A brilliant, shiny idea. It’s a masterpiece in the making, you’re sure of it. You can already see it being bought by Netflix if Disney doesn’t beat them to it first.
You can’t wait until the kids are in bed so you can finally start writing it all down.
But as you get more and more words on the page, the doubt begins to creep in. You begin to struggle with the setting, or with the plot. Maybe it slowly dawns on you that you don’t understand your characters internal motivations as well as you thought.
Or perhaps you were so overflowing with the zeal of creation that you could barely keep up with the jumble of ideas and words pouring from your fingers. As you type feverishly away you begin to wonder if the story makes sense to anyone but you.
You want feedback on what you have so far, but this is dangerous territory.
Your story is in its infancy. It has barely begun to draw breath. Even the slightest criticism could crush it irrevocably. What do you do? Do you continue on, ploughing through the words while plagued with self-doubt?
Or do you risk showing it to someone, knowing your vision could be destroyed before it ever gets off the ground?
If you find yourself in this situation then what you need is a first reader.
A first reader is someone you trust and someone who will act as a cheerleader for you.
A first reader will be positive and support your efforts no matter what. And while your first reader should be supportive, they should also give you useful feedback on your unpolished story. What did and didn’t work for them about the plot? What characters did they love or dislike and why? In Stephen King’s ‘On Writing’ he mentions that his wife, Tabitha, is his first reader and he can feel secure in the knowledge that she’ll be supportive of his efforts, but also let him know where his story is going astray.
It’s important you trust your first reader and that you know they have your best interests at heart. Your first reader should be able to be honest with you without crushing the life from your story.
It can be hard to find a first reader that strikes right balance between honesty and cheerleader. While it may make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside to have someone tell you that every word you wrote is brilliance, it is not very helpful.
ALL first drafts have room for improvement, no matter who wrote them.
If your first reader showers you with nothing but praise you would do well to look further afield for someone who can give you more objective feedback.
If you don’t have a first reader that you trust, then I would suggest not showing the work to anyone until it is completed. It is all too easy have your creative vision derailed by a savage or thoughtless comment.
Alpha Readers
Alpha readers, in my opinion, tend to be writers. Often, they are your writing group and they do not critique your novel as a whole but on a chapter by chapter (or word-count by word-count) basis. The type of feedback they provide is very much dependent on the individuals and the nature of the writing group.
Writing groups are peculiar creatures, each one having its own quirks and agenda’s.
Hopefully you have found a positive and supportive writing group – be it face-to-face or online. If not, it is well worth your time to do so. Don’t be afraid to try out different groups until you find the one that feels right for you. Not all writing groups are going to suit all people.
In general writing groups should focus on structural level elements of your piece, such as plot, consistent character motivation, believable dialogue, and avoiding rookie writing mistakes such as all telling rather than showing, ‘As You Know, Bob’ dialogue and so on. But each writing group will have a hobby horse or two that they like to harp on about, as will individuals within the group. Don’t be surprised if different members of your writing group nit-pick different things, like commas or use of prose despite your manuscript being at the structural stage of development.
The great thing about the diverse focus of writing group members is that they help flag problematical aspects of your novel that might otherwise not have occurred to you, such as the way a fire spreads in a closed room, or the real colour of a river in a certain climate. Each little piece of feedback is another ragged edge you can file off your story; so be thankful for it even if its not immediately relevant to your structural edit.
At the alpha reader stage you’re looking to smooth anything out that will be jarring to your beta readers. You want to avoid throwing your beta readers out of the story wherever possible so that they can focus on their reader experience.
Beta Readers
Beta readers are your test audience. They are a group of people who read your novel as a whole and provide feedback on what did and didn’t work for them. They are often not writers themselves and that is fine because what you are looking for at this level of feedback is the reader’s response to your story, not a writer’s response. Beta readers don’t need to be concerned with grammar and punctuation, what you want them to focus on is what worked for them and what didn’t? What did they love? What did they hate? Where were they bored or confused?
Where Do You Find Beta Readers?
