Ryan M. Patrick

I alpha and beta read a lot – see this post for what that entails – for my critique partners. Here’s a quick post on some of the things I often see when I’m reading.

Taking Too Long to Get Started

There’s some advice that I heard, I think for the first time on the Writing Excuses podcast, to be “in late, out early.” It’s really easy to say, “yeah, that makes sense,” but much harder to do in practice. And it’s an issue I see all the time when I beta read, especially for newer authors.

I get it. You’ve done a ton of worldbuilding or outlining and you want to show off the incredibly detailed setting you’ve created, or you see a movie with an epic opening shot and want to recreate that in prose. But it’s the wrong move – you want to establish setting, sure, but also want to get character and conflict down as soon as possible. And that means getting to the heart of the matter as soon as possible and cutting out all of the fluff.

And, it may be a more modern trend. Older novels had more room to get established before jumping into the plot, but with Amazon’s “sample” feature a reader can see the first 10% inside your book before he or she buys it. With so many options out there, you need to hook them ASAP.

Repeated Words

All writers have their crutch words – one of mine is “hopefully,” which I probably use dozens of times in my first drafts before I find/replace and hopefully get myself down to the low single digits. We all have them, it’s not necessarily an issue – how many times did Robert Jordan’s female characters “tug on her braid?”

But it’s noticeable, and it makes your book appear unedited (and if published in that state, unprofessional). Be aware of certain phrases or words that you use repeatedly and either eliminate or change them to others.

Character Soup

I, too, am guilty of this one, especially in my earlier writing. The biggest piece of feedback that my mom gave me on The Martian Incident was that there were too many characters – which is fair, there really are.

Not every character needs to be named, and not everyone in your story needs a complete arc. But – especially for beginning writers – less is more.

Dialog

Dialog in a novel is NOT how people talk in real life. It’s really hard to explain, but I can 100% nail when a writer I’m alpha/beta reading for is a voracious reader or not. The ones that are write dialog “correctly,” like I expect in a published book, while those who are less frequent readers almost always fall into this trap.

In a novel, unless it’s for emphasis, you don’t need the “ums,” “okays,” “uhs”, and other parts of speech that we use in real life. Dialog is an art, not a science, and different genres have different expectations – the domestic thrillers my wife reads are less formal in this regard than a hard sci-fi novel. Read heavily in the genre you write in and try to match your dialog to what you see there. You can’t go wrong with reading more!

White Room Syndrome

I’m actually less guilty of this one than the others on my list, but I’ve done it a few times.

When you’re writing, you know what the scene looks like, where it takes place, the placement and orientation of all of the characters and objects. But the reader doesn’t – he or she can’t go inside your brain and see it. This is something I see all of the time, especially in sci-fi and fantasy where the world looks different than ours. Don’t over-describe, of course, but make sure the reader understands the picture you’re trying to paint.

Hope this helps!