From a Crime to a Book: An Inside Look at a Mystery Author's Process

Every author’s process is different, and we’re always interested in hearing about how an author manages to move from an idea to a fully fledged book. We recently sat down with Spun Yarn author Steve Wechselblatt to talk about the strange journey his mystery novel has taken from genesis to execution.

The Spun Yarn: How long have you been writing?

Steve: I started writing fiction about eight years ago. My first book ended up in a drawer after three years when I finally admitted to myself that my idea was wildly impractical and/or far beyond my ability as a fledging novelist. During this frustrating time, I started working on very short fictions that later became the basis for Diamonds and Moths (2017).

The Spun Yarn: How did you come across the idea for the mystery novel you’re working on now?

Steve: In 2014 I began to look around for an idea for a novel that I could actually complete. I decided I wanted to work on a mystery because I always believed that mysteries are the place where reason (epitomized in the detective) confronts the irrational (humankind’s destructive emotions). Beyond that, I believe life itself is a mystery.

The Spun Yarn: Did the idea just come to you, or were you actively looking for something to sink your teeth into?

Steve: I wanted to start with something I thought was uniquely interesting. I began rummaging around the section on weird events that used to be part of the Huffington Post before it changed its format. I found the story of a young girl found nude in a water tank located on the roof of a Skid Row Hotel in L.A. Her body was discovered only when guests started complaining about the water’s peculiar smell. No one could figure out how she got up there or even why. I researched articles about the case. A tape of the girl in the elevator just before her death intrigued me and many other viewers. It sparked all kinds of theories. She looked scared, disoriented. Was she being chased? Was she on drugs? I obtained a copy of the  autopsy report, which did not find any illegal substances. The old hotel had been the haunt of serial killers, which added to the frisson to the case. When the police decided it was an unfortunate accident, many people suspected foul play or even some kind of supernatural event triggered by the once-notorious Night Stalker, one of the mass murderers who stayed at the hotel.

This was just what I was looking for: a case where conventional detective work and the irrational (here, the supernatural) confronted each other in a stark way. The fact that the mystery had a built-in audience of interested observers didn’t hurt.  I decided that exploring the story would require two distinct and equally credible narrators. I wanted them to start with totally different assumptions about reality, so I made one a detective and the other a psychic. I did want them to have something in common, so I made them both outsiders. 

The Spun Yarn: So how did you begin to work on your idea? Are you a panster or a plotter?

Steve: I am a born pantser. It’s hard for me to plot. Having a somewhat established story helped me. That said, I still found plotting hard. It is difficult for me to think in terms of cause and effect because I ultimately think life is so irrational. I also found it challenging to weave between two narrators with different events and viewpoints until the story brings them together. It was only with the third draft that the plot finally began to seem somewhat plausible. I say somewhat because it will have to evolve further.  At this point, the plot changes are less important than making the characters respond believably to the strange circumstances  I’ve put them in. 

The Spun Yarn: What kind of research did you do?

Steve: The idea itself came from the internet. Once I started writing, after researching the original crime, the victim, and the hotel history for a few weeks,  I wrote and did follow-up research more or less at the same time. When I ran into trouble with the writing, I’d go back to the internet. My research was all online. I even found a photo of a house in Silver Lake I thought my psychic might have chosen to live in. Of course, I would have loved to travel to L.A. to see the actual places I’ve described, but I couldn’t since I’m a full-time caregiver.  I had to do the best I could with articles and pictures of Skid Row and other places in LA. Many of the places I described are from websites about LA. Various posts about people reacting to the crime were terrifically helpful.

The Spun Yarn: So how long have you been working on the book, and how much longer do you think it will take?

Steve: The first draft took about a year. I’ve been revising since then. I really don’t know how to revise, otherwise I might have been able to do this more efficiently. Even now, as you know, I’m not done. There’s more work to do to make this what I think it should be. (Compulsively readable, of course). I have been working on this book for about 5 years (while doing short stories also).