Beta readers can either be volunteers or paid. Most writers try to source willing victims readers amongst friends, family and followers on social media. I would suggest that you get ten to twenty people to beta read your novel. Any less than that is too small a sample size to give you meaningful feedback.
You can do two rounds of beta reading if you like, having ten people read the first version, then making the necessary edits before having the second ten people read your manuscript.
Skimp on beta reading at your own peril.
It can be hard to find quality beta readers and emotionally painful to wade through their feedback. It can also feel overwhelming to go through your novel and implement the required changes. But if you don’t get this feedback from beta readers you will soon be getting it via poor reviews and lack of sales if you self-publish and from agents if you go the traditional publishing route.
When seeking beta readers, it helps to keep in mind that most people, no matter how well intentioned, will leave reading your manuscript until the last possible moment. If you give them four weeks to read it they won’t start until the third week. If you give them six weeks to read it they most likely wont start till the fifth week. It is simply human nature. Similarly, you can expect 30 – 50% of volunteers not to complete the assignment for one reason or another. Life gets busy and being a beta reader is hard work.
Therefore, you should treat your reliable beta readers like the amazing golden people they are. Never take them for granted and always be gracious in your response to them, regardless of it you agree with their feedback on not.
On that note at the end of the day only you can know the correct vision for your story. You don’t need to implement all changes your beta readers suggest, nor should you. What you are looking for is a general consensus. If two thirds of readers felt the pacing was uneven, then its quite likely that the pacing of your story is uneven. If eight out of ten people love your main character but two find him whiny and annoying then feel free to ignore that those two opinions.
How Long Does It Take To Beta Read A Novel?
You can grant your beta readers any amount of time you like to read your novel. Though I’d say two weeks is too short a time for people to read and critique a novel, and six weeks is too long. As mentioned above, most people will leave it till the last minute anyways, so the longer you give them, the longer they will leave it for.
What Type Of Feedback Should I Ask For?
You can ask your beta readers to focus on any aspect of your story that you like, though as mentioned earlier beta reading tends to focus on the readers response to the story structure. Some of your beta readers may do little more than note things like: ‘LOL’ and ‘I thought his coat was red?’ while others (like myself) won’t be able to help but line edit as they go. Both forms of feedback are fine. They all add to giving you an overview of your novel.
I provide simple instructions to my beta readers ask them to flag the following areas (credit for the system belongs to Mary Robinette Kowal):
A – awesome: Let me know anything you think is awesome so it doesn’t end up on the cutting room floor
B – boring: let me know where your attention wandered.
C – confusion: Let me know anywhere you felt confused and why
D – didn’t Believe: let me know anything you didn’t buy into and why
E – expectation: Let me know where you think the story is going next.
What If The General Consensus Is My Novel Sucks?
Ouch. That’s going to hurt. Getting beta feedback can be tough at the best of times. If you have ten people beta read for you and your novel is 300 pages long that’s 3000 pages of people nit-picking at your work that you have to wade through. Even if people predominately liked the story the weight of all the feedback can start getting to you, but you just have to soldier through it. And maybe bolster your spirits with a glass of wine, or a hot chocolate. Trust me, if you don’t have tough skin at the beginning of the process you certainly will by the end. Either that or you will have been swallowed by a pit of despair and vowed never to write again.
As mentioned earlier, if two thirds of people flag an element as problematic you’re going to want to look into it, whether you end up implementing changes or not. If most people didn’t finish your novel, or only finished under duress because they felt obligated as your friend/family member/partner there’s a problem there. Online readers are not going to be as forgiving and your book will end up on their DNF (did not finish) pile. You may also end up on the receiving end of a scathing review.
Put simply – if people consistently don’t finish your novel, there’s a problem with your writing. It could be the story structure; it could be the prose or any number of things. Go back to the feedback you received from your writing group and beta readers and see what you could take on to improve your story.
If the response to the story is overwhelmingly poor the novel may be a ‘trunker’. Put it away in a box under the bed or in a folder on the computer and start a new story. No words are ever truly wasted. They all add to your skill and experience. Take the lessons you learnt on this novel and apply them to your next project. Now you can get busy making a higher level of mistakes and receiving a whole new level of nit-picking.
