Alpha Readers & Writing Partners

Writing is a deeply intimate affair. You are allowing others insight into the crazy and wonderful place that is your mind. But before you're ready to hand out the key to your anonymous readership at large, the first peek goes to your writing partner. By this I do not mean someone with whom you work on the same book, but your alpha reader.

Your alpha reader is the first person, beside yourself, to catch a glimpse of your book, but she's also so much more.

An alpha reader has the dubious pleasure of wading through your inane ramblings, flowery treatises on your characters' angst, and your attempts at describing the most sensual experiences with a suddenly limited and awkward vocabulary. My alpha reader is called Julie, but yours may go by a different name. Anyway, Julie always manages to find the silver, and occasionally the gold, in my writing. She comes equipped with a natural talent for cadence, a good head on her shoulders, and a wonderful sense of humor to soften even the harshest of truths. Once she's grabbed my WIP (= work in progress) by its collar and given it a good shake, my confidence soars, because -- look here, perhaps I'm not as rubbish a writer as I thought.

How do you find your Julie? Well, I found mine through a post on Absolute Write. She wasn't the first fellow writer I'd met that way, but she'd turn out to be my most important (although I've also found some great beta readers that way, but they will be the subject of a different blog entry). Anyway, it pays to approach the relationship with a potential writing partner slowly. Don't bury her in your last four manuscripts with a turnaround time of a week. Get to know one another. Chat about your particular concerns, and ask for advice. If you gel, you gel.

It helps if your Julie is also a fabulous writer in her own right. Because a writing partnership is a two-way, high-speed interstate. So it is essential you want to dissect her novel, push her to write ever more and faster, and are not afraid to be critical. You need constant communication and, most of all, mutual reassurance.

If you haven't found your Julie yet, don't worry. You will. And once you do, never, ever let go.