about shortcomings in your own writing that might not be obvious to you because you’re the one who wrote it. Most writers habitually do some niggling thing, like overusing a particular word (for me it’s “little”). Then there are more general mistakes, like typing errors resulting in a different, wrong word that you’re spellcheck doesn’t pick up but your readers probably will.

Things like that can become distracting for a reader, make your work seem sloppy, and potentially be the One Thing that makes an editor choose a different story. That’s why you really need someone to spot them for you.

(Incidentally, did you see what I did there? My spellchecker didn’t. The trouble with spellcheckers is that I’m pretty sure they’re programmed by computer nerds, not English nerds. Just know that it physically pains me to leave that in there.)

You know your story (hopefully) inside and out. You know why that person’s upset with your character and why that bracelet’s important. And that’s great, but it’s also the problem; you know exactly what you intended to write, and that can make you miss what you actually did write.

Good beta readers can improve things in ways you flat-out didn’t see coming. I recently shared a few chapters of a fanfic with a friend. The feedback I got was mostly positive, but the best thing was a prediction she made which was… not at all what I was going for. The way I’d written something foreshadowed things I hadn’t intended.

Here’s the thing, though; her prediction was better than what I’d planned. Much better. My original plan would’ve foreshadowed things that didn’t happen, and been pretty dull in comparison. Instead I ended up rewriting a couple of upcoming chapters I’d half-written, and it was great. All thanks to beta reading.

A beta reader goes into a story with no idea what you were trying to do, which makes them the perfect person to tell you without preconceptions what does and does not come across. You are literally the only person in the world who can’t do this.