My whole life is dedicated to being a successful, published author. To that end I applied for a writing workshop in America. Here’s what happened.
I was awarded a place at Futurescapes, a prestigious writing workshop in Utah.
YAY!
I was also awarded a scholarship to attend.
EVEN MORE YAY!
The Futurescapes workshop is highly competitive. Places are offered to people whose writing is on the cusp of professional standards or higher, and you must submit an example of your work as part of your application process.
Attending Futurescapes provided me with the rare opportunity to workshop my manuscript (as well as hobnob) with some amazing authors, editors, and agents, such as:
Ted Chiang
Ali Fisher
Matt Bialer
Matthew Kirby
Lucienne Diver
Thao Le
Dan Wells
Ben Grange
DongWon Song
Fran Wilde
Christian McKay Heidicker
to name a few.
Being based in Australia makes attending these types of events a bit of a challenge for me, but I felt the opportunity was too good to pass up. Unfortunately, my autoimmune condition has recently forced me to drop down from full-time work to part-time work even though I need a full-time wage in order to be able to feed the mortgage beast and keep the utility monsters at bay (the cat and dogs are also pretty keen on regular meals).
Nevertheless, I was committed to attending, and after a pep talk from my best friend, she convinced to me to start a GoFundMe campaign.
‘After all,’ she said, ‘You might as try to raise the money. You already can’t afford to go, so you have nothing to lose by trying.’ Made sense to me and so I launched my campaign. And of what a squirmy, uncomfortable process that was. The concept made me feel SQUIRRLEY with embarrassment. SQUIRRLEY I tell you (not to be confused with squirrely). I learnt a lot about myself in a short amount of time. I realised that I might, just might, have some issues around self-worth and self-esteem and asking for help.
I’m the kind of person who, even if I have ten bags of groceries in my arthritic hands I will still try and open the front door by myself even though there’s someone else standing right there. That’s just how I am. Asking for help has always been anathema to me. But now here I was asking for the most embarrassing kind of help – money help. From strangers. I was cringing and dying inside.
And then the donations started coming through.
I was flattered and honoured. Each one made me say out loud to myself, “Oh no – you shouldn’t have” as I covered my mouth with excitement and embarrassment. I was also astounded when a few big-name authors (who shall remain anonymous) donated. They know I exist? I thought with amazement as I saw their donations come in.
The GoFundMe campaign was quite successful and, in the end, raised almost enough to pay for my flight to Utah. It was official. I was going!
Having had previous experience in just how heavily jet-lag can affect you on these trips I left three days early to allow myself enough time to adjust, and it was just as well because I hadn’t factored the altitude of the location. Now I live at literal sea level and walk to the beach most days. But Futurescapes took place in at The Chateaux in Deer Valley – a gorgeous hotel located at 8100 feet or 2400 meters.
Let me tell you, breathing was hard. If you’re asthmatic or have ever had a severe chest infection, it felt similar to that. My lungs were burning. It felt like someone was standing on my chest. Because I couldn’t get enough air I felt like I had anxiety (pounding heart, quick shallow breaths, anxiousness) but it was simply the lack of oxygen. Which, by the way, also made me feel quite loopy and surreal. I’m pretty sure the walls were breathing in and out at one stage.
I slowly adjusted to the altitude and by the time the conference officially started I was feeling almost human, though I did get quite faint every time I got to the top of a staircase.
My feedback to my patient critique group was also given in this manner:
“[deep breathe in] I feel that this [deep breath out] piece could benefit [deep breathe in] from changing the order [deep breath out] of information [deep breath in]”
It’s safe to say that, thanks to the altitude, I was neither the brainiest nor most eloquent during my time at Futurescapes.
The first day opened with our critique group meeting with Thao Le, from Dijkstra Literary Agency to assess our first three thousand words. Half an hour before the meeting I got very anxious, but my fears were allied as soon as I met my group and Thao. Everyone was lovely and supportive and offered fantastic insight into each other’s work. (Yes – that means even more revisions for The Truth About Dragons. But I gained some really valuable insight into deepening the POV in tight third person, so it will definitely be worth it).
