Beta Testing Your Novel

Copyright © 2011, Steven E. Houchin. All rights reserved.

When I'm not writing novels or short stories, I develop software to keep the lights on and the fridge stocked. A key stage of the software development cycle -- the steps taken to engineer a software product and release it to the world -- is "beta testing."

There comes a time when the development work is essentially finished, but the product is in a rough, largely untested form. The engineers have run it through rudimentary tests, and the quality assurance team has subjected it to some of their battery of standard tests. But, it is still imperfect. That's where beta testing comes in. You send a series of these rough versions to your best customers, who have bravely volunteered to be Guinea Pigs, with the understanding they will use it every day and ruthlessly report back on its bugs.

This concept is also valuable to writers -- especially for novels and non-fiction books. Once we have edited our first draft into a readable second draft, we are at the stage where we need honest, knowledgeable "beta readers." These are people you trust, who will dedicate themselves to read through your manuscript, cover to cover, without delay, and make detailed notes on its flaws and charms. I have been trying to find a few "right" beta readers for a long time, but as yet without success.

Family usually doesn't qualify because they will feel compelled to say nice things to you or, conversely, they still hold a grudge from when you were 11 years old and will rip your work apart just for sport. If they say, "It's great. I loved it," are they really cringing inside about how lame the story was and how it's better suited for insomniacs?

I've tried local librarians and booksellers, but they insist they and their staff are overwhelmed by required reading. Writer friends ought to make good beta readers because they have more knowledge of the mechanics of writing. But a writer whom you barely know, and who doesn't care if a friendship ever develops, may be the ideal beta reader. They have no axe to grind either way. They'll let the chips (and worn out clichés) fall where they may. And you should get the honest feedback you really need.

Scare Quotes

Copyright © 2010, Steven E. Houchin
(Originally written October 31, 2010)

It's Halloween, so I figured this topic was damned appropriate: Scare Quotes.

What is a Scare Quote? Here is the definition from Wikipedia:

Scare quotes are quotation marks placed around a single word or phrase to indicate that the word or phrase does not signify its literal or conventional meaning. In contrast to the nominal typographic purpose of quotation marks, the enclosed word(s) are not necessarily quoted from another source.

In other words, the phrase enclosed in quotes is not dialog and is not a quotation of someone else's words. Instead, the phrase is quoted to indicate that its meaning is not to be taken literally by the reader. The intention of the writer is to indicate sarcasm, skepticism, derision, irony, or doubt over accuracy.

Scare quotes usually show the attitude of the writer, or of the point-of-view character, about a certain subject.
Some examples:

• She demonstrated her "knowledge" on the subject by citing Oprah.
• The driver turned on a hip-hop station and pounded his hands against the steering wheel in time to the "music".
• A reporter began to recite his "objective" account of the incident.
• Our Great Imperious Leader signed an order giving the military full authority to engage in "population control" of undesirables.

When writing scare quotes, you use the same quotation marks that occur throughout your manuscript when writing dialog or including literal, quoted material. That is, if your dialog uses single quotes ('He's dead, Jim.'), then scare quotes use the same. If double quotes ("Take that, sucker."), then use doubles. Single quotes tend to be British formatting, doubles for American. Of course, when inside dialog, the opposite quote mark is used ("Oh, your 'music' is really great.").

An aspect of scare quotes that I consider controversial is this: does sentence-ending punctuation belong inside a scare quote as it does in dialog? Consider these examples:

Dialog: "Take that, sucker."
Scare quote: He hated Eddie's "music".
Versus: He hated Eddie's "music."

In the case of dialog, the ending period is clearly part of the dialog, and thus belongs inside the quotes. For the scare quote, the ending period is not part of the sarcasm, but simply terminates the narrator's sentence. Strict grammarians insist that, for American English, the punctuation must reside inside the quotes. To me, it just plain looks wrong; the punctuation is not part of the quoted phrase. And, one can find all over the place where authors do place the punctuation outside the quotes. So, it seems to me that this has now entered common usage.

One last thing. Some assert that writers shouldn't use scare quotes at all. The quotes can be replaced by phrases such as so-called, supposed, purported, self-styled, or alleged.

