Masterclass - Getting Ready for the Beta or the Zine Editor
So your story is written. You've sweated over it, can probably recite it in your sleep and want to send it to the beta. Is there something you should look at before you send it?
“Before you send it to the beta” or “Checking Your Work”
The irony is that this essay is not beta’d. Therefore, you will find mistakes. The other irony, at least to me, is that I am not the best beta here. I am certainly not terrible (I hope), but there are several people in this group that I bow down to in great respect.
However, I am the one who felt like writing about getting ready for the beta… And because I publish zines, I'm sort of blending editor/beta into one thing.
This is a self-indulgent essay. Be aware that what follows is my opinion and not hard-and-fast rules. Basically, they are items that I tend to look at when I am involved in a work, both as a beta and as a zine editor. You may find that some, or even many, of the sections do not apply to you. Also I tend to drift off-topic as this was not originally started for the master classes and so touches on a good deal that had already been said. As to what dinahmt said about less is more? I probably didn’t hit the ‘delete’ button nearly as much as I should have.
For a good introductory essay on the relationship between a beta and author, see Calanthe’s “For Beta, For Worse.”
*****
It would be lovely to only get items to review that are almost perfect and just need some small fixes. Unfortunately, however, all of us make mistakes. I don’t think authors are always the best choice to be their own betas - even in a drabble you can overlook something. A second pair of eyes is a great help to an author.
I will admit, however, that I usually don’t have my drabbles beta’d.
If you take a few steps to look over your work before you send it off, the easier it will be for your beta to do a stellar job. In addition, the more you can work as a team with your beta, the better your results will be. Remember, a good beta, working in partnership with you, can improve your work. In addition, a very good beta can take a story with a good plot and idea but atrocious writing and make it readable. (At least they can do it to a point. Right now I am doing a story for one of my regulars in anime that must have been written in her sleep - I’m spending an hour on each page. I won’t be able to salvage it, but I can at least improve it. It will show up as bad examples later on.)
Going Off Topic: Some words about spell-check and grammar-check.
I assume you have done the first step and run the story through spell-check. Have you made sure that spell-check is set up for the proper language? Don’t laugh. I get pieces to look at where they are supposedly written in American English but spell-checked in British or even sometimes a foreign language. It can be very disconcerting when I am in the middle of doing my own spell-check and get “Dictionary not found” and it wants, for example, Norwegian.
Remember also that spell-check does not catch mistakes like “wash” where it should be “was” or even the use of the wrong word, as long as you spelled it properly.
Did you run grammar-check? Did you rely on it? Well, that may not have been a good thing. I find that over half the suggestions it makes are not useful as grammar-check only looks at small parts of each sentence. Grammar-check does not think. You, thankfully, do.
If you are unsure of grammar, look at a reference source. You can find them all over the web, or in books - I keep three style manuals and six grammar books at my desk. That’s not because I’m a gung-ho beta; I use them for other reasons and started the collection when I was going for my Masters. But I will admit to sitting down with a great book like Lapsing into a comma: a curmudgeon's guide to the many things that can go wrong in print--and how to avoid them by Bill Walsh or, Made in America: an informal history of the English language in the United States and The mother tongue: English & how it got that way, both by Bill Bryson. Does that improve my writing? Nope. However, it does give me an idea of where to look when I have to research a point.
You can even find a list of useful sites compiled by, um, me… References sources for betas and writers. It mainly covers on-line reference sites.
I think the best check for grammar is your ear. Most of us know how things should sound, even if we can’t tell a past participle from our principal. If it sounds off, it probably is. So, if grammar-check told you are ending with a participle or splitting an infinitive, well, this isn’t your thesis. How does it sound to you?
