If you’re a writer, then you probably know how it feels to be misunderstood. We do our best work at the cutting edge of possibility, but like all creatives in pursuit of excellence, we sometimes stray too far into the realm of the illegible, the risible, the totally absurd. Many will not understand how we got there, much less where we were trying to go.
Maybe you’ve signed up for writing groups in hopes that people there will finally, truly “get” you. Maybe you’ve even taken out loans and entered academic programs just to get away from the haunting feeling that no one—not your friends, not your family, and certainly not a single soul with whom you went to high school—understands the subtleties of what you’re doing or the mercurial passions that drive you to do it.
Understandably, when the time comes to ask for feedback, you probably turn to your fellow practitioners, peers whom your trust to understand, if not what you’ve done, then at least what you were trying to do, and why you were trying to do it, and not to judge too harshly, sharing as they do a basic awareness of how much risk and effort goes into each act of creation.
We hate to break it to you, but if you live by this instinct, you’ll soon find yourself stuck in an echo chamber, wondering why your work’s not resonating with a broader audience when you’ve only ever shown it to people with MFAs.
If you’ve ever participated in a focus group to beta test a new app, you know why engineers, though more than capable of fixing bugs, shouldn’t always be entrusted with identifying those bugs in the first place. To build a functioning piece of software, you don’t just need experts who understand how everything works on the back end. You also need users. The more diverse those users are, the more useful their feedback will be.
To reach the heights of creative achievement, writers, too, must make a practice of asking for feedback, not just from peers, but also from people with expertise in statistics, biology, physics, medicine, anthropology, and so on. We should even ask readers who’ve never been to college at all.
Only once you’ve gathered a broad spectrum of feedback from diverse beta readers can you comb through it for a higher-resolution understanding of your work’s impact on different audiences, filter out the less relevant suggestions, and incorporate the useful ones. This doesn’t merely yield a deeper understanding of your work, but also helps you define your target audience—a critical step for anyone who wants to sell a book or survive as a full-time writer.
We recognize that this means stepping, once again, outside your comfort zone—a comfort zone that, for many authors, may feel precious and hard-won. That’s why we’re building an international community of people from all walks of life, with expertise in many different fields, whose diverse perspectives will enrich your work and ours as well.
We’re excited to have you along for this journey. We congratulate you on displaying the courage to try something new.
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