why I love my sister

[edenfalling]

Usually I don't send stories to beta until I'm pretty comfortable with them, because an unfinished story is a glimpse into the unedited mind of the writer, and because I am a perfectionist and I don't like people seeing me with my metaphorical pants down.

But when something is off with a story, and I can't quite figure out what, I send it to Vicky.

Because Vicky knows me well enough to understand what I'm trying to say, and yet we think differently enough that if I'm unclear she'll miss my point rather spectacularly -- and that lets me know what I need to explain better. She picks out the subtext I don't realize I've written, and tells me how the implications work or don't work. She tells me when I start using odd grammatical constructions. She jumps up and down and yells at me when my narrative voice goes wonky. She shows me where I need to use more description, so my stories have a physical setting. (That's something I've always been bad at, since I tend to gloss over that sort of thing when I'm reading -- I just don't notice settings.)

Vicky's the one who told me I had to completely rewrite "Fire" because Hermione's narrative voice was wrong. And she was absolutely right. She's the one who got first crack at "Parseltongue," and made me change all my verb tenses. And she was right about that too.

The problem with "Knives" isn't that the ending is off. It's that I forgot to include a couple other scenes earlier on, I got some other things mixed up in terms of timing, I didn't make certain reactions detailed enough, and I left certain things unexplored that should have been clarified.

This is why I send stories to Vicky. She finds the problems I'd never see for myself.

Comments

[annearchy.livejournal.com]

mollymoon used to do that for me, last year, when she was still beta-ing for me. She made me rewrite Bittersweet Sixteen twice because the original scenario stank, then I'd written it in the wrong voice (third past instead of first present). She always told me when something didn't work. Alas, she isn't betaing for me anymore (for personal reasons related to her having lots of health problems). Now I rely on abigail89 to tell me which things suck :)