Tonight I was watching MasterChef, as I often do.
The challenge they had tonight was to:
- Make up a recipe
- Test it out until they perfected it in their kitchen at home (and by home I mean the large house they all share)
- Write the recipe out
- Make the dish in the MasterChef kitchen, to be professionally photographed for the recipe card
- Home cooks then came in and tested the recipes
It occurred to me while watching it the importance of testing things.
Mistakes were evident in the testing phase as wrong measurements were written, wrong times, missing ingredients.
This has been on my mind lately as I was talking with a friend about the revisions I’m doing on my manuscript.
Without my betas (my lovely, lovely, wonderful betas) I wouldn’t've picked up half the stuff they did.
Without my betas, I wouldn’t know things that I thought worked but don’t.
Without my betas… Well, suffice to say a it wouldn’t be half as good without them.
Watching MasterChef, watching the contestants cringe when their tester made a mistake due to their mistake in writing the recipe, really made me think about testing and getting second (and third, fourth and fifth) opinions.
A friend recently told me that he was giving his manuscript to an agent without anyone having read it.
I cringed: surely a second opinion would make it a better manuscript?
Even if it’s for silly things like typos (I, for example, always muck up ‘quite’ and ‘quite’. Constantly! I know the difference between them but always type the wrong one! Always!), I really believe another opinion is invaluable.
What about you? Do you seek second opinions?