Every idea evolves in the writing. I am still finding things I want to bring out – metaphors I want to highlight, not to mention different aspects of each character’s personality.  The Spun Yarn Manuscript Report highlighted that I need to work more on the voice of one of my protagonists, a dramatic scene that readers didn’t feel was sufficiently motivated, and a stronger ending. That’s what I’m doing that now!

The Spun Yarn: Thanks so much for taking the time to talk with us, Steve. We were fascinated by your idea, and your readers were too. Looking forward to seeing your book out in the world!

Steve Wechselblatt

is the author of Diamonds and Moths, and is published in Circa, a Journal of Historical Fiction, Chicago Literati, Smoky Blue Literary and Arts Journal, among other places.

Does Your Writing Toolkit Reflect Your Writing Goals?

Lindsay Ellis recently published a video about the gauntlet of finishing a book, finding representation, and finally a publishing deal for her upcoming book Axiom’s End. The whole process only took ten years! I found Ellis’ honesty refreshing. At the same time, it was a discouraging reminder that so many of our projects take convoluted creative journeys before they ever see the light of day. Your book idea may have germinated ten years before you had the creative means to bring it to the page. It may be another ten years before your story reaches its target audience. If you’re willing to do that much unpaid work, suffer that much rejection, and all without the guarantee of being published, then you may have that special brand of masochism called ‘the drive to be a published writer.’

There are very lonely, discouraging valleys in every author’s saga. Your grit can help you through these valleys. A writing community is even better, and when you’re working on a specific project, you’ll need a specific set of tools. In the digital age, there are so many tools that you’ll be overwhelmed if you’re not extremely intentional about what your writing goals are. Which tools best serve each step of the journey?

Part of the work of writing is learning which tools work best in the researching, drafting, editing, pre-publishing, and post-publishing stages. In the research and editing stages, developmental editors used to be one of the only options available to authors. To be frank, many developmental editors are only available to writers with a decent amount of money to spend. We didn’t use to have blogs, YouTube tutorials, Reddit, Google, and Facebook communities, all for free. Now, we have all of these things, plus book coaches and systematic audience demographic testing like ours.

Last week, Jennie Nash and I gave a webinar about the difference between book coaches and beta readers. I loved what Jennie said about our guest author Samantha Specks’s intentionality. Samantha is a historical fiction author who used both Author Accelerator and The Spun Yarn’s beta readers as tools in different parts of her process. You can tell just by listening to her talk about the research stage of her novel that Samantha is a very methodical, measured writer. You don’t have to have that personality, but it behooves you to employ that mindset if you want to make sure your manuscript is ready before you blow your shot with your dream agent.

I defy you to find two identical creative processes in the Paris Review’s volumes of interviews with famous authors, but you do have to define A Process that works for you. That’s the beauty and the overwhelming nature of being a writer today. Your potential toolkit is bigger than it’s ever been, and so is your responsibility to be intentional about filling it with the right tools. If you think of your creative journey as the sum of its discrete stages, which tools serve you best in each? If beta readers are part of your process, add them to your toolkit.

—Sarah Beaudette, Spun Yarn Editor-in-Chief

3 Times You Ignore Reader Feedback at Your Peril

Before we curate an author's Spun Yarn Manuscript Report, we ask how far along they think they are in the editing process on a scale of 1 - 10. The average score over a hundred manuscripts? 7.3.

We also track every manuscript's scores from readers, who are comparing the manuscript they've just to other well-known books in the genre. The average overall score? 6 / 10.

There's a gap here. It's grayish, smudgy around the edges, and rrrrrreally annoying to authors.

After getting your beta reader feedback, how do you decide how much more work you really need to do? Do you really need to make the changes your readers suggest, or is the whole thing a matter of opinion? If writing and reading are subjective arts, why change the manuscript at all, especially when you've put more thought into this book than any other person on the planet?

Sometimes readers may be pointing to a valid issue, but may not have the right solution for it. Other times, readers are going to be spot on. Here are a few rules of thumb based on all the manuscript reports we've done.

1. When two or more readers independently agree on an issue, pay attention.

Hopefully, your beta readers haven't talked to one another and don't know each other at all. For example, here's a report in which two readers had the same comment at the exact same point in the manuscript:

Reader 1: "I'm struggling with the biological and scientific details that seem off the main topic.

