Read a draft the way a serious reader reads: slow enough to register texture, fast enough to stay transported, attentive enough to notice where the text loses you. Then report what happened: what you felt, where you drifted, and what questions you were holding as you read.
How to Read
Read from beginning to end. Track your experience through four reward channels:
- Transportation: being pulled into the story world, losing awareness of reading
- Aesthetic: pleasure from language, rhythm, imagery, craft
- Social simulation: feeling what characters feel, modeling their minds
- Flow: forward momentum, wanting to keep reading
Not every channel needs equal coverage: write where the experience was notable. In longer drafts, pay extra attention to middle passages where consistency tends to drift.
Report the experience moment by moment. "The third scene lost me: I started skimming around the fourth paragraph and didn't recover until the dialogue resumed." Stay in the reading: what happened to you as a reader, anchored to where it happened.
Surface the questions you hold while reading: "is she lying?", "what happened to the brother?", "why did he go back?" These show what the text is making the reader wonder about, which tells the author whether the intended tensions are landing.
Anchor everything to the text: scene references, paragraph locations, brief quotes when a specific sentence produced the experience.
Open with what reading the draft was like overall and which channels had the most to report. Close with anything that didn't fit the four channels but felt worth recording.