*****
Some You Can Do Before Sending Your Story to the Beta
1. Check spelling and punctuation.
This may seem obvious, but after a period of time your eye starts to see what should be on the page instead of what is actually there. In addition, check for things like “it’s” for “its”, “you’re” for “your” and so on. I have found a good trick is to change the format so that you are reading something ‘new.’ How do I do that? I paste my stuff into email, send it to myself and read it from my email account. That way things show up for me. Other authors post to Live Journal using the “private” setting so they can look at the story that way.
2. Look for overused words.
One of the authors in my zines has only two verbs for dialogue: said and asked. I finally sent her a list: declared, enquired, replied, stated … and told her to staple it to her forehead. If you think you might be overly fond of a word, or even a phrase (if that author writes ‘in a moment’ one more time I am going hit her over the head with a comb binder, I swear) then check. I do it by using the ‘find’ option under the edit menu. I put the offending word in and then click through the tale while I count how many occurrences show up.
3. Are your characters’ names consistent?
I am ashamed to say that last year one of the zines I helped a little with (cough*Kuryakin Files*cough) had a story in it, which I did not see before publication, in which the protagonist’s name changed from Nick to Rick for a few pages. That is just downright humiliating. I have also seen stories where the author could not decide how they were spelling the person’s last name. In one of the stories I beta’d recently the character’s name was sometimes hyphenated; sometimes not. Easy fixes, but sometimes it takes someone other than the author to notice these things.
As another side note, I personally don’t care if you make a name like Jethro Gibbs possessive by doing “Gibbs’” or “Gibbs’s” but once you’ve done it one way, please be consistent.
4. Did we have that then?
One thing you have to be careful for in Man From U.N.C.L.E. stories is anachronisms. Remember, we are in the sixties here. If a musical group did not form until 1973, I doubt Illya will be going to see them at a club. Look through your story and make sure that any cultural or equipment references are valid. I have gotten into long discussions with editors about things like whether a medicine was given by IV back then, whether a toaster would broil, all sorts of oddities.
Be careful about landmarks too. Make sure something wasn’t built until after the story takes place. Highways also.
5. POV.
leethet said it all.
6. Can you tell who is doing what to whom?
I hate overuse of pronouns. Here is a sentence from that anime story I am currently cleaning up for the author:
Pulling his fingers out of the boy he jerked his legs out from his coils and bent them so they were over his shoulders in a painful position that almost had his toes touching the ground.
Can you follow that? I can’t. Breaking it up or using a name somewhere in the sentence would be helpful.
For that matter, always remember that someone reading your story may not be familiar with the fandom. Therefore, if you refer to “the Russian” or “the brunet” it helps to give a hint earlier as to who they are, such as “Sometimes his friend was just so Russian, Napoleon thought.” Then you have established who the “Russian” is.
We had a discussion in another group once about overusing descriptive words instead of actual names. As one person said, by the end of the paragraph she felt that seven different people were in the room.
"I have a name, Napoleon."
"Don't I mention it?"
"Not often. 'The blond,' 'the Russian,' 'the smaller agent.' You're not that much taller than I."
(From “The Unexpected Talents Affair” by T. Gabrielle )
7. Who was that masked man?
Your story may contain original characters: guards, femme fatales, janitors, whatever. Please do not have them just appear in the story out of thin air. One story I edited had a doctor in the room talking to one of the agents, without him being introduced, and I did not know who he was. He just appeared out of nowhere. (In the same story, at one point the author had six or more people in the room all talking as the NCIS team came to visit the U.N.C.L.E. agents - let us get real here, folks. Can you imagine Illya tolerating that?)
8. Mapquest can be your friend.
If you have the agents traveling, do some research to check into travel time. It does not take six hours to get from New York City to New Jersey; it just seems like it sometimes. (I can get away with saying that as I have lived in both places.) Remember too that modes of transportation were a little different. Planes were slower, people rode more trains than they do now and Trailways bus lines still existed.
9. Plot holes. Are there any?
Well, normally, I would worry about these, but the television show didn’t, so why should we? Just throw another outlandish Thrush plot in there if you have to.
