What I learned from My Beta Reader

~Every Reader Brings a Biography to the Page~

In the front room of our small, minimalist, 500-square-foot apartment, a row of books sits between two gold bookends that spell LOVE. Scripture tells me that God is love, and over the last decade, hearts have quietly made their way into nearly every corner of our home. I treasure the silly heart-shaped sunglasses my best friend and I bought on vacation, the leather Etsy bracelet I designed with metal hearts and rivets that reads Trust Your Path, and the artwork I collect, which often carries a heart somewhere inside. Somewhere along the way, I became a woman who chose to surround herself with reminders of the love Christ was teaching me to receive, offer, and trust. Those hearts also serve as a quiet reminder to the darkness that it no longer gets the final word.

Earlier this week, I started thinking about how the books between those bookends tell a story before I ever open one. A dear pastor recommended The Bondage Breaker after sitting with me one afternoon and listening to how often I expected the enemy to appear around every corner. He explained that most people rush straight to the Gospels because they want to know Jesus but never take the time to understand what Scripture says about Satan. What I understood him to be telling me was that fear could not remain my teacher.

Then there is my Matthew Henry commentary. I swear to you, the clouds parted the first time I began reading Matthew Henry. Scripture became deeper, richer, and somehow easier for this old soul of mine to understand. One of the Bibles was given to my husband by a teenage girlfriend, and the black leather Bible is mine.

I have embraced plenty of technology, but I still cannot bring myself to sit in church with my phone open. That has nothing to do with feeling holier than anyone else. I think about the people sitting around me, especially the seniors who may not know whether I am reading Scripture or checking Facebook. Besides, I like writing in my Bible. I take notes in the margins until the pages begin to feel like part of my own history. My Bible grows more precious to me with time. Conveniently, the print in each new Bible I purchase also seems to grow larger as the years pass.

Tucked beside the Bibles is a thin Matthew Henry book about meekness and a quiet spirit. During certain seasons, I can read the book on repeat and feel every word soak into my mind and soul with complete clarity. Other times, I pick up the same little book and feel completely lost and a tad bit clueless. Something I admire in others is their ability to live in a way that shows meekness is not weakness. Their meekness is strength under control.

That truth feels especially close as I work through another pass of my memoir, From Fifteen to Freedom.

A recent conversation with my first beta reader made the lesson more necessary than I expected.

The First Thing She Said

We sat face-to-face in two really comfortable chairs. My beta reader looked relaxed, and the conversation felt easy. Then she opened with a thought that caught me completely off guard.

“While I was reading, I kept wondering whether Michelle had ever considered giving this book away for free.”

I will be honest. I did not know what to do with that thought. Did she see the book as ministry, but not necessarily as a memoir with a place in the publishing world? I did not know, and our conversation moved on before I thought to ask. She went on to tell me that it was obvious, without a doubt, that I wanted to testify to what Jesus had done in my life.

She also shared that she thought the poetry throughout the manuscript was beautiful. At the same time, she would become deeply involved in a chapter and then have to shift her mind into the allegorical language of a poem at the end of each chapter. For her, the poetry interrupted the momentum of the story. She suggested that the poems might belong in a separate collection someday, and I was grateful for her honesty.

When she told me that the Preface and Introduction gave away too much of the story too soon, I had to smile. “Funny you should say that,” I told her. I had spent the previous four or five days bulldozing the front of the manuscript and had already cut close to a thousand words. I had changed my author-written Foreword into a Preface and was combining material that had once been divided between a Prologue and an Introduction. On that point, we were already thinking in the same direction.

She also told me that she enjoyed my humor but noticed less of it after my husband entered the story. She wanted to read more raw concern, more vulnerability, and more of what I had been feeling during that season. Our marriage has been remarkably steady, but steady does not mean there is no deeper story to tell. I felt as though she was asking whether I could give the reader more of the emotional bridge between survival and safety, including what it took to receive faithful love after instability, allow myself to be known after years of hiding, and recognize that chaos once felt more familiar than peace.

That is a story I can tell more fully.

Our conversation remained respectful and steady throughout the time we spent together. Nothing became hostile or sharp. Still, I noticed a shift when we reached the portions of the memoir where I write about sensing the Holy Spirit and recognizing God’s communication through ordinary details.