References:

Wikipedia, Scare quotes
Guide to Punctuation, University of Sussex (UK English), Scare Quotes
The Chronicle of Higher Education,What's 'Scary' About Scare Quotes
The Victorian Web,Punctuation Matters and Matters of Punctuation
Writer's Relief , Odds and Ends: Scare Quotes, Exclamation Points, Almost, and Plural Compounds

It's Soooo Obvious, I Didn't See It

Copyright © 2010, Steven E. Houchin

I read a posting on Anne Mini's excellent blog "Author! Author!" titled The dreaded Frankenstein manuscript, part XXI: Millicent holds these truths to be self-evident. Trust me.

It discusses two aspects of editing your manuscript to eliminate phrases that drive agents (or their slavish manuscript-reader underlings) crazy. One she calls "statements of the obvious". These are phrases like "nodded his head" (what else would he nod?) or "shrugged her shoulders" (what else would she shrug?). The second is the "Walking Across the Room" (WATR) problem, where you describe your character's every movement as she rises from the chair and walks across the room and bends over to pick up the tray of biscuits. Once you tell us she rose from the chair, the reader can fill in the rest until she picks up the tray. That is, unless she has suddenly suffered a stroke and is now dragging her left leg.

The examples Anne gave prompted me to scan my latest manuscript - the one I am currently shopping around - for these terrible language faux pas. It was an enlightening exercise, even though I found only a few of the bad phrases. Some of the phrases that didn't cross Anne's lines, did have other things wrong with them, or could be written better. Here are the words I searched for:

* Blink
* Wave
* Nod
* Shrug
* Walk

I noticed "blinked rapidly" several times. I tried to do that, and found it thoroughly unnatural. So, the word "rapidly" rapidly got the axe. I had used "waved her hand", one of Anne's obvious no-no's, and discovered a few bad nods and shrugs as described above. But, the exercise caused me to reevaluate many of these gestures in context and rewrite them slightly, or caused me to notice that I'd overused them in a particular scene.

As far as examining "walk", I was able to eliminate a few altogether, and to change some to other words, such as "stroll" or "saunter" to better fit the feel of the action.
When I was all done, one hundred words had vanished from my manuscript, which I'm struggling to keep below 120,000 as I continue to do edits.

Useful Rejection?

Copyright © 2010, Steven E. Houchin

I often wonder what I’m doing wrong when I hear another author gush about the nice, personal, detailed rejection letter received from an agent. Why don’t I get those? What are they doing in their query that I’m not? Is there some magic “useful critique” potion they sprinkle all over their query before sending? Was it sealed with a special kiss?

My rejections read like they’ve been downloaded en-mass from Rejections-R-Us, every one nearly identical:

Thank you for your submission. Unfortunately I do not think this novel would be a good fit for me/would not know how to present it to an editor. Please remember that this is just one agent’s opinion, and another agent may feel differently about your work. Best of luck/keep trying elsewhere.

Ahhh! Okay, but why? Did the story premise not work? Was the writing style flat? Were the characters thin? Do you not handle this genre this week? Did you drink too much last night and can’t remember? Do you only like New York-centric locations?

I know - agents get hundreds of unsolicited queries. But I even get form rejections after partials or full manuscripts were requested. Those of us who have studied the craft, had our works critiqued, and polished the manuscript, hunger for real feedback to improve even more. Providing feedback is not an agent’s job, but making those kind of quality judgments is part of the process. Even a few words about their unique take on the novel would be nice. Either that, or give a hint where I can buy the magic potion.

For the agent’s perspective, Nathan Bransford provides insight into his side of the story in this blog posting of June 24, 2010, titled Why I Write Vague Rejection Letters.

Manuscript Formatting Tips

Copyright © 2009, Steven E. Houchin

Writers often encounter frustrating manuscript editing and formatting problems when using an editor such as MS Word. Sometimes I'll see the problems in their manuscript, or they come to me (a software engineer in my other life) and ask, “How the heck do I ...?” Below, I list some of those issues and a solution. I use Office 2000, so the directions apply to that. But newer versions have analogous features.

