|
One thing I find invaluable, especially at the developmental editing stage, is having good beta readers. The trick is to apply the feedback properly.
As a general rule: whenever they tell you what's wrong, they're right; whenever they tell you how to fix it, they're wrong.
It's simple, when they're telling you "what's wrong," they're describing their own reading experience and it's impossible for them to be wrong about that. What they get from the story is what they get from it. (Marvel comics is having a big issue with this right now; it's telling people who get a certain message from a current event that they're reading it wrong. The people aren't, Marvel just didn't do a good enough job of getting its message across.)
Don't argue with people about how they feel.
The reason that betas often don't suggest good solutions is that sometimes the reason they have the problem is that you didn't explain something well enough many pages earlier. If you fix that, problem solved. Betas can't tell you to fix that because they don't know what it was supposed to do.
|