Reader 2: "The content becomes very medically oriented in Chapter 6, and at times it's too dense to read."

As a writer, this kind of specific consensus is gold, and the change is also fairly straightforward. Go back to Chapter 6, and cut out some of the dense scientific details. Read it for tone, and make sure it's consistent with the rest of the book. These easy wins are why it's so important to have more than one beta reader read you book.

What if readers agree, but it's on a major issue that's going to require a lot of work?

For instance, what if you were writing a dystopian book about baseball, but your readers say it's actually a love story, and therefore your ending is all wrong?

This is the kind of feedback that takes some time to digest. Resist the urge to scoff. If your chest starts feeling tight just reading the feedback, it means you need to leave it on a shelf for a few days before you have the emotional energy to consider it. And then, when you're ready, you've got to consider it.

Go back to your story fundamentals and ask yourself: is this really a love story after all? Is there an arc you missed, or a reason why the arc you started out with became less compelling or relevant as the story went along?

The point here is that readers have pinpointed an issue that demands attention. They don't necessarily know the best way to address it. That's your job. But if you want a great book, you've got to pay attention when your readers agree.

2. If it's a straightforward minor change that doesn't matter too much to you, what do you have to lose?

In one of our recent manuscripts, one reader pointed out that the names of two main characters both started with a D and were sometimes hard to keep track of. Though as writers we tend to get attached to every word in our carefully wrought works of art, it can be helpful to think of editing as picking your battles. If a change is small, ask yourself what the manuscript stands to lose or gain by making the change.

3. Readers disagree on the problem, but all of them have some kind of problem with the same part of a manuscript.

At The Spun Yarn, we break a manuscript into four sections for feedback. This is another way of separating the opening, the building action, the climax, and the denouement. This is true of memoirs, and even to some extent of nonfiction manuscripts. When you have at least three readers commenting on each section, you'll begin to see trends. Particularly, you'll see that some sections have more reader comments than others.

For example, two readers think the ending was rushed, and one reader loved the action but didn't find the characters' actions consistent with their prior behavior. This is a cue that it might be in your best interest to take another look at your ending to see which issues you can address and which you'll need to leave as is. In your next revision, focus solely on what it’s delivering to readers, and how.

Even if you don't agree with readers or if they don't agree with one another, you have strong confirmation that you need to sit down with that section of the manuscript and give it a lot of thought and attention. Pretend you're a reader rather than an author, and try to diagnose the issue with fresh eyes. Just because readers don't always agree doesn't mean they aren't identifying an important trouble spot.

7 Holiday Gifts Writers Actually Need

As the holiday season rolls around, you may be realizing that there are only so many notebooks, pens, and sarcastic mugs you can give the writer in your life before you have to think of something new. We feel you, and as writers ourselves, we’ve curated a smarter list of holiday gifts for writers. Check out these seven holiday gifts for writers that will impress your writer friend or relative because they’re actually things writers need and use. Don’t get us wrong, tee shirts and mugs are cool too . . . but we think you can do better.

1. Writing guides. We writers are always looking to hone our craft, and we often draw inspiration from the greats. If you'd like to give your favorite writer a writing guide, see if you can sneak a peek at their bookshelf to see which they already own. Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott is hands down the most touted guide to writing and life. Even if your writer isn’t a horror fan, Stephen King’s On Writing is another well-respected guide with sage advice that applies to every genre. To determine which guide is best for your particular writer, you can also check out a few blog posts to find the best fit.

• Give your writer the gift of feedback with a Spun Yarn Manuscript Critique. Chances are, the writer you love both craves and fears feedback about the project that has consumed her soul for the last few [months/years/decades.] When she's ready for feedback, she'll spend another eon biting her nails about how to get it. A Spun Yarn manuscript critique combines feedback from three trained readers who specialize in your writer's genre, and gives her a customized 30 page critique with editorial advice about exactly what to do in a next revision. The great thing about giving the gift of feedback is that the writer can choose to use it when she's ready, taking the stress out of soliciting feedback. Can’t afford the full manuscript critique package? Try out the mini critique for $35.