Actually, it is probably a good idea to look over the story and mentally outline its plot. I’m talking about the story as it ended up being written, not as you had outlined it for writing. Does it flow logically or is there a gap or jump that needs to be explained?
10. How did we get here?
Look for jumps in continuity. Do not end one paragraph with it being 3 p.m. in New York and then in the next start talking about dinner in Florida unless you have explained the transition.
11. I speak very good British
If you are not an American and writing American, or British and, well, you get the idea, you may want to consider asking someone who actually is to run a quick eye over the story. Yes, most of us know things like lift/elevator or pajama/pyjama (which just looks plain weird to me) but what about things like “knocked her up?” Or elijahwildchild's lovely example of 'rubber?'
12. I’ve got rhythm
Some of the authors I know tend to fall into writing a long series of sentences as noun/verb.noun/verb,noun/verb. (Johnny went to the store. His mother watched from the window. He dropped the money on the sidewalk. Mr. Black packed the purchase as he talked to Johnny.) That can get somewhat choppy. I call it ‘the railroad track’ style as if you were riding on a train.
A few transition words (suddenly, at the same time…) or rearranging the sentence does wonders. Rephrasing some of the sentences, such as ‘As he packed the purchases, Mr. Black talked to Johnny,’ can do much to prevent the story becoming tedious. I like to read my stories aloud, if they are not too long, to get a feel for the flow.
13. Pay attention to the speaker, please
Many characters have quirks in their speech. In NCIS, Ducky tends to address everyone very formally and Gibbs drops the initial pronoun, so that you get sentences like “Don’t think so.” In U.N.C.L.E. I think, although I am not sure, that Illya does not use very many contractions. There is also a little English and French influence to his speech. He rarely uses Russian, although fan fiction writers seem to have learned a few phrases they like to drop in: Milli moi, bolzhe me, and so forth.
14. Be true to your character
I find this more with original characters as the series people have fairly well established traits. Make sure your character’s personality is consistent. I worked on a Harry Potter story that featured Snape’s nasty and evil twin. The author was sending it to me chapter-by-chapter. In the first two chapters the character was cruel and rotten. In the third chapter he suddenly was a bumbling idiot. I sent it back to the author. Sadly, she had already written the next four chapters and had to rework them. By changing the man from snarky to stupid, she had lost the tension of the story. Unfortunately, she did not feel up to rewriting and abandoned the story.
15. Do I have to stop and think about what I just read?
Every so often I hit a sentence where I just go, huh? If I have to stop and think about something, such as ‘who is the speaker?’ or ‘what is this clause modifying?’ then I am miffed. It throws me right out of the story. Here is an example of the second:
She was subsequently married to Bronson, with whom she had had a daughter, from October 5, 1968 (who appeared with McCallum in The Great Escape) until her death following a long battle with breast cancer in 1990 (she had been diagnosed in 1984) at the age of 54 at home in Malibu, California, survived by her husband, 3 children and her parents.
from allfansites.com)
The above gets really tangled when the author tries to tell us that Jill Ireland had a child with Bronson, was married to him and that Bronson worked with McCallum, all at once. Did that information have to go into one sentence? This could easily be broken into to or three shorter ones and then would be much clearer. I had to read it three times to figure it out.
I know it is hard to tell when it is your own work, but my rule-of-thumb is generally that if you have to take a deep breath in the middle of a sentence, it is too long. I have found personally that shorter is better.
16. Get your facts straight.
One thing library schools teach is to never, ever say, “Oh, I know the answer to that!” without verifying it first. You would be surprised how much of your “knowledge” is wrong. The longer I worked in reference the more I discovered what I did not know.
