: Re: How to get feedback about the quality of one's fictional writing from friends unbiased by the friendship? It is a little strange to ask, but are there ways to get feedback from friends about

@Angie602

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Share your work as a revision-enabled word processor document (e.g. Word) or a cloud service (e.g. Google Docs):

People are more likely to add comments while reading rather than facing you with verbal criticism.
Their opinions are more considered because they can take time to write them. They also have the time to phrase it without hurting your feelings.
If shared among multiple beta readers (this is only possible with a cloud service), they get to see each others comments and compare notes.
This will also filter out those who are not serious about critique -- they wouldn't want to spend the time or effort to write down their comments.
Note: make sure you trust your friends enough that they won't indiscriminately re-share it.

Tell them to assume that they're reading an actual book that they paid money for. Tell them you already have positive comments and that you're looking for the flip side:

When they read it as a book they bought, they'll be a lot more critical.

Choose beta readers who read regularly. Better if you've heard them talk about other authors' works in the past

This will tell you exactly what level of analysis they're capable of.

As a final note. I did all these recently and it worked out very well. (It didn't hurt that I had several well-read friends with absurdly high standards!)

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