Over the next few days, we continued to workshop our manuscript. I got to review my query letter with author Emily R King, who uses the three C’s when constructing a query letter. The format she uses is:
First paragraph – Character:
What does the MC want and why do they want it?
Second paragraph – Conflict:
What is stopping the MC getting what they want?
Third paragraph – Consequence:
What will happen if the MC doesn’t get what they want?
On query letter bio’s DongWon Song said: “No one cares how many kids or pets you have. Don’t put it in there. Put in something that will make you stand out.”
Sage advice 😊
It was great to see familiar Writing Excuses Cruise faces at Futurescapes including Bob Connick, Nick Bright (and of course DongWon Song). Since my arrival on the 9th The Chateaux had gone from empty to filled with writers talking about writing in every lounge chair, nook and cranny you could find. The sounds reminded me of a flock of chattering birds on a wire. And while it was great to indulge in such fervent excitement on the topic of writing, I also took frequent breaks from it, but retreating to my room to decompress for an hour at time.
Once it stopped snowing (and I could also breathe again) I even went for a walk and a swim. To say it was picturesque was an understatement. I mean, look at me doing tough here:
All too soon the Futurescapes workshop was over and it was time to head back to reality. I had gained some valuable insights on the craft, met up with old friends and made some fabulous new ones.
I’m look forward to my next overseas writing conference, and I have my eye set on attending the Nebula’s and New Zealand World Con in 2020. Maybe I’ll see you there!
Do you want to see a real-world, blow-by-blow of hyper fixation in action? Buckle in!
Like oh-so-many (many!) writers, I’d love to create an elvish language as sonorous and mellifluous as Tolkien’s elvish (read: Quenya, though Sindarin will do at a pinch.) But it’s never been a high priority for me. With Tolkien, he created languages first and then a world and history to showcase them. With me, I built an ‘Idea’ story first – ‘What if the universe was hostile, and actively trying to destroy itself? What would that look like? How would that pan out?’
“The most important decision we make is whether we believe we live in a friendly or a hostile universe.”
(Attributed to) Albert Einstein
Although I knew my writing would need a few phrases, sentences, and terms in elvish, dwarvish, etc, I decided to arbitrarily cobble some words and sentences together and tell the readers as much in the Foreword (which I’ve already written.) Yet, being autistic I like things to be ordered properly, and to me, it ‘only makes sense’ to have consistent root words and so on. I already have a 600-word strong Excel spreadsheet for unique in-world terms I’ve come up with over the years, and I based a lot of these terms on Sanskrit, in the hopes that some sense of internal logic to the languages would shine through. That process has served me fine up until this point.
But when drafting I reached the point where I needed to construct sentences in elvish (greetings and so on) and knew that I had no idea how to properly join together these random words I’d created. Still, creating a conlang was not a high priority for me and I shelved the issue.
When I got to mapmaking I realised I couldn’t go on in that fashion. I needed to sit down and figure out root words for the common story elements (mountains, galloping, market squares, swords, etc) otherwise I would (and had) used several different terms on the map to indicate the same thing. That is, in one instance I’d used the suffix -fyldar to indicate forest in elvish and somewhere else I’d used the term -kyliss. The same issue has cropped up with seas, cities, roads, mountains etc.
Sure, I could have explained that way somehow, but in my soul I NEED these things to be done correctly.
Once again I was struck with the fear that I am in denial and do indeed have ‘World Builders Disease’ and ‘Procrastinationitis’ and ‘Fear-Of-Actually-Publishing-Something-itis’ as some people tell me. Yet I couldn’t put the issue aside any longer, but I didn’t want to spend too much time on it. I resolved to do the bare minimum of work required so that I could push on with plotting my novels. I googled and found a list of the 625 most commonly needed/used words when learning a new language and decided to create root words just for them.
