I Need my Friends
Why a Self-Publisher needs friends
Being a writer can be like living in a constant bubble, you have an entire world that you are immersed in that nobody else know anything about. Whether you are writing fact or fiction you become lost in your story, making yourself laugh or cry at certain points, living and re-living experiences that no-one else will witness. Once you have finished your story you feel elated, like the effort has been worthwhile and you have achieved something amazing. The first thing I then do is start reading through it again, I imagine most writers behave the same way, sometimes there has been quite a lot of time between when I wrote it to when I am reading it for the first time so I don't remember it all, while reading through enjoying being reminded of the little anecdotes or extra points that you have put in, feeling rather smug for being so clever, you find a little grammatical error, but that's ok 'I'll fix that quickly,' you say to yourself then you are off and reading again. Somewhere in your head you are recording the issues, the bad writing or the fact that unless you were there the story doesn't make sense, but that part of you is blocked out by the elated part that says, you did well, you did everything you could.
If you were in the hands of a publishing house you would have an editor who would go through and point out the mistakes, possibly suggest fixes or recommend entire re-writes. This is something you can't do yourself, although it is possible to find mistakes that you have made and do small fixes, even small plot holes, but we will never convince ourselves that an entire rewrite of a section is needed, we all need that person who will tell us that something is no good and we have to start again.
Who is that person you ask? It's not your mum, believe me. Although I do like to run my stories past my mum who is an avid reader, she is the person who will say it's very good, I enjoyed it. The problem is I already believe that as it is, I wrote it, I need to believe that it is good, however I need someone to tell me what's wrong with it too. My wife is carefully honest with me, on my latest novel 'Retaliation' she said 'I liked it, however it think it could do with more strong female characters.' I was surprised by the feedback as I had thought I had done well to be very fair with the gender spread, but I took the feedback on board when I re-read the story and I did find there was room for strengthening the female characters, good feedback, useful, but I needed more. I sent it out to another couple of friends to read through, one came back with feedback regarding the ending, it was too rushed she felt, after discussing this with my wife she agreed, taking the time to think about it I realised that in my haste to finish the book I had ended the story before it's time, thus actually giving the book a really quick and easy resolution, which meant a big re-write was required. Another friend was looking for some more meat on the bones, he wanted more in-depth, more back story, more detail, giving me examples of what he meant.
This was the type of feedback I needed, I couldn't get it from one person, but at the same time the test group needs to be reasonable, you cannot re-write a book to every ones opinions, but reasoned arguments that you can see and understand should be acted upon. Editing is a skill and unless you are willing to pay the money out yourself for a professional editor then you have to be willing to engage your friends and take into account lots of opinions and be open to re-writes as horrible as the notion can be.
I have known writer friends of mine to be too nervous to show their stories to friends, through fear of embarrassment, my argument to this is always, if you can't show your work to people who actually like you, how will you ever be able to release it to the world.
Self-publishing already requires you to be a writer, typesetter, marketer, salesperson, and distributor, any help you can get with the editing will be worth its weight in gold.
Written by Martin Wallace
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