As promised, the book review post # 3

While I gird my loins to write my first, thoughtful and considered book review (and egads, which one to choose?), here is my third installment of notes and thoughts. It’s messy and somewhat incoherent, something I will try to avoid when reviewing though I can’t promise much. I haven’t had a chance to proof this, nor to look at the structure, it’s just a blech onto the page but I’m hoping you can see the gems here, and what I’m getting at. I have to be up at 6am to get a flight at 9.30, so must go to bedski now, it’s after midnight.

With reviewing, I know there’s a lot to consider and I won’t have any trouble expressing an opinion and having a response and plenty to say but what I’m trying to work out is how do I manage to be critical while being respectful; how do I work out balancing a helpful review that will assist readers with being honest to myself and my reactions? I know the work it takes to write a book and I don’t want to be mean, but at the same time I don’t want to be a suck. Some people say they don’t review books they don’t like, but I have read plenty of books I haven’t liked or which aren’t my usual ‘thing’ so where exactly does my responsibility lie and why should I not have a response to book I don’t like that much? How thorough do I try to be? How closely do I interrogate the book? I can’t help but form a private opinion of whether a book is good or bad, works or doesn’t, but do I go public with this?

I’ve decided I need to be balanced and fair, but honest. I may not say everything I could about a negative reaction but I am going to aim to include something of why I didn’t like the book, or why I thought there were flaws. The best reviews I think are the ones that tell more about the reviewer’s experience of reading the book and where it took them, and their thought processes rather than a precis or summary and some stars. How we look for meaning, how we create meaning, rather than see it as a fixed object (this is from an earlier point made by critique Wyatt Mason, Among the Reviewers.

There are some simple rules from John Updike, a couple of which are really pertinent:

1.  try to understand what the authors wishes to do and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt: that is, for example, I shouldn’t be critical of an author for not being ‘literary enough’ when it’s clear the intention for the book is to be commercial, or is genre and not literary at all.

2.  give enough direct quotation – at least one extended passage – of the book’s prose so the review’s reader can form his own impression, get his own taste

*

The recent copy of Australian Book Review has an article by Kerryn Goldsworthy called Everyone’s a Critic – a timely piece (for me) on exactly this: how to write reviews. She surveyed 16 people in the biz, from authors to bloggers, editors, publishers, reviewers and booksellers. The general view was that there’s a discrepancy between critics’ private opinions of books and the polite reviews of them that appear in print. Recently, James Bradley tweeted that he was ‘writing a review that will make me deeply unpopular with everybody. Hee-hee.’ (16 May, 2013). I’m sure I’m not the only one waiting to see what the book is and what he says. That ‘hee-hee’ on the end taps into my shameful tendency towards schadenfreude - there’s something gleeful in thinking that someone’s gonna get it, and I hope it’s deserved. But also, there is a large gap between what people might privately think and what is published when it comes to reviewing books; we are all so scared that when someone like Bradley announces his intention we all start rubbing our hands together and going ‘hee-hee’ too.

When asked about the responsibility of the book reviewer, these were some of the responses from the 16 people:

On what people want in a review
Delia Falconer wants ‘literary genealogy, place in family of other work, in the author’s wider oeuvre’

Fiona Stager, bookshop owner, ‘where does it sit in the literary landscape’

Aviva Tuffield, publisher at Scribe wants the genre context. Someone else: ‘you need to know whether the reviewer has any knowledge/taste in the area or not.’

Stephen Romei, literary ed of The Australian, ‘I expect them to tell me something about the author’s background, including their nationality (something very few reviewers do)’

James Ley ‘a reviewer should not be condescending towards either the writer or the reader. No cheap shots, no dumbing down, no gratuitous name-dropping designed to impress or intimidate, no pretentious flourishes or grandstanding. It should be a conversation between equals.’

On making a call - where do you stand?
Aviva Tuffield, ‘I always want a book reviewer to make a judgement call… for reviewers to tell me if they enjoyed and admired the book, or if they didn’t.’ Jason Steger and Stephen Romei agree.

