The perils of alpha reading

Lynne Patrick

Three times in the past few months, I’ve been asked to read intermediate or final drafts of work-in-progress by writer friends or relations. I’m reading one at the moment. I think they call it being an alpha reader, though I make no claim to being an alpha anything at all. I occasionally earned a beta double-plus for my college projects sometime way back in the last century, but mainly I think I got stuck some way below the top of the tree in any context. But people ask, and it’s flattering, so I do it. But not without a certain trepidation.

Every writer I know, and I include myself, suffers from acute and chronic lack of confidence in the work we do. How can we tell if what we’ve written achieves what we set out to do – which in most cases has to be hook the reader and hold his/her attention, and keep the pages turning? We’re intimately acquainted with characters, love or hate them; we spend time, sometimes literally, in our locations; we know whodunit, and what’s going to happen, if not when we start out, at least by the time we type The End. But how do we know if the same applies to someone coming to it fresh: someone who hasn’t been entangled with it for weeks, months or years? Mostly there’s no opportunity to step away from the final draft and give it a few months to settle.

I’m sure there are writers who don’t have this problem; they type the final full stop and send the manuscript on its merry way to an expectant publisher or agent and don’t give it another thought until the box of complimentary copies arrives on the doorstep a few months later. But I’m not acquainted with any of them; hence the alpha reader, the trusted fresh pair of eyes who acts as first representative of the readers we want to reach.

When I’m asked to be that representative, I have to ask myself, what does the author want from me? And that takes me back to times when the boot was on the other foot, and I was looking for that first informed opinion myself. Oh, we say be honest – brutal if necessary; I need to know the truth. But the truth has been known to be painful, and I think we all come out of the zone at the end of a project feeling even more fragile than usual; I’ve heard top bestselling authors say they need a period of convalescence when they finish a book. So though I try to be honest, and wouldn’t baulk at pointing out a major issue which might compromise the book’s chance of publication, I also try to tread softly; I’m treading on more dreams than the average, after all.

There’s more. Sometimes the author says, there’s something that’s not quite working, but I can’t see what it is. Or, I’m not quite happy with a couple of things; see if you can spot what they are. Sometimes the author was simply too close, and didn’t see something obvious. But it’s another dangerous request, given that chronic lack of confidence. I used to belong to a writers’ group, and I’ve chaired several ongoing critique workshops; the joke, except it’s true, and not a joke at all, is that if you invite ten people to comment on your work, you’ll get eleven different opinions. So asking anyone, even just one person, however trusted, to point out something that isn’t working is potentially asking them to hand you a poisoned chalice; you could finish up with problems you didn’t know you had.

Fortunately none of the above has so far been an issue with the author friend whose work I’m reading at the moment. I may encounter an occasional minor glitch, ask one or two questions about the background, but I can be pretty certain that the manuscript I’m reading now will only be marginally different from the book which appears in print in a few months.

Provided his publisher comes to the same conclusion, of course. And that, as they say, is a whole different ballgame.

Comments

[Roy Innes]

Include me as well in the "Is this any good or am I wasting my time?" group. That thought has such a pernicious effect: a peculiar ennui and a tendency to procrastinate that puts THE END so far away. I suggest that those "fresh eyes" at an earlier stage, particularly in novel writing, might be the way to go; get the fire going again.