Reading Not Like A Reader

Often, when a writer asks for feedback on a work in progress, they will
ask for the reader to pay attention to things like story, character, pace, and
to not bother too much with spelling or grammar or other nit-picky elements at
this stage.




The reason for this is pretty obvious. It’s early in the development of
the story and most of those minor errors will be taken care of during the
polishing and fine-tuning stages which will happen once the story is more or
less completed.




Right now, all the writer wants is an overview of how things are taking
shape and whether the premise seems interesting and engaging.




Which is fair enough. But there is a slight problem.


Those small nit-picky errors are distracting. They can make it hard to
get into the flow of the story. Is your attention wandering because of them or
because the story isn’t holding together?




However, I can see the benefit of getting some feedback on the general
engagement level of the story early on, so I try to ignore most of the minor
errors in favour of getting a feel for the characters (do I like spending time
reading about their adventures?)and the premise (do I care what happens next?).




In order to do this, I have to concentrate quite hard. As a writer, I’ve
trained myself to pay special attention to the little errors. Now I’m trying to
disregard them.




But  a strange thing happens when
I do that. Not only do I overlook all the questionable grammatical issues and
the typos and the run on sentences, I also stop worrying about dialogue and
description and setting.




In fact, when you focus that hard, the things that stand out are: Why
is the character doing this? What’s the point? Why now? Who cares?




Is this how a reader would read the story? Probably not. But then few
readers would get the manuscript in this rough and ready manner.




Once you strip away the incidental stuff, the good and the bad, you can
see the story much more clearly. And you really don’t need someone else to do
that for you. Simply go through your draft and write down, chapter by chapter,
who does what in a chapter, what the reaction is, what they decide to do next
and why.




If you do that, it will become very easy to spot when characters do
things for no good reason. Jane visits Mike on a whim. Dave cleans his car
because he’s bored. Amy joins the army because she lost her job at the Post
Office. Whenever someone acts without purpose, a real reader reading the
published book will stumble or yawn or start daydreaming.




If you want to know if the story definitely works, a lot of that is
down to personal taste and the kind of story you want to write—it’s a difficult
thing to know for certain. If you want to know if the story definitely doesn’t
work, that’s a lot easier to spot.




Although occasionally I point things out to writers and their response
is, Oh, yeah, I know. I’m going to sort
that out later. Which makes me wonder what was the point of showing it to
me in the first place?


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