Adding Headers and Page NumbersWhenever you pass your manuscript (or portions of it) to someone else to read, you should have title headers and page numbers on every page. In MS Word, this is done with the “Header and Footer” feature.

Headers place text at the top of each page. Footers place text at the bottom of each page. In MS Word, they are created or modified by selecting “Header and Footer” under the View menu, which pops up a little toolbar. Usually, you will want to put your name and book title at the upper left. For my novel Double Fire, I have: Houchin/DOUBLE FIRE

The page number is usually placed in the upper right, but some put it on the right in the Footer. [There is a button in the toolbar to switch between Header and Footer.] To put the page number on the right, press the Tab key in the Header until the cursor reaches the right-hand border, then press the “#” button in the toolbar. That will cause all your pages to be auto-numbered. When you’re done, press the toolbar’s Close button.

However, you’ll want your manuscript to have a title page, but won’t want a header or a page number on it. So, how do you accomplish that?

Go to your title page in the manuscript. Then, open the “Header and Footer” toolbar again, and press the little button that looks like an open book. The Page Setup screen opens. Check the “Different first page” box, then press OK. If you had any title page headers, they vanish! If you don’t have headers yet, you can now insert them on page 2.

But, a problem remains: the page after the title page is numbered 2. You’ll want it to be page 1. To fix this, select the Insert menu, then open “Page Numbers…”. On the Page Numbers screen, choose the Position and Alignment for your numbers, and clear the “Show number on first page” box. Next, press “Format…”, select the “Start At:” option and type in 0 (zero) as your first page number. Finish by pressing OK. When you add your page numbers in the Header (or Footer), the page after the title will be number 1.

Automatic Paragraph Indentation
Editors expect to see the first line of each paragraph in your manuscript indented. I’ve noticed that many writers do this by simply typing a few spaces. However, MS Word provides for automatic indentation, which should provide consistent looking paragraphs.

To enable this feature, open Word’s Format menu, then select Paragraph. Under its “Indents and Spacing” tab, look at the settings under “Indentation”. Select the “First line” value under the “Special” drop-list box. If you don’t like the default 1/2 inch indentation this provides, you can enter a different value in the “By” box.

The “Left” and “Right” settings will indent the whole paragraph from the left or right margins. This might be useful if you’re inserting a quotation or poem within a story.

Note that these settings apply only to the currently selected paragraphs (and any new one added immediately after). Unfortunately, to fix your manuscript, you must remove the spaces you manually inserted, highlight all paragraphs you wish to change, open the Paragraph menu, select the “First line” value, then click OK.

Paragraph Spacing
Have you run into the situation where blank lines appear in your manuscript between paragraphs? There they are, but you never intended to put them in; and they won’t go away.

Well, here’s the problem. Open Word’s Format menu, then select Paragraph. Under its “Indents and Spacing” tab, look at the settings under “Spacing”. The “Before” and “After” values specify how much space to add before/after the paragraph. Zero means no space between. To fix your manuscript, you must highlight the space between all incorrect paragraphs, set these “Before” and “After” values to zero, then click OK. You must do this for each paragraph that is wrong.

Unwanted Horizontal Lines
Have you ever discovered that unwanted horizontal lines have magically appeared in your manuscript? Word may create these lines automatically in response to certain things you type, such as ‘***’. It assumes you really wanted to insert a horizontal line, so it does.

First, you need to eliminate the lines that already pollute your manuscript. To do this, highlight a line of text before and after the horizontal line, then under the “Format” menu, select “Borders and Shading...”. In the pop-up window, select the “None” box and click OK. The line should go away. If you intended to insert a scene break here, replace the now-removed solid line with a blank line, then type the break characters WITHOUT PRESSING THE “ENTER” KEY AFTERWARD. You’ll need to do this for each unwanted solid line you find.

To turn off this automatic line-insertion nonsense, open the “Tools” menu and select “AutoCorrect...”. In the pop-up window, choose the “AutoFormat As You Type” tab, then uncheck the “Borders” box under “Apply as you Type”. Then click OK. You’ll have to do this for every doc file you have. After this, typing asterisks for a scene break should not mess up.