So, in the world of writing, everyone talks about needing a beta reader and a critique partner.

Everyone that is, except Carrie, who has trust issues and survives as a lonely, isolated writer in Maine.

What is a beta reader?

It's that person who reads your story, gives you some mild suggestions that feel like a big hug. This is a person you want to party with, a person you can cry to, a person with no mean judgement. This person is basically the human equivalent of your dog: loyal, helpful, good and they give you advice.

What is a critique partner?

These awesome people help you feel less alone, they share stories and ideas with you. They see your story piece by piece, usually, and they help you find the flaws in this work-in-process. These people are like your life partner. They see you without make-up. They see you vomiting into the porcelain pig of your creativity and they hold up your hair because nobody wants puke in hair.

Do you need beta readers?

According to everyone else in the world, yes.

But remember they aren’t an editor. They aren’t a critique partner. They aren’t your dad. They are just someone who gives you feedback.

There’s a great article on beta readers in The Write Practice that goes, “You might not want to hear this, but there is something wrong with your book.

“Hear me out. You know how you can read the same page twenty times and then someone comes along and points out a typo? Yep. We've all been there.

“The same thing can happen with major issues in your book. Things like inconsistencies in world-building, character description, plot lines, and even misplaced objects in the story can throw your readers out of your book and confuse the heck out of them.

“One of my beta readers caught the fact that I had my characters shackled and then a couple of paragraphs later, they were swinging fists and fighting. Where did the shackles go? Good question, dear beta reader.”

And that is why beta readers are great. You want them to be honest, to actually give you feedback, and to read in the genre your story is in and point out in a nice and gentle loving way about inconsistencies.

Ignore everything else Shaun says in this podcast.

DOG TIP FOR LIFE

Dog Tip For Life - Don't be afraid of showing us the messy, disgusting, less-than-perfect aspects of your process. We can love you no matter what.

Life Tip Of the Pod - Pick your critique partners carefully, man. Seriously. Pick someone who wants to stay up with you rather than pull you down.

RANDOM THOUGHT LINK

It’s here.

The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License.

Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.

WE HAVE EXTRA CONTENT ALL ABOUT LIVING HAPPY OVER HERE! It's pretty awesome.

We have a podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream biweekly live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and YouTube on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook.

We’ve started a series of paid and free posts and podcast episodes about writing bestsellers. Our first post about this is here. To see them all just look up “hit novel” or “bestselling” in the search bar.

In his book Hit Lit, which we’ve been talking about, James W. Hall talks about 12 elements that he thinks really make those super-popular-multi-million-copy bestsellers in American fiction in the past 100 years or so.

And one of those features?

It’s a fractured family.

Yep. That’s a big feature of what Hall found in the 12 books he analyzed, (Gone With the Wind, Peyton Place, To Kill a Mockingbird, Valley of the Dolls, The Godfather, The Exorcist, Jaws, The Dead Zone, The Hunt for Red October, The Firm, The Bridges of Madison County and The Da Vinci Code).

“Families under economic stress, families at emotional war, families splitting apart, families with a missing parent, families dealing with disease, death, infidelity, job stress, or out-right life-threatening danger. You name it. Badly destabilized families are featured in each of our twelve bestsellers,” Hall writes.

Why? That’s the question, I think.

Why do we as readers buy and books that have fractured families in them. OR is it that books with a lot of these elements and features (there are 12 that Hall lists) make books that feel like a lived and recognizable experience.

Most of us know what a fractured family feels like. Most of us know what it is to feel like an outsider, to live in a time of crisis, are intrigued by secret societies.

These novels hit at commonalities in human experience. And families (even a lack of one) are things that resonates throughout our culture.

RANDOM THOUGHT

A man was arrested for sneaking into his neighbors’ homes and sniffing their shoes. the AP article about this is here.

DOG TIP FOR LIFE

If you have to, go ahead and sniff shoes, just don’t eat them. Humans get mad about that.

The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License.

Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.

WE HAVE EXTRA CONTENT ALL ABOUT LIVING HAPPY OVER HERE! It's pretty awesome.

We have a podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream biweekly live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and YouTube on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook. But she also has extra cool content focused on writing tips here.

Carrie is reading one of her raw poems every once in awhile on CARRIE DOES POEMS. And there you go! Whew! That's a lot!

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Dogs are Smarter Than People

There’s an old NPR article about writing bestsellers that quotes critic Ruth Franklin’s overview of American best-sellers as saying "No possible generalization can be made regarding the 1,150 books that have appeared in the top 10 of the fiction best-seller list since its inception."

In his book Hit Lit, which we’ve been talking about, James W. Hall disagrees, talking about 12 elements that he thinks really make those super-popular-multi-million-copy bestsellers in American fiction in the past 100 years or so.

We’ve been talking about that a lot. Hall analyzed Gone With the Wind, Peyton Place, To Kill a Mockingbird, Valley of the Dolls, The Godfather, The Exorcist, Jaws, The Dead Zone, The Hunt for Red October, The Firm, The Bridges of Madison County and The Da Vinci Code.

And I just wanted to have a moment to regroup because I found an old interview with Hall and Marc Schultz on Publisher’s Weeklywhere he talks about what element he found in those 12 top selling books that surprised him.

He says, “One I didn’t expect to find is something we came to call the Golden Country, which is a phrase from Orwell’s 1984. Winston, the protagonist, trapped in this dull empty world, has created in his imagination this edenic, natural, beautiful landscape called the Golden Country. It’s his ideal world. And not just in these 12 books, but in all the bestsellers we looked at, there is always an image of a place or a time that’s this idealized, edenic, natural landscape that serves a reference point for much of the story.”

We’ve talked a bit about that in the last week. There’s this idealized want of an idealized world or time that we long for, right? And the characters in our books long for it, too.

In that same interview, Hall says, “But the ingredients themselves remain the same, as Americans we’re really reading, and have wanted to read, permutations of the same book for the last 100 years, and probably into the foreseeable future.”

And it doesn’t have to necessarily be awesome writing for us Americans to want to read these books.

“Grace Metalious, author of Peyton Place, once cracked, "If I'm a lousy writer, then a hell of a lot of people have got lousy taste.’” Sarah Weinman writes, “What Metalious and her kin in best-sellerdom really possess, as Hall explains so well in Hit Lit, is the power to connect with readers through their hearts and guts as much as, if not more than, their minds.”

It’s about your heart, humans. About your heart.

DOG TIP FOR LIFE

As we learned from the raccoons, don’t be aggressive if you don’t get your food or else they call the sheriff on you.

RANDOM THOUGHT LINK ALL ABOUT A WOMAN CORNERED BY 100 RACCOONS. YIKES!

The link

PLACE TO SUBMIT

Guidelines:

• The winner receives $3,000; online publication; and a consultation with Marin Takikawa, a literary agent with The Friedrich Agency.
• The second- and third-place finalists receive cash prizes ($300/$200), onli...