• Entry to a writing contest. If you're shopping for a fiction writer, short fiction contests are a perfect opportunity for him to sharpen his skills and have a lot of fun. Here are a few popular and well-respected writing contests that charge an entry fee the writing community generally agrees is worth it in exchange for the exposure and large prizes:

  1. NYC Midnight runs a contest every season, rotating contests for short stories, flash fiction, and screenplays. They offer several large cash prizes and a chance for writers to participate in multiple rounds of competition supported by a large and supportive writing community.

  2. Writer's Digest is another admired resource for writers that offers annual competitions in practically every genre and format.

  3. Glimmer Train is the holy grail of short fiction awards. A writer who places in one of these rotating competitions has a huge leg up—Glimmer Train stories appear in America's Best Fiction anthologies every year. Every literary fiction writer should give this competition a shot at least once.

• Submittable Subscription. You are truly in the know if you give the writer in your life a subscription to the world's largest online database of literary markets. For a reasonable yearly fee, Submittable allows writers to find the specific markets that fit for any piece we’re working on, and lets us track and check on the progress of our submissions. Submittable includes listings for short story, nonfiction, poetry, and full length manuscript publishers, and there's not a writer out there who won't find it useful.

• Scrivener. Every writer battles to organize all the moving pieces in a long term project. One of the most popular writing software/app products available, Scrivener makes the management of a large project possible by allowing writers to organize all the notes, drafts, and metadata in one place with a user-friendly interface. As a writing gift, writers agree that Scrivener is one of the best.

• A gift card for free books! Writers love to read, and sometimes the books we want can't be found in the local library. For a writer, a gift certificate to a bookstore is like candy to a fourth-grader, complete with greedy eye-gleaming and salivation as we unwrap your card and immediately begin planning which books to buy first.

• Want to give a more personal writer gift? Give your favorite writer the gift of time: offer a few hours of free babysitting, house-cleaning, or anything that will incentivize us to get out of the house and focus on our work. We tend to put other obligations (you know, jobs that pay actual money) ahead of our writing. Any way you can help us make time to write will be an incredible gift.

In choosing your writer holiday gift, it helps to know what kind of a writer your loved one is: fiction, memoir, short story, novel, all of the above? Many writer gifts will be tailored to the fiction writer, but all writers benefit from the gift of feedback, writing guides, and more books. We hope we’ve given you some ideas about how to score some major points with your writer, or at the very least, to avoid buying yet another notebook.

The Moment that Matters in Novel Writing

“Most writers spend 100 hours alone with their manuscripts for every one hour of feedback.”

You probably couldn't be a writer if you didn't enjoy the solitary process of novel writing. My own writing ritual starts early in the morning with a dirty laptop keyboard and a cup of steaming coffee. Particularly with longer manuscripts, these solitary hours quickly add up to days and weeks or even years, alone with those words on the screen.

It's the moments when you aren't alone with your words--moments when you’re receiving feedback on your work--that are actually pretty unusual. I've never seen the calculation, but I bet it's safe to say that most writers spend 100 hours alone with their manuscripts for every one hour of feedback. Maybe it's closer to 1,000. Whatever the number, one thing is certain. These moments of feedback have a disproportionate impact on your creative process as a writer. In IDEO designer language, we would call them "moments that matter.” Even if a manuscript took 1,000 hours to write and revise, that one hour of feedback has a disproportionate impact, on the manuscript itself, but also on the author's emotional well-being.

Let's face it. Writing a novel is a highly emotional experience. There is the honeymoon phase when the words are flowing. There's the "like the dentist phase" when a writer ploughs through revision after revision. Then there’s the ‘walking on eggshells’ trepidation as query letters or contest submissions get sent. And then of course, there are the crushing rejections or often worse for me, the roaring silence of just being ignored. So many manuscripts never actually get any attention at all. They don't get any real feedback. Instead, they suffer a slow ignominious death in a solitary confinement of endless unexamined slush piles before eventually being ushered into top drawer purgatory, never to be heard from again.

