Alpha & Beta Readers: Making an Alphabet from the Soup

A quick song for some heroes: alpha and beta readers, who hear and read stories while they are still emerging from the soup of somebody’s “subconscious” mind (to be purposefully plated and garnished, of course!).

I have one alpha reader, and he’s the person I spend most of my time with. That may seem obvious and easy, but imagine someone who always seems to need the bathroom at the same time as you do and tries to cram the garbage can as full as physics will allow before taking it out also asks you to play with their imaginary friends before you can go to sleep.

It’s no small (t)ask, especially because those make-believe people still have missing bits and their journey is wobbling all over the place on its way to becoming a quest. But for me there is only one alpha, and he is amazingly generous about both my wordy first drafts and my excessive disinfection routines.

Alpha reader(s) hard at work.

Beta readers have a similarly fraught undertaking: the story is hopefully in better shape, but they are usually people who are close to you in some way, just not close enough to tell you unvarnished truths secure in the knowledge that you will still have to share a coffee pot in the morning. They therefore have to navigate the tricky path between honesty and not offending the daylights out of someone they (hopefully) respect and (probably) care about.

(No matter how much you insist that their critique can’t hurt your feelings, readers are empathetic people - that’s the nature of the exercise: imagining your way into the lives of others!)

Their feedback is always incredibly useful, not least because when somebody outside your household starts talking about “your book” it goes from a ridiculous pipe dream that you don’t dare name - in the early days you probably whisper the words “my manuscript” with a desperate combination of superstition and shame - to something legitimate and concrete, and your characters suddenly exist in other people’s brains and you can talk about them and not feel like a mad fantasist… or at least like less of one.

A wild and empowering experience.

To these folks who make time in their very busy lives to indulge our playacting and quite literally make our dreams a reality: thank you - thank you - thank you. You are our alphabet - the medium before the message is completely out: without you, there are no stories.