Beta Readers Quotes

Now let's say you've finished your first draft. Congratulations! Good job! Have a glass of champagne, send out for pizza, do whatever it is you do when you've got something to celebrate. If you have someone who has been impatiently waiting to read your novel-a spouse, let's say, someone who has perhaps been working nine to five and helping to pay the bills while you chase your dream-then this is the time to give up the goods ... if, that is, your first reader or readers will promise not to talk to you about the book until you are ready to talk to them about it. ~ Stephen King

I am often talking about the ideas collected in Normal Life in contexts that are not academic, or that are full of people who are not primarily engaging as theorists or theory-readers. Being able to make ideas visual, especially critical ideas about movements that can be difficult to hear because of attachments we have to certain national narratives, or because of ways that we see ourselves, is especially useful. ~ Dean Spade

If we value all readers, we must value all reading. ~ Donalyn Miller

I strive to find materials that will engage students, expand their capacities as critical readers and thinkers, and feel immediately relevant to their daily lives and future work in court and social service systems. ~ Dean Spade

In reading you must pursue to become a creator. ~ Aman Jassal

And it's great to have all these readers and fans who, for the most part, are very nice people, saying they love the books and the TV show. But there are so many of them and it just doesn't end. Oh, and 'selfies'! If I could clap my hands and burn out every camera phone in the world, I swear I'd do it! ~ George R R Martin

My job is not to try to give readers what they want, but to try to make readers want what I give. ~ China Mieville

It's not in the book or in the writer that readers discern the truth of what they read; they see it in themselves, if the light of truth has penetrated their minds. ~ Augustine Of Hippo

Fiction is a set of observable manifestations, as represented and frozen in language, that triggers a profoundly subjective and individual experience.

Ultimately, this is the kind of productive dilemma that can allow fiction to get to places that other media does not. Fiction is exceptionally good at providing models for consciousness, and at putting readers in a position to take upon themselves the structure of another consciousness for a short while. It is better at this than any other genre or media, and can do it in any number of modes (realistic or metafictional, reliably or unreliably, representationally or metafictionally, etc.). But for it to be able to do this as well as it possibly can, it must clear a space. This is where, for me, doing without becomes most crucial.

The subtractions that we find in innovative fictions (even when those subtractions, as in Joyce's work, are followed by further ornamentations and encrustations) are there to facilitate the simulation of consciousness. What is subtracted is the significance and meaning designed to let us classify an experience without entering into it. Doing without such things opens the door wider for experience, putting the reader in a position where they are experiencing fiction in lieu of understanding it.

By paying more attention to what we leave out than to how readers are going to interpret or work after the fact, we refuse to let fiction be assimilable, digestible, and safe. We k ~ Brian Evenson

This will surprise some of your readers, but my primary interest is not with computer security. I am primarily interested in writing software that works as intended. ~ Wietse Venema

It's not Brits who think American readers are a bunch of whinging morons with the geo-social understanding of a wire coathanger, it's American editors. ~ Terry Pratchett

This is that which I think great readers are apt to be mistaken in. Those who have read of every thing are thought to understand every thing too; but it is not always so. Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking makes what we read ours. We are of the ruminating kind, and it is not enough to cram ourselves with a great load of collections; unless we chew them over again, they will not give us strength and nourishment. ~ John Locke

Someday, men will visit ideas instead of places. ~ Toba Beta

The people who encouraged me weren't necessarily writers or readers themselves. They were people who were just pleased to see me devote my life to reading and writing. ~ Pankaj Mishra

The small-minded has no time to read summary. ~ Toba Beta

Readers like SapphicDerrida, who reeled off statistics and used words like "reify" in their comments, made Ifemelu nervous, eager to be fresh and to impress, so that she began, over time, to feel like a vulture hacking into the carcasses of people's stories for something she could use. Sometimes making fragile links to race. Sometimes not believing herself. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Life with out friend, is like life with out God! But your love for them is different from God, because I always place God first in my life and that's why I am able to love you! ~ Zybejta "Beta" Metani' Marashi

READERS ARE MY FAMILY AND IT IS MY DUTY TO WRITE FOR THEM. ~ Mahendra Trivedi

In any government, interests precede truth. ~ Toba Beta

When my father first took me to Ennis Library I went down among the shelves and felt company, not only the company of writers, but the readers too, because they had lifted and opened and read these books. The books were worn in a way they can only get worn by hands and eyes and minds ~ Niall Williams

For me, the favourite chapters have always been the last chapters in the books. I knew exactly how each book would end - and how the first chapter of the following book would begin. I knew I wanted to leave the readers with answers - and a bunch of new questions! ~ Michael Scott

Certainly the highest posthumous praise that can be conferred upon any writer is the assertion that his or her writing permanently altered the literary landscape for the better, opening new textual doors and engaging new readers. That the author's oeuvre was essential and irreplaceable and transformative. ~ Paul Di Filippo

Market without competition impedes its' dynamics. ~ Toba Beta

Every moment of a science fiction story must represent the triumph of writing over worldbuilding.

Worldbuilding is dull. Worldbuilding literalises the urge to invent. Worldbuilding gives an unnecessary permission for acts of writing (indeed, for acts of reading). Worldbuilding numbs the reader's ability to fulfil their part of the bargain, because it believes that it has to do everything around here if anything is going to get done.