That took me down yet another rabbit hole into the world of etymology in which I researched the English root word for the term and then decided if it was something I could tweak and use for myself, or see if it inspired a new search for a different term. For example, the modern term ‘tree’ derives from the root word *deru, which means ‘steadfast.’ So then, not liking the euphonics of the word ‘deru’ I would google the word for ‘steadfast’ in other languages to eventually come up with a root word I liked for my own language.
Once I had my list of root words I needed to learn how to expand them out into full words and verbs etc. I had no idea how to do this and had been arbitrarily adding different suffixes to mean doing (-ing in English) or pluralization and so on.
That’s when I hit the point that I was going to actually have to learn how to create a language so I could put my words in the correct places at the correct times.
And oh boy did that open up a can of whoop ass. Welcome, my friends, to the world of linguistics.
Conlanging
A conlang is a constructed language, one that didn’t evolve naturally over time like most languages do And now it was my turn to create one. But when it comes to linguistics I am a total No0b – as in, until last week I’d spent my life thinking the word was ‘constantants’ instead of ‘consonants.’ That’s how little I know about linguistics. ( I grew up in a very low socioeconomic area.) Obviously, I learned enough to read and write, but all the finer nuances?? I have no idea.
As I didn’t want to spend a lot of time on it, my initial thought was to reverse engineer Quenya by finding all its language rules, inputting it into Vulgerlang, seeing how it worked, and then pulling out the parts I liked (I don’t like ALL sounds in Tolkien’s elvish.) I have also over the years (like a totally *normal* person would) collected a list of word parts that are pleasing to my ear, and to my eye when written in English, and I thought I could feed them into the language somehow.
I’ve since spent a week learning the IPA chart symbols and sounds, discovered the existence of phonemes, of diphthongs etc, found the Zompist website which is a popular website for conlangers (those who build ‘constructed languages), and have started tinkering on Vulgerlang, which is another conlang building website.
***
I soon learned the first port of call for any wannabe conlanger is the IPA chart (International Phonetic Alphabet) and to learn what all those crazy squiggles mean and what sounds they represent. You know when you open the dictionary, and you see the word and then the word spelled in all those crazy squiggles? That’s the IPA writing of the word so that everyone around the world can understand how to pronounce it correctly.
In the IPA chart they’ve assigned each language sound a special character, as you can see in the chart below. If you follow this link to the IPA chart you can press each character on the chart and hear what sound it represents. And if you’re juvenile like me you can spend a good 5 minutes giggling to yourself as you press a bunch of the letters in rapid succession making the humorous sounds.
Now, back to the IPA chart. Most conlangers decide how they want their language to sound and then gather up those IPA symbols they want to use and start putting them together in ways that achieve that. So, the first step in creating a language is first learning ANOTHER LANGUAGE (IPA) and how to read and write in that language.
Most Conlang websites also advise that you also ALREADY KNOW TWO OR THREE LANGUAGES so you can understand how non-English languages construct sentences and use grammar because if you simply do the same thing as English does all you will effectively create is a cipher of the English language. So, as I’m googling how to create my fantasy language I’m thinking to myself, ‘Great. So, step one to creating elvish is to first go and learn at least 3 other languages (IPA and two other real-world languages.)
Well, I only know English, and I don’t have time to go and learn other languages, so I’m going to have to muddle through. I then started googling ‘How did Tolkien create Quenya’ and discovered the many websites dedicated to the analysis and discussion of his languages, and its many complex rules. I was amazed to discover that many people have also done their theses on Tolkien’s longest passage of written Quenya, the poem, Namerie.
After reading several people’s thesis and reading numerous websites I collated all the rules for Quenya. They look something like this:
*These are the Quenya ‘rules’ as I have found from various thesis papers/Wikipedia et al. If they are wrong please don’t shoot the messenger! I just copied and pasted them from the internet.