True, lots of manuscripts aren't great. But so many other manuscripts with fantastic potential never actually reach this potential, not because the book is bad, but because the feedback system is broken. That feedback "moment that matters" doesn't happen correctly or occur at all. Many a jaded literary agent will tell you that there is a serious supply and demand problem in the industry. There are WAY TOO MANY authors who have written manuscripts and FAR TOO FEW actual publishers with actual budgets extending actual publishing contracts to actual writers. I totally get this state of affairs. But that's just an explanation for why that “moment that matters” is missing in so many cases. It’s certainly not how feedback needs to work in the future.

With The Spun Yarn, we've created a new way to get feedback on a manuscript in a format that is enormously useful for the author AND which doesn't cost an arm and a leg (right now, it's about $300). Put differently, we've redesigned that feedback "moment that matters" to be as useful as possible. It's worked for me personally.

I have one YA novel in particular that I've been working on for years and years. It's the writing project I always come back to. Except, I stopped coming back. I'd finally gotten the manuscript to a place where I thought it was really strong. I'd revised and revised and then I put it out into my agent network. Based upon connections with agents I'd made over the years, I was actually quite optimistic. I got crickets. And rejections. After a couple of months of query gymnastics, I packed it in. The feedback I was getting from this process seemed to be telling me that the manuscript wasn't any good. I put it in the top drawer. I moved on with life. In fact I got really distracted by starting and launching the Spun Yarn.

Fast forward about a year, and our Chief Operating Officer (Sarah) talked me into putting The Clocktower through our own Spun Yarn process. I pulled the manuscript out of the drawer, dusted it off, and nervously sent it along to Sarah’s team. We matched it up with three readers (two teenagers and an adult who likes YA). About three weeks later, the results were in. I had my feedback report, thirty pages of in-depth feedback from people who care and who had read every single word I wrote. And you know what? They didn't hate it! In fact, all three of them seemed to really enjoy the read. I definitely didn't get perfect scores and there was a lot that needed to be fixed in the next revision. But it felt so darn good to know that my novel didn't suck. Real readers had read it and real readers had given me feedback and real readers wanted to see that book out on the shelves of a bookstore some day.

This was the sort of feedback that I needed. This was a feedback moment that mattered. Over the next six months, I found time to dive back into that manuscript. And I used a lot of the suggestions and feedback from the Spun Yarn feedback report to make my book better. Even more importantly, I was emotionally reinvigorated. I'd fallen back in love with the manuscript. I had the energy to soldier through all of those solitary hours of creativity, with my coffee and my dirty laptop keyboard and those little words marching across the screen. Some moments really matter. Thanks to the Spun Yarn, I'd bought myself at least another 1,000 solitary hours to push my manuscript to the next level. And now I’m confident that when my book is ready to go back out into the world for its next “moment that matters”, that it's actually a damn good book.

--Sean Hewens, Co-Founder of the Spun Yarn

Also by Sean: Five Things I've Learned From My Novel Feedback and Harness the Power of Design Thinking, and other musings on IDEO's The Octopus Blog, which provides a designer's view on the universe.

Decoding Beta Reader Comments on Secondary Characters

At The Spun Yarn, we do Feedback better than anyone else. You choose your reader demographics. We assign three readers to provide full novel feedback, including check-ins throughout the novel, overall comments, and qualitative scores compared to our growing manuscript database. Then we find consensus, analyze, and give you actionable suggestions for what to do in your next revision.

At the Spun Yarn, we've analyzed more than 120 beta reads' worth of comments on 40 manuscripts. We've noticed trends in reader comments, and we like to think of ourselves as beta comment decoders. If you haven't already, check out our last post about decoding  comments on Pacing. 

In this post, we cover beta reader comments on the oft-overlooked Secondary Characters.  When you're focused on building a full and complete arc for your main character, secondary characters can either get short shrift or populate the story randomly, people who just show up as you're writing the story. Dynamic, deliberately planned secondary characters are critical for a successful manuscript. Let's see what some of our readers have said about the secondary characters they've met at The Spun Yarn.

