Good morning everyone. I hope you have finished your edits and are feeling pumped about the completed manuscript. Yesterday we came up with a list of potential readers for out manuscript. I know that is somewhat daunting. At last it is for me. No matter how much I love the story I crafted there is the moment before I show it to someone else where I am convinced it is so horrible that I should never inflict it on anyone. I have quite a few books under my belt at this point and it never really gets any easier. But unless you are writing solely for yourself then you must show it to someone.
And we did come up with the initial list of someones. So now what? We have to think about what we want from our readers. The first reason we have someone read through a manuscript is to have someone who isn’t in our heads read it and see if they can see what we meant to say. Today we are going to come up with a list of questions we want our readers to answer. Sometimes we will give this to them at the same time as the manuscript and sometimes after. I like to have the person read through the manuscript before looking at the questions. I like this because then they don’t have my questions in their mind. They won’t be looking for the answers to those questions in their first read through.
Having them only look at the questions after they have read is more helpful. Sometimes you will ask a question, for example, Did the man in the bowler hat seem disinterested or overtly sinister? If they come back with, I don’t remember the man in the bowler hat, that means I need to do a bit more. Or I might have forgotten to mention he was wearing a bowler hat. Your questions are going to relate to things in your story (I know, obvious right?) so they will be different. I will put the questions I want answered in my task section if you are interested (I’ll add a few notes since you won’t have read the manuscript when you see the questions).
Today’s Task #163: Think about the points you want to make with your story or the issues you want to be clear to a reader. Make a list of questions for your reader to answer after they have read your manuscript.
As always, happy writing.
Ten til Midnight 