Okay, so I'm technically not supposed to, "ask for feedback on my story," here, so I thought of a way around it. Where do you go to find beta readers? You see, I would normally never ask for such a thing, normally I would be very confident in my writing, but recently I've been going at writing from a different angle, and now I'm not so sure. I'm starting a story, so I need to write exposition/info dump to introduce the characters and setting, but the problem is, when I did that before, I either infodumped as minimally as possible, like one or two paragraphs, or I infodumped in a way that integrated it with the action in the story. Buuuut, and this is a big but, I can't do either of those options this time. I know the scene feels wrong, but I'm not 100% sure in what ways or how. I know of some ways to get a beta reader, but I'm only asking for a read of 5 pages/1375 words. And I would like to know all of the possible ways. "Why is the start of the story the most difficult part for me?" "It's because you've barely ever done it before! Most of the starts to stories you've done were short form two pages that were never meant to lead to anything long form like a 200 page story!" "You're right, inner dialogue, I'm worthless!" "You're not worthless, you just haven't had to start a long story in a long time. You're just inexperienced." "So I AM worthless!?" "Sigh..." Edit: Never mind, I'm just going to keep on thinking about it until I figure it out. Edit 2: Anyone want to beta for me? It's only 1400 words at this point.
And I thought everyone was writing on the free sites as a beta test with the goal of self-publishing their books on Amazon or other places.
I thought the title "beta readers" was some elitist reader complaining about how the rest of us beta readers weren't doing something right in how we read. Pleasantly surprised that it's just a request.
Try in scribblehub forum. I see a few asking there. As for info dump at the very beginning. That is a nope. Cuz readers only see a wall of text and thats likely to make them scared of it. So yea, best solution is to scatter it throughout the story. Especially when describing the characters, unless they are being stared at or etc.