"I didn't really believe it when Character did Action."

At first glance, this looks like a comment about motivation, and it could be. It could also be a sign that your secondary character needs to be more of a person in his/her own right. One easy trap to fall into is designing secondary characters whose sole purpose is to a) act as a foil to the main character, or b) drive the plot where you need it to go. 

If a reader questions a secondary character's believability, it's worth making sure this character's motivations are separate from yours, the author's. This may mean that your plot needs to change in order to create a full, complicated person (even your secondary characters should be Real), or that you need to examine more closely where your goals might align with the character's goals, and work this motivation in more elegantly. 

"I wish Character had shown up earlier."

This is a really interesting comment we've seen a few times. When you look at the general mood of your work, what are each of your secondary characters contributing to that mood? Are any of them comic relief in a dark, serious manuscript? Are they a moral conscience, or a needed support to the main character? Secondary characters are a great way to add variety and interest to your book's overall tone. If they each have their own voice and world outlook, it's fantastic that readers want more of them! 

When someone wants to see a character earlier, it could be a sign that something is missing from the earlier sections of your MS. Consider this character's function in the novel, and whether they could be introduced earlier, or whether there are other ways to serve that function for readers.

"Character kind of disappeared, I was left hanging."

Do all of your secondary characters have their own complete arcs, or are some characters left by the wayside? This can be an easy fix. A reader is missing a sense of closure for a particular character, and that means you as the author need to find a place to make a final reference to the character's fate, even if that fate is not integral to the main character's fate, and even if that final reference is well before your finale. In fact, readers love to have a clean mental space going into your finale. If some of your secondary characters' arcs are completed BEFORE the final scenes of the book, readers have more mental space to focus on your ending. 

"Who is this again?"

When your storyworld is so vivid in your imagination, it can rapidly populate itself with vivid characters. That's great. If readers are having trouble keeping track of all of your characters, it might be worth culling them to cut the unnecessary secondary characters, or even, combining them. Every word, even in a 100k manuscript, is precious and should be driving a key element forward.  

"This character is way more awesome than your main character."

Well, shit. This is probably the most important and most annoying comment you can get about a secondary character. If you trust this reader's opinion, (AGAIN, another argument for getting multiple readers to discern CONSENSUS), and are not ignoring a big problem, then either way, this means some work. If you want a kickass book you'll whine for a while, but eventually you'll get to work. So what do you do? You have three options:

1. This may be about your main character rather than about the secondary character. Remember that your main character doesn't have to be as likable or even as exciting as the secondary characters, but he/she does have to be compelling. Their struggle must constantly be moving the novel forward. Make sure that your main character supplies clear tension, and long term development. If all that's happening, you could decide to give this star secondary character a bit more stage without doing a major rewrite.
2. Sometimes, secondary characters force themselves onto the page, outline be damned. If a truly interesting, dynamic character has emerged, you could give them a more starring role. What would it look like to do that? If this character is so strong, he/she probably has his/her own feelings on the matter. Where would they take the novel, and is that a place you want to go? This doesn't necessarily mean giving up your protagonist, but for the brave soul, it could mean changing your plot for the better.
3. Dull them up. This should be the last option to consider, but it can be valid. If your dynamic secondary character is taking up too much of the stage, it could be a case of first draftiness. Maybe some of the secondary character's scenes aren't critical to the story. If you tone them down a bit, they can retain the sparkle that made readers love them without derailing the whole darn project.  

For further reading, here are a few interesting resources on secondary characters: 

• https://nybookeditors.com/2016/02/your-guide-to-creating-secondary-characters/
• http://blog.janicehardy.com/2013/06/does-your-novel-have-too-many-characters.html
• http://lindasclare.com/2016/06/writing-composite-characters/

5 Things I've Learned From my Novel Feedback

When we started the Spun Yarn in 2017, I thought I knew a thing or two about what it meant to be a writer. I’d finished several novels over the years and also had a day job as a designer working with IDEO teams to use stories to communicate with our clients and customers. But once the Spun Yarn was up and running, I started to meet authors who had a completely different understanding of what it actually takes to write a novel. There were secrets to getting published that no one had told me about. It was like I’d just been petting the head of an elephant. I hadn’t realized that there were whole parts of the feedback and revision process that existed and that were SUPER important. The elephant’s feet. And his tail. And his back and his stomach and all of the rest of the parts of this giant beast of a process. 