As it happens, I was tripped up on this in a recent story, From Here to Epiphany. Granted, the story was just a joke, and I only have a draft version up, but I blew something significant. I had a line in it “was a hot, sweaty day in Chicago.” A beta would have noticed one thing immediately: the story was set in December. Not a hot, sweaty time in a northern city like Chicago. I was so concerned with getting the joke in that I forgot about reality. (See drworm's class on Verisimilitude.) Furthermore, Chicago, known as “The Windy City,” is not really a hot and sweaty place at any time. This was really embarrassing, because I’ve been to the city many times, including this November - when I froze. Thankfully an alert reader (artyartie, thank you) caught it.
Going off topic again: Want to really tick off a beta?
Just like authors, betas work to gain a reputation. I had the bad experience of having an author thank me in her story for my beta work and then ignore every single one of my corrections! I am ashamed to be seen within 100 feet of the story. If you are going to ignore the beta's work, please don't thank them in the author notes.
Final words of wisdom:
1. The beta is not God, not matter what I keep telling you.
I make many comments when I edit along the lines of “how would it sound worded this way?” or “I can’t see Illya doing that.” Those comments are to make the author think about what is on the paper. If they reconsider the item in question and they are happy with it, or prefer to stay with what they did rather than what I suggested, then I think they should keep it that way. I do not want to be so hung up on grammar that I ruin their style. But I do like to know that they have at least thought about what they wrote. Ultimately, it is their story and they should be able to be happy with it.
It does help if they can articulate why they did something or why they are not making a change.
2. The story is the most important thing, above all.
Please, please do not get too hung up on any of the above. Not one author or beta actually does everything I listed above. Consider them merely suggestions of things to look at. If you worry too much about grammar and other items, you can worry the life right out of your story. I would rather see a vibrant tale than a grammatically flawless essay any day.
P.S. Because I am never totally serious:
Two talented writers and I wrote a story that was grammatically correct but nearly impossible to read. It came about when I was complaining about authors overusing semi-colons to create spliced sentences. We wrote the longest sentences we could. Some are over 2000 words long. It is still a valid story, but your eyes will cross very quickly.
If you want to see what warped minds can do, check out “It Was a Dark and Stormy Night.”
I would love to get feedback from other betas to see if anyone else thinks like I do.
“Before you send it to the beta” or “Checking Your Work”
The irony is that this essay is not beta’d. Therefore, you will find mistakes. The other irony, at least to me, is that I am not the best beta here. I am certainly not terrible (I hope), but there are several people in this group that I bow down to in great respect.
However, I am the one who felt like writing about getting ready for the beta… And because I publish zines, I'm sort of blending editor/beta into one thing.
This is a self-indulgent essay. Be aware that what follows is my opinion and not hard-and-fast rules. Basically, they are items that I tend to look at when I am involved in a work, both as a beta and as a zine editor. You may find that some, or even many, of the sections do not apply to you. Also I tend to drift off-topic as this was not originally started for the master classes and so touches on a good deal that had already been said. As to what dinahmt said about less is more? I probably didn’t hit the ‘delete’ button nearly as much as I should have.
For a good introductory essay on the relationship between a beta and author, see Calanthe’s “For Beta, For Worse.”
*****
It would be lovely to only get items to review that are almost perfect and just need some small fixes. Unfortunately, however, all of us make mistakes. I don’t think authors are always the best choice to be their own betas - even in a drabble you can overlook something. A second pair of eyes is a great help to an author.
I will admit, however, that I usually don’t have my drabbles beta’d.
If you take a few steps to look over your work before you send it off, the easier it will be for your beta to do a stellar job. In addition, the more you can work as a team with your beta, the better your results will be. Remember, a good beta, working in partnership with you, can improve your work. In addition, a very good beta can take a story with a good plot and idea but atrocious writing and make it readable. (At least they can do it to a point. Right now I am doing a story for one of my regulars in anime that must have been written in her sleep - I’m spending an hour on each page. I won’t be able to salvage it, but I can at least improve it. It will show up as bad examples later on.)
Going Off Topic: Some words about spell-check and grammar-check.