Is the responsibility to the reader, the author, or yourself?
Most respondents felt that the reviewer’s greatest responsibility was to the reader – to help her make a choice when selecting a book, to not waste money etc. Susan Wyndham said the responsibility was to a ‘wider culture… to help create an intelligent conversation about books and a belief in their importance and value.’ The feeling comes through the article that most people feel that a reviewer owes it to the reader (and the writer) to not soft-pedal, but not try to be ‘flip or dismissive’, to show the writer ‘basic respect.’ Peter Rose believes ‘the ultimate responsibility is to the work itself… not to its hopeful maker, intended audience or national honour.’ Lisa Hill says ‘As a reader I have been suprised by some glowing reviews of rather ordinary books – and have learned not to trust the reviewer again.’

Geordie Williamson says ’50/50 split: to the book under discussion, which deserves your attention and respect, as well as a default optimism regarding its worth; and to readers, those who are trusting you to arbitrate honestly.’

Peter Craven says ‘A critic meets her responsibility to her readership by meeting her responsibility to herself.’ A person shouldn’t review on behalf of the audience because that leads to second-guessing and isn’t helpful.

James Ley – ‘Whenever I write a sentence that sounds like the kind of thing that gets plastered across a book cover, I cross it out’ and Geordie Willliamson ‘I’m proud of the fact my reviews contain little in the way of grist for the publicity mill. It means I haven’t gushed.’

On being part of a gigantic conga line of suckholes (thanks Mark Latham for giving the world this expression)

James Ley: ‘gigantic conga line of suckholes constantly on display at writers’ festivals, Twitter etc’ (gulp) and

Ley again ‘criticism cannot do what it should be doing if it is worried about anything other than the task at hand.’

*

So, if I can put all of that into a mixing bowl and stir, and leave it to rise, I’ll see what happens.

I’m off to Hong Kong tomorrow and I’m thinking pearls… Back next week.

 

 

 

My excuses and I do have several

Tags

Carrie Tiffany, Hong Kong, Ian McEwan, Mateship With Birds, Melbourne laneways, pearls, The Comfort of Strangers, West Wing

Reasons why I have not yet posted on book reviewing:

1. I’ve been procrastinating
2. I’ve been writing (which is better, yes?)*
3. I’ve been teaching (a little bit)
4. I’ve been re-watching West Wing (a lot)
5. I’ve been reading heaps. Just finished abotu three in a row that didn’t do it for me, and then just now am half-way through Ian McEwan’s The Comfort of Strangers. Wow. And before that, finished Mateship With Birds (also, wow). These might get a reviewing, peut-être. We shall see. And I shan’t talk about the ones I didn’t like so don’t push me.
6. I’ve been preparing mentally for our trip to Hong Kong on Thursday (practical preparations will take place Wednesday night). Just a little getaway which somehow involves extensive research of pearls and martini bars. My mum is coming here to provide Stability and an Adult Presence for the teenagers lest they start wandering the back lane with bottles in brown paper bags OR don’t feed the dog.
7. I’ve been excited about my teaching, had a couple of really great sessions and they are occurring so frequently (like EVERY TIME) so I’m loving whenever I have to go out and do it
8. I went to a bookish evening – a launch – of my writing teacher Andrea Goldsmith’s book THE MEMORY TRAP. Bought a second copy, got it signed, cause I’m a bit fan-girly like that. I’ll give the first unsigned copy to my mum, partly cause I think she’ll enjoy it and partly cause she heard Andrea being interviewed on the radio and Andrea was making lots of references to the music in the book (one of the main CHs is a world-class pianist) and my mum is a classical music buff.
9. Been cooking and cleaning and all that boring mother stuff.
10. And sleeping. A bit of that going on too, but not too much.

So, I intend, tomorrow, to put up the next post on book reviewing, and thus continue my journey through self-doubt towards some sort of mad skillz (this is the hope, whether it eventuates…)

* Today I had great progress with my second thing (novel). I decided to sit down and read over my learnings and notes on how to make a story more compelling. While I write a more character-driven, literary fiction, one that is sparsely populated with exclamation marks** (and don’t want to sell my soul to formulaic, predictable, template-derived stories) I DO want to see whether I can blend (within reason, within limits – my limits) the elements that drive a story forward and keep a reader turning the pages and invested, AND the beauty and lyricism and creativity of more free-form, less commercial writing.

** I have a quotation somewhere, is it Faulkner? I’ll check, where the person says one exclamation mark per 100K words if at all. Love it.

See you tomorrow.

Dragging my feet a little

Tags

ABR, Kerryn Goldsworthy, Melbourne weather, reviewing, walking