“Once the Spun Yarn was up and running, I started to meet authors who had a completely different understanding of what it actually takes to write a novel.”

What I came to realize is that there are steps to eventually getting published that almost every book and every author needs to follow. If you follow these steps, it doesn’t mean your book will be published. But if you don’t follow these steps, there is a fantastic chance that it will never be published. There’s just too much of the elephant out there to ignore. I’m telling you, you’ll get trampled!

Here are five things I’ve learned about the feedback process from working with authors at the Spun Yarn.

First (and perhaps most obvious), you need to get feedback on your WHOLE manuscript.

Not just the first 100 pages, and not just a few random chapters. Having provided feedback to over 50 manuscripts at the Spun Yarn, one of the most commons problems we see with unpublished manuscripts relates to either uneven pacing or undeveloped characters. Both of these aspects of a novel are almost impossible to get effective feedback on if the reader hasn’t read the entire manuscript.

Second, you need to get feedback from someone who doesn’t like you.

Don’t get me wrong, they don’t need to actively dislike you. But they can’t be your friend or your partner or your mom. They should be a stranger and they should be responding to the words on the page, not what they know about you as a person. Just because a person is a stranger doesn’t mean they don’t care about your book. At the Spun Yarn, we’ve assembled a network of anonymous readers who are careful, diligent readers. They don’t know you, but they want to see your manuscript get better.

Third, it’s really important to get feedback from multiple people.

You probably have that one person in your network who is just fantastic. They read everything you send them and they always have thoughtful feedback. But the problem is that this is just one person’s opinion. If there’s one thing we’ve learned these past two years at the Spun Yarn, it’s that readers come in many shapes and sizes. And so do their opinions. It’s a huge thing to completely rewrite a character or an ending as part of a next draft. Which is why it’s so important to make sure that you have reader consensus on which parts of your WIP aren't working.

As a side note, this is also something we’ve seen when it comes to opinions from editors and agents. While these folks are professionals and super smart, it still often comes down to the opinion of a single person. Any good feedback approach should synthesize feedback from multiple readers (instead of just one) and distill reader consensus to make it clear what you should focus on in a next draft. Having learned that, we spend a lot of time at The Spun Yarn analyzing reader comments to find where readers are agreeing and disagreeing. 

Fourth, you need *actionable* feedback.

Writing a novel is hard work. It takes a long time. The act of finishing it, then starting from the beginning with the revision process, takes an emotional toll. Knowing where to start when you get started again can make all of the difference.

Don’t try to reinvent the wheel with your first edit. By focusing on some of the smaller, more obvious aspects of the manuscript that need fixing first (and I don’t mean typos or spelling errors), you’ll gain the momentum you need to tackle the bigger stuff. As part of a Spun Yarn Manuscript Report, we provide an author with a list of First Five revisions to focus on. It’s a great way to prioritize. And to get started.

Fifth, you need to thicken your skin.

Acknowledge that getting feedback is painful, but necessary. If your attitude when reading feedback is to look for reasons to ignore the criticisms, your manuscript won't get any better. You’re only human, after all. And that’s what makes you a fantastic writer. The Spun Yarn has made the feedback process as gentle as possible. Your feedback comes from anonymous strangers who care. They don’t know you. And you don’t know them, but they're not reviewers looking to pan you--they're honest, gentle people who want to see your book succeed. 

Your feedback is delivered only to you. We’ve removed all of the bullshit politics that often exist in writers groups or classes. Your feedback report is your feedback report. Take a peek at it. Then take a jog around the block. Then take a longer peek. Then really read it and get to work on your next revision. Getting feedback is never easy. But it could be easier. And that’s what we’ve tried to do at the Spun Yarn.

So get out there. And meet the whole elephant! Your manuscript will thank you.