I assume you have done the first step and run the story through spell-check. Have you made sure that spell-check is set up for the proper language? Don’t laugh. I get pieces to look at where they are supposedly written in American English but spell-checked in British or even sometimes a foreign language. It can be very disconcerting when I am in the middle of doing my own spell-check and get “Dictionary not found” and it wants, for example, Norwegian.
Remember also that spell-check does not catch mistakes like “wash” where it should be “was” or even the use of the wrong word, as long as you spelled it properly.
Did you run grammar-check? Did you rely on it? Well, that may not have been a good thing. I find that over half the suggestions it makes are not useful as grammar-check only looks at small parts of each sentence. Grammar-check does not think. You, thankfully, do.
If you are unsure of grammar, look at a reference source. You can find them all over the web, or in books - I keep three style manuals and six grammar books at my desk. That’s not because I’m a gung-ho beta; I use them for other reasons and started the collection when I was going for my Masters. But I will admit to sitting down with a great book like Lapsing into a comma: a curmudgeon's guide to the many things that can go wrong in print--and how to avoid them by Bill Walsh or, Made in America: an informal history of the English language in the United States and The mother tongue: English & how it got that way, both by Bill Bryson. Does that improve my writing? Nope. However, it does give me an idea of where to look when I have to research a point.
You can even find a list of useful sites compiled by, um, me… References sources for betas and writers. It mainly covers on-line reference sites.
I think the best check for grammar is your ear. Most of us know how things should sound, even if we can’t tell a past participle from our principal. If it sounds off, it probably is. So, if grammar-check told you are ending with a participle or splitting an infinitive, well, this isn’t your thesis. How does it sound to you?
*****
Some You Can Do Before Sending Your Story to the Beta
1. Check spelling and punctuation.
This may seem obvious, but after a period of time your eye starts to see what should be on the page instead of what is actually there. In addition, check for things like “it’s” for “its”, “you’re” for “your” and so on. I have found a good trick is to change the format so that you are reading something ‘new.’ How do I do that? I paste my stuff into email, send it to myself and read it from my email account. That way things show up for me. Other authors post to Live Journal using the “private” setting so they can look at the story that way.
2. Look for overused words.
One of the authors in my zines has only two verbs for dialogue: said and asked. I finally sent her a list: declared, enquired, replied, stated … and told her to staple it to her forehead. If you think you might be overly fond of a word, or even a phrase (if that author writes ‘in a moment’ one more time I am going hit her over the head with a comb binder, I swear) then check. I do it by using the ‘find’ option under the edit menu. I put the offending word in and then click through the tale while I count how many occurrences show up.
3. Are your characters’ names consistent?
I am ashamed to say that last year one of the zines I helped a little with (cough*Kuryakin Files*cough) had a story in it, which I did not see before publication, in which the protagonist’s name changed from Nick to Rick for a few pages. That is just downright humiliating. I have also seen stories where the author could not decide how they were spelling the person’s last name. In one of the stories I beta’d recently the character’s name was sometimes hyphenated; sometimes not. Easy fixes, but sometimes it takes someone other than the author to notice these things.
As another side note, I personally don’t care if you make a name like Jethro Gibbs possessive by doing “Gibbs’” or “Gibbs’s” but once you’ve done it one way, please be consistent.
4. Did we have that then?
One thing you have to be careful for in Man From U.N.C.L.E. stories is anachronisms. Remember, we are in the sixties here. If a musical group did not form until 1973, I doubt Illya will be going to see them at a club. Look through your story and make sure that any cultural or equipment references are valid. I have gotten into long discussions with editors about things like whether a medicine was given by IV back then, whether a toaster would broil, all sorts of oddities.
Be careful about landmarks too. Make sure something wasn’t built until after the story takes place. Highways also.
5. POV.
leethet said it all.