Consonants: c f h l m n p q r s t v w qu tʤ lʤ nʤ nw tʃ
Vowels: /a/ /i/ /e/ /u/ /o/ /ai/ /oi/ /au/ /ui/
Allowable Initial Word Consonants: c f h l m n p q r s t v w qu tʤ lʤ nʤ nw tʃ
Allowable Initial Word Consonant Clusters: qu ty ly ny nw
Allowable Mid-Word Consonants: cc ht htʤ lc ld lf ll lm lp lqu lt lv lw lʤ mb mm mp mʤ nc nd ng ngw nn nt ntʤ nw nʤ ps pt qu rc rd rm rn rp rqu rr rs rt rtʤ rw rj sc squ ss ts tt tw tʤ x cc ll mm nn pp rr ss tt
Most Common Mid Word Consonant Clusters:
ld mb mp nc nd ng ngw nqu nt nw qu ps ts ks ll ss lv lqu ny lw rqu”
Allowable Final Word Consonants:
l n r s t nt
Germinated Consonants (Whatever that means): cc, ll, mm, nn, pp, rr, ss, tt
Frequency of consonants high to low (in the poem ‘Namárië’):
These three sounds (/a/, /i/, and /e/) are either front or central vowels, and together make up 141 of the 183 vowels in the entire text, which is approximately 77% (in the poem ‘Namárië’)
/o/ and /u/ were used 16 and 17 times each (a mere 18% of total vowels), showing a clear preference for front and central vowels (in the poem ‘Namárië’)
Prohibited: D & B are never found on their own – ONLY as ld, mb, nd, dh
Most basic pluralization (for the sake of my sanity):
For plural 1, the suffix is -i or -r
or plural 2, the suffix is -li
Sentence Structure: CVC
Most common structure: CV (57% of the time)
Syntax: SVO
IPA to English Spelling Conversions:
θ > th ð > dh ɬ > lh k > c ŋk > nc ŋg > ng ŋ > ng χ > ch r̥ > rh f$ > ph v$ > f ʍ > hw j > i
aː > á ɑː > á ɑ > a ɛː > é iː > í ii > í ɔː > ó uː > ú ɛ > e ɔ > o
Other:
• use of only three fricatives, “soft /f/ and /v/… [and] non-sounded /s/”
• even spacing of consonants and vowels within syllables
• strong preference towards “high-sounding front vowels”
• strong dispreference for words longer than three syllables
The above is a simple overview of the rules for Quenya. The more in-depth ones look like this:
Like a chimp at a typewriter, I have hammered away all week, trying to google for answers when I don’t even know what terms to use or what I’m really trying to ask. I now have a vague knowledge of (or at least of the existence of) terms such as phonemes, allophones, morphemes, articles, fricatives, plosives, diphthongs, phonology, derivative morphology, diacritics, tone numbers, and so on.
Impatient to actually CREATE SOMETHING I started putting data into Vulgerlang without really knowing what I was doing. (I tried reading their guides, but seeing as the IPA and other linguistic terms and scripts were (are) gobbledegook to me it is literally like trying to read an alien language.
How Many Hours I Spent In One Week Working On My Conlang
I ‘wasted’* countless hours inputting Quenya data and trying to get Quenya-like results out, to no avail. Eventually, as I learned more of the IPA, and linguistic terms and their meanings I started getting better with the data I was inputting, which brought me to the realization that I needed to learn YET ANOTHER LANGUGE (OR TWO!)
What language could you possibly need to learn now Jesse to create your own fantasy language? I need to learn to CODE in Vulgerlang terms so that I can tell Vulgerlang how to understand and interpret my fantasy language! Oh yes indeed.
To get us to this point where I can create my own fantasy elvish language, this week I have had to:
Discover IPA > learn to read and write IPA > learn the language rules of Quenya > start learning the language rules of Latin, Finnish, & Italian > learn all about linguistics > learn to code grammar into Vulgarlang.
Coding in Vulgerlang looks like this:
Which meant I also had to do a quick dive into what the hell is a declension, an accusative noun, or a diminutive noun? And then while googling I saw how Italian uses grammar and was very drawn to it, so I think I will take some of their grammatical rules and apply it to my fantasy language (which is yet to be named.)
Having ADHD and autism means once I get an idea in my head (e.g. that I need to create a fantasy language in order to proceed with my novels) I CAN’T CHANGE MY OWN MIND.
And, I can’t stop until it’s done. I become like a glacier, slow, yet implacable.