Where the Conversation Shifted

My beta reader referred to those spiritual moments as miracles. I have often understood them as quiet acknowledgments from the Lord. My mother described them as God giving me a thumbs-up. That phrase became so meaningful that after she passed away, I had an imprint of her right thumb placed on a dog tag that I still wear.

These acknowledgments did not become noticeable to me until after I turned forty. They were not audible voices. They were quiet but spiritually clear moments that often came through ordinary objects carrying meaning at the exact time I needed to pay attention.

My beta reader reminded me that the world can be hard and unkind. People do not always appreciate or understand the same things in life. Some readers might find those passages strange. They could misunderstand what I had written or believe I was seeing and hearing things that were not truly there.

She kept saying those moments needed a pretense. I believe what she was reaching for was context, a gentler entrance into experiences that may not feel familiar to every reader. I was not offended. I leaned in and listened. Her response showed me where a reader who does not share my spiritual language might lose their footing.

After several days of prayer, I came to a conclusion. Her feedback did not mean I needed to remove those encounters. It meant I needed to build a clearer doorway into those experiences.

When a Reader Reaches for Another Explanation

At another point in our conversation, my beta reader asked whether I had ever taken an IQ test. She wondered whether I might be exceptionally intelligent, especially because I have written openly about lacking a high school and college education. She believed I had learned to shrink back in rooms filled with people who carried degrees, even though I might be organically intelligent and then some. She also described me as an empath whose skin was so thin that I absorbed the emotions of everyone around me.

Then she asked whether I had ever considered the possibility that I might be autistic. She connected that question to scenes in the memoir where I describe living for years without turning on the overhead bathroom light. I would get ready by the glow of a night-light or a small lamp plugged into the wall.

I understood why she reached for that possibility. Sensory sensitivity and neurodivergence are real, and I would never dismiss another woman’s experience. But I knew exactly what the darkness in that bathroom held for me. It was not merely a preference for softer light. It belonged to trauma, concealment, shame, and the way my body had learned to move through the world without feeling fully exposed.

At times, I felt as though she needed another explanation for the darkness I described, one that fit more comfortably within what she already understood. I began to understand that a reader may interpret my experience through the language and explanations already familiar to them.

Every Reader Brings a History

It is my belief that no reader comes to a memoir without bringing some emotional baggage of their own. We bring our histories with our mothers and fathers, our marriages and divorces, our friendships, disappointments, church experiences, doubts, and private longings. We bring the positive and not-so-positive experiences that have shaped how we understand faith. We also bring what we personally believe about God and what we may fear to be true about Him. Those histories influence the places where we most easily recognize ourselves in someone else’s story.

My beta reader connected deeply with the woman I had been when I was searching for love at almost any cost. She understood the wildness, the loneliness, and the ache of wanting to matter to someone. She also wanted to know more about how lasting love became possible in my life.

But when the details of my memoir moved more fully into my relationship with God, she became less certain of where she belonged inside my story. It became clear to me that she knew what to do with my wildness. She was less certain what to do with my witness.

That is not a judgment of her faith or her character. Her response showed me where she could see herself in my story and where she had a harder time following me. I have come to believe that her input helped me see how quickly a reader can identify with the human wound and then hesitate when I name the spiritual reality beneath the healing.

A Beta Reader Is a Snapshot, Not the Whole Picture

I have now chosen my second beta reader with greater intention. I wanted the manuscript placed in the hands of someone whose life experiences and relationship with God would bring a different reflection back to me. She is a Christian woman who speaks openly about her faith and believes that God still communicates, guides, and performs miracles in the lives of His children.

I am confident that she will notice different strengths, ask different questions, and help me recognize places where the writing needs greater clarity. Two very different readers can read the same pages and find themselves in completely different places. Their responses can help me see where the writing needs more light without changing the truth of what I lived.

What I Am Willing to Change, and What I Must Preserve

I am willing to restore more humor to the later chapters, especially those love-fogged sections where my thoughts may have boiled down to one recurring realization: He is so amazing. He is so amazing.

I am willing to give readers more of the ordinary life my husband and I have built together. I can offer more vulnerability and show more of the emotional journey that taught me how to receive steady love. That same steadiness is what I have found in Scripture.

My first beta reader told me plainly, “I do not know the Bible the way you know the Bible.” I can take the time to explain Scripture that may feel unfamiliar rather than assuming every reader understands language that has become second nature to me. But I am not willing to remove Scripture from a story built upon what the Word of God has revealed to me.