6. Can you tell who is doing what to whom?
I hate overuse of pronouns. Here is a sentence from that anime story I am currently cleaning up for the author:
Pulling his fingers out of the boy he jerked his legs out from his coils and bent them so they were over his shoulders in a painful position that almost had his toes touching the ground.
Can you follow that? I can’t. Breaking it up or using a name somewhere in the sentence would be helpful.
For that matter, always remember that someone reading your story may not be familiar with the fandom. Therefore, if you refer to “the Russian” or “the brunet” it helps to give a hint earlier as to who they are, such as “Sometimes his friend was just so Russian, Napoleon thought.” Then you have established who the “Russian” is.
We had a discussion in another group once about overusing descriptive words instead of actual names. As one person said, by the end of the paragraph she felt that seven different people were in the room.
"I have a name, Napoleon."
"Don't I mention it?"
"Not often. 'The blond,' 'the Russian,' 'the smaller agent.' You're not that much taller than I."
(From “The Unexpected Talents Affair” by T. Gabrielle )
7. Who was that masked man?
Your story may contain original characters: guards, femme fatales, janitors, whatever. Please do not have them just appear in the story out of thin air. One story I edited had a doctor in the room talking to one of the agents, without him being introduced, and I did not know who he was. He just appeared out of nowhere. (In the same story, at one point the author had six or more people in the room all talking as the NCIS team came to visit the U.N.C.L.E. agents - let us get real here, folks. Can you imagine Illya tolerating that?)
8. Mapquest can be your friend.
If you have the agents traveling, do some research to check into travel time. It does not take six hours to get from New York City to New Jersey; it just seems like it sometimes. (I can get away with saying that as I have lived in both places.) Remember too that modes of transportation were a little different. Planes were slower, people rode more trains than they do now and Trailways bus lines still existed.
9. Plot holes. Are there any?
Well, normally, I would worry about these, but the television show didn’t, so why should we? Just throw another outlandish Thrush plot in there if you have to.
Actually, it is probably a good idea to look over the story and mentally outline its plot. I’m talking about the story as it ended up being written, not as you had outlined it for writing. Does it flow logically or is there a gap or jump that needs to be explained?
10. How did we get here?
Look for jumps in continuity. Do not end one paragraph with it being 3 p.m. in New York and then in the next start talking about dinner in Florida unless you have explained the transition.
11. I speak very good British
If you are not an American and writing American, or British and, well, you get the idea, you may want to consider asking someone who actually is to run a quick eye over the story. Yes, most of us know things like lift/elevator or pajama/pyjama (which just looks plain weird to me) but what about things like “knocked her up?” Or elijahwildchild's lovely example of 'rubber?'
12. I’ve got rhythm
Some of the authors I know tend to fall into writing a long series of sentences as noun/verb.noun/verb,noun/verb. (Johnny went to the store. His mother watched from the window. He dropped the money on the sidewalk. Mr. Black packed the purchase as he talked to Johnny.) That can get somewhat choppy. I call it ‘the railroad track’ style as if you were riding on a train.
A few transition words (suddenly, at the same time…) or rearranging the sentence does wonders. Rephrasing some of the sentences, such as ‘As he packed the purchases, Mr. Black talked to Johnny,’ can do much to prevent the story becoming tedious. I like to read my stories aloud, if they are not too long, to get a feel for the flow.
13. Pay attention to the speaker, please
Many characters have quirks in their speech. In NCIS, Ducky tends to address everyone very formally and Gibbs drops the initial pronoun, so that you get sentences like “Don’t think so.” In U.N.C.L.E. I think, although I am not sure, that Illya does not use very many contractions. There is also a little English and French influence to his speech. He rarely uses Russian, although fan fiction writers seem to have learned a few phrases they like to drop in: Milli moi, bolzhe me, and so forth.