Above all, worldbuilding is not technically necessary. It is the great clomping foot of nerdism. It is the attempt to exhaustively survey a place that isn't there. A good writer would never try to do that, even with a place that is there. It isn't possible, & if it was the results wouldn't be readable: they would constitute not a book but the biggest library ever built, a hallowed place of dedication & lifelong study. This gives us a clue to the psychological type of the worldbuilder & the worldbuilder's victim, & makes us very afraid. ~ M. John Harrison

The genre of self-help for depression is littered with well-intentioned books that overpraise solutions and raise false hopes. It would be nice to defeat your depression in ten easy steps, but rarely is it so easy. Books that overpraise solutions produce frustrated, disappointed and demoralized readers and damage the credibility of experts. ~ Jonathan Rottenberg

The early readers are in-between books for the kids who aren't ready for novels yet but are done with my picture books. It's really rewarding to think that they can grow up reading my books at all the different levels. ~ Grace Lin

THREE LEVELS OF LAW

America's Declaration of Independence names three kinds of law: the laws of man, of nature and nature's God.

The Book of Change is based on the laws of natural change. They emanate from and depend on divine law and serve as the rightful foundation of civil law. Clearly, laws legislated in ignorance of or in opposition to natural and divine law are not likely to work out well. Policy makers at all levels would do well to give this point careful thought.

In Common Sense, Thomas Paine wrote about the relationship of divine, natural and human law in a way that inspired readers at the time of the American Revolution to fight for freedom from tyranny.

Approaching natural law from the deeper understanding of the ancients could inspire a reinvention of democracy now.

Sages say that freedom from tyranny begins with dispelling ignorance and overcoming toxic, negative emotions. Inalienable freedom starts with the self-awareness and self-mastery which can be gained by diligent use of the I Ching. pp. 3-4. ~ Patricia E. West

Some readers were aware that the novels they loved amounted to a propaganda campaign, that the love stories had a particular agenda that might or might not have anything at all to do with reality. But then as now, being a canny and independent-minded consumer of popular media did not bar one from also enjoying being manipulated by it. ~ Hanne Blank

In hard-core science fiction in which characters are responding to a change in environment, caused by nature or the universe or technology, what readers want to see is how people cope, and so the character are present to cope, or fail to cope. ~ James Gunn

Too Big To Fail is nothing compared to Too Holy To Fall. ~ Toba Beta

Intelligence could be more briliant within modesty. ~ Toba Beta

Smartass Disciple: Master, what did you do to earn wisdom ?
Master of Stupidity: Well, I forget. Shit happened, life goes on. ~ Toba Beta

Penumbra [...] produces another e-reader - it's a Nook. Then another one, a Sony. Another one, marked KOBO. Really? Who has a Kobo? ~ Robin Sloan

It's interesting that so many books now are published as the first in a series. It never occurred to me. Although 'The Giver' does have an ambiguous ending. I've heard about that from readers over the years. ~ Lois Lowry

We ain't alone in this universe.
We just don't wanna be disturbed. ~ Toba Beta

Are you imperfect, romantically irrational, ridiculously fearless, and utterly illogical? You're my ideal reader, friend, partner. I'm your fan. ~ Brook Tesla

Sometimes I suspect that good readers are even blacker and rarer swans than good writers. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

The narrative image has more dimensions than the painted image - literature is more complex than painting. Initially, this complexity represents a disadvantage, because the reader has to concentrate much more than when they're looking at a canvas. It gives the author, on the other hand, the opportunity to feel like a creator: they can offer their readers a world in which there's room for everyone, as every reader has their own reading and vision. ~ Dumitru Tepeneag

If You don't give readers what they want, they'll be mad at you. If you give them what they do want, they'll be even more mad at you. ~ Cassandra Clare

For many potential Bible readers, this expectation that the Bible is univocal is paralyzing. You notice what seem to be contradictions or tensions between different voices in the text. You can't find an obvious way to reconcile them. You figure that it must be your problem. You don't know how to read it correctly, or you're missing something. You're not holy enough to read the Holy Bible. It might even be sacrilege for you to try. If the Bible is God's perfect infallible Word, then any misunderstanding or ambiguity must be the result of our own depravity. That is, our sinful nature as fallen creatures is what separates us from God, and therefore from God's Word. So you either give up or let someone holier than thou tell you "what it really says." I think that's tragic. You're letting someone else impoverish it for you, when in fact you have just brushed up against the rich polyvocality of biblical literature. ~ Timothy Beal

Isn't that why all writers write? To inspire their readers? ~ Adam Langer

The first person who is on your mind the moment you open your eyes after a long sleep is the reason either of your happiness or pain. ~ Reader's Digest Association

Why is autobiography the most popular form of fiction for modern readers? ~ Jill Ker Conway

However much, as readers, we lose ourselves in a novel or story, fiction itself is an experience on the order of memory -not on the order of actual occurrence. ~ Samuel R. Delany

Human needs rules and penalties.
Lessons require heroes and villains.
Ignore them, then welcome to the jungle. ~ Toba Beta

In this century, we are about to enter interplanetary civilization.
In order to survive, we need to go beyond neoclassical economics definition.
We define it as interplanomics. ~ Toba Beta

I think the influence of books is neither direct and more predictable. Books themselves are too unruly, and so are readers. ~ Maureen Corrigan

The Librarian considered matters for a while. So ... a dwarf and a troll. He preferred both species to humans. For one thing, neither of them were great readers. The Librarian was, of course, very much in favor of reading in general, but readers in particular got on his nerves. There was something, well, sacrilegious about the way they kept taking books off the shelves and wearing out the words by reading them. He liked people who loved and respected books, and the best way to do that, in the Librarian's opinion, was to leave them on the shelves where Nature intended them to be. ~ Terry Pratchett

The best writers are usually the most voracious & diverse readers! ~ C.S. Dixon