I am willing to frame my encounters with the Lord gently enough that a spiritually curious or skeptical reader can stay inside the story long enough to understand what those moments meant to me. I am not willing to weaken my testimony. My goal is not to make the truth smaller. My goal is to make the entrance gracious.

I want to write for readers who do not share my faith, but I cannot remove Jesus from the story of the freedom only He has made possible for me. Jesus is not branding added to my memoir. He is the reason I survived what I once feared would destroy me. He is the reason my bondage was broken. He is the reason shame did not have the final word, and He is the reason I learned to bring hidden things into the light.

A Wider Doorway Without a Smaller Jesus

Years ago, I opened a professional photography business and named it Eleven One Photography, inspired by Hebrews 11:1. The name was chosen to glorify God, not me. I wanted to build a faith-based business with a sliding scale so no one would be turned away because they could not afford professional photography services. I believed God would provide and make the business successful while allowing me to serve people who might not otherwise have access to beautiful photographic art.

Still, I do wonder whether the faith-based business label became a gatekeeper before people ever saw my beautiful photographic art. I often remind myself that assumption can be the mother of all mess-ups. But let us step into the shoes of someone who feels spiritually distant, skeptical, ashamed, or afraid of judgment.

That person was once me.

There was a time when I could have seen a Christian label and kept moving. I might have assumed the person behind the label would not understand my life or would feel uncomfortable in my presence. I might have decided I did not belong as a customer before I ever had the chance to feel welcomed.

I am human, and even though Jesus has told me again and again not to worry, I still worry about repeating that mistake with the publication of my manuscript. This memoir has become a wholehearted, blood-sweat-and-tears cry to reach people and tell them that my life was once a horrible train wreck, and it no longer is.

I do not believe a Christian label should prevent the very people I hope to reach from opening the first page of From Fifteen to Freedom. But I cannot state this with more sincerity: I refuse to build a wider entrance by removing Christ from the center of my story.

The question for me is not, How can I make Jesus less visible so more readers will feel comfortable?

The question is, How can I make my story more welcoming to readers who do not share my faith without making Jesus smaller?

My human story can open the conversation. It carries the hidden wounds, the fear of being known, and the longing to be loved. It tells the truth about the devastating consequences of giving myself away and the awkwardness of learning how to receive steady love. It also includes the details of original, tangible objects throughout my life that caused me to stop and pay attention.

That same habit of noticing meaning in ordinary objects became the heart of my first blog post, Where the Blur Still Speaks.

My hope is that readers will recognize themselves in those places before they fully understand the faith beneath them. Then I can show them where Jesus met me. Not from a pedestal. Not as a woman who had always been pure of heart or spiritually mature. As a woman who hid, wandered in sin, grieved, and finally allowed the light of Christ to reach the places she had kept locked down.

That is the wider doorway I want to build.

My human story can open the conversation. Then I can show readers where Jesus met me.

The Writer I Am Becoming

There is a belief that crosses my mind weekly and sometimes daily. Listening well does not require me to hand someone else authority over what I lived. I also truly believe, and often tell myself, “Michelle, you do not learn much while you are busy talking. You learn when you quiet yourself long enough to listen.”

At the very young and spry age of fifty-something, I want to remain teachable. I have reached a place where I can receive feedback without immediately becoming defensive. As I continue this late-in-life writing career, I want to know when I have repeated myself, guarded the tender places, left my meaning unclear, or assumed a reader understands words and ideas that have become second nature to me.

One thing is certain. I could not advocate love for anyone else until I understood how completely Christ had advocated for me. He forgave me, set me free, and broke the bondage that held me for years. He gave me a hunger for the Word of God, the instruction manual for my life. Through His Word, He has formed a meeker, quieter, and steadier spirit within me.

All of that is held together by love because God is love. Psalm 50:21 taught me that God’s patience should never be mistaken for approval. His love never pretended my choices were harmless, but His love also refused to leave me hidden beneath my poor choices.

His love told me the truth, and His love stayed.

Because His love met me that way, I carry the responsibility to offer a gracious entrance, write honestly, and make the reason for my freedom unmistakably clear.

That is the writer I am becoming, one who builds a wider doorway without making Jesus smaller.

Michelle ♡
“Follow the light where it gets most honest.”

Designed By Faith