Beta Appreciation Day
Being a good beta is hard-it means being timely and upfront with your betees, willing to give tough love, to tell authors where you see problems without discouraging them, to help them make their story the best it can be without imposing your own vision on them.
I was lucky with my betas in both Trek and Harry Potter, and I’ve learned something from all of them, even the ones where the relationship didn’t work out. So, wherever you are, thank you to my past betas: my first, Laura Michelle Hale and seemag, my other old Trek betas; jat_sapphire, Jungle Kitty, Kathy Dailey, hafital, Wildcat, and Trekki; and HP betas ordinary_magic and kobegrace. You all made me a better writer.
And a special thanks to my current betas Djinn and bambu345-how I lucked out to have both of you helping me out I don’t know-I feel I learn so much from every beta you guys do, and my stories are always, always stronger for it. (And thanks to southernwitch69 for helping me with a story recently that lay in the virtual sock drawer-or at least closet-far too long.)
I know not everyone is a fan of betas-and I do believe a bad beta is worse than none at all, and a beta is to be chosen carefully-someone you’ve observed long enough to believe sane and reliable and who is a writer whose gifts you respect. They’re not to be taken for granted certainly, and having one doesn’t absolve you of your responsibility to self-edit and learn craft and grammar for yourself-they’re not there to be a crutch, and they shouldn’t be sorting things out and rewording and rewriting for you-that’s not a beta, that’s a co-writer.
I can’t stress this enough. A good beta is not a proofreader-if that’s all you want, you possibly could get along without one. Put your stuff away a while, put it into a different, weird font that forces you to slow down to read it, print it out, read it aloud-all that can help. And if you do, do that as much as possible for your work before sending to beta, then that makes it easier for your beta to go deeper-you've cleared the brush.
More than just proofing, a beta can lend you a reader’s eye into your writing, and however good you may get at the mechanics, I don’t think there is any substitute for that. You may know what you want to express-but it takes a reader to let you know if you communicated. When you add to that the sensibilities and reactions of an author you admire, you can’t help but learn a lot.
So to all my betas who gave of their time to me-thank you.
I was lucky with my betas in both Trek and Harry Potter, and I’ve learned something from all of them, even the ones where the relationship didn’t work out. So, wherever you are, thank you to my past betas: my first, Laura Michelle Hale and seemag, my other old Trek betas; jat_sapphire, Jungle Kitty, Kathy Dailey, hafital, Wildcat, and Trekki; and HP betas ordinary_magic and kobegrace. You all made me a better writer.
And a special thanks to my current betas Djinn and bambu345-how I lucked out to have both of you helping me out I don’t know-I feel I learn so much from every beta you guys do, and my stories are always, always stronger for it. (And thanks to southernwitch69 for helping me with a story recently that lay in the virtual sock drawer-or at least closet-far too long.)
I know not everyone is a fan of betas-and I do believe a bad beta is worse than none at all, and a beta is to be chosen carefully-someone you’ve observed long enough to believe sane and reliable and who is a writer whose gifts you respect. They’re not to be taken for granted certainly, and having one doesn’t absolve you of your responsibility to self-edit and learn craft and grammar for yourself-they’re not there to be a crutch, and they shouldn’t be sorting things out and rewording and rewriting for you-that’s not a beta, that’s a co-writer.
I can’t stress this enough. A good beta is not a proofreader-if that’s all you want, you possibly could get along without one. Put your stuff away a while, put it into a different, weird font that forces you to slow down to read it, print it out, read it aloud-all that can help. And if you do, do that as much as possible for your work before sending to beta, then that makes it easier for your beta to go deeper-you've cleared the brush.
More than just proofing, a beta can lend you a reader’s eye into your writing, and however good you may get at the mechanics, I don’t think there is any substitute for that. You may know what you want to express-but it takes a reader to let you know if you communicated. When you add to that the sensibilities and reactions of an author you admire, you can’t help but learn a lot.
So to all my betas who gave of their time to me-thank you.