14. Be true to your character
I find this more with original characters as the series people have fairly well established traits. Make sure your character’s personality is consistent. I worked on a Harry Potter story that featured Snape’s nasty and evil twin. The author was sending it to me chapter-by-chapter. In the first two chapters the character was cruel and rotten. In the third chapter he suddenly was a bumbling idiot. I sent it back to the author. Sadly, she had already written the next four chapters and had to rework them. By changing the man from snarky to stupid, she had lost the tension of the story. Unfortunately, she did not feel up to rewriting and abandoned the story.
15. Do I have to stop and think about what I just read?
Every so often I hit a sentence where I just go, huh? If I have to stop and think about something, such as ‘who is the speaker?’ or ‘what is this clause modifying?’ then I am miffed. It throws me right out of the story. Here is an example of the second:
She was subsequently married to Bronson, with whom she had had a daughter, from October 5, 1968 (who appeared with McCallum in The Great Escape) until her death following a long battle with breast cancer in 1990 (she had been diagnosed in 1984) at the age of 54 at home in Malibu, California, survived by her husband, 3 children and her parents.
from allfansites.com)
The above gets really tangled when the author tries to tell us that Jill Ireland had a child with Bronson, was married to him and that Bronson worked with McCallum, all at once. Did that information have to go into one sentence? This could easily be broken into to or three shorter ones and then would be much clearer. I had to read it three times to figure it out.
I know it is hard to tell when it is your own work, but my rule-of-thumb is generally that if you have to take a deep breath in the middle of a sentence, it is too long. I have found personally that shorter is better.
16. Get your facts straight.
One thing library schools teach is to never, ever say, “Oh, I know the answer to that!” without verifying it first. You would be surprised how much of your “knowledge” is wrong. The longer I worked in reference the more I discovered what I did not know.
As it happens, I was tripped up on this in a recent story, From Here to Epiphany. Granted, the story was just a joke, and I only have a draft version up, but I blew something significant. I had a line in it “was a hot, sweaty day in Chicago.” A beta would have noticed one thing immediately: the story was set in December. Not a hot, sweaty time in a northern city like Chicago. I was so concerned with getting the joke in that I forgot about reality. (See drworm's class on Verisimilitude.) Furthermore, Chicago, known as “The Windy City,” is not really a hot and sweaty place at any time. This was really embarrassing, because I’ve been to the city many times, including this November - when I froze. Thankfully an alert reader (artyartie, thank you) caught it.
Going off topic again: Want to really tick off a beta?
Just like authors, betas work to gain a reputation. I had the bad experience of having an author thank me in her story for my beta work and then ignore every single one of my corrections! I am ashamed to be seen within 100 feet of the story. If you are going to ignore the beta's work, please don't thank them in the author notes.
Final words of wisdom:
1. The beta is not God, not matter what I keep telling you.
I make many comments when I edit along the lines of “how would it sound worded this way?” or “I can’t see Illya doing that.” Those comments are to make the author think about what is on the paper. If they reconsider the item in question and they are happy with it, or prefer to stay with what they did rather than what I suggested, then I think they should keep it that way. I do not want to be so hung up on grammar that I ruin their style. But I do like to know that they have at least thought about what they wrote. Ultimately, it is their story and they should be able to be happy with it.
It does help if they can articulate why they did something or why they are not making a change.
2. The story is the most important thing, above all.
Please, please do not get too hung up on any of the above. Not one author or beta actually does everything I listed above. Consider them merely suggestions of things to look at. If you worry too much about grammar and other items, you can worry the life right out of your story. I would rather see a vibrant tale than a grammatically flawless essay any day.
P.S. Because I am never totally serious:
Two talented writers and I wrote a story that was grammatically correct but nearly impossible to read. It came about when I was complaining about authors overusing semi-colons to create spliced sentences. We wrote the longest sentences we could. Some are over 2000 words long. It is still a valid story, but your eyes will cross very quickly.
If you want to see what warped minds can do, check out “It Was a Dark and Stormy Night.”
I would love to get feedback from other betas to see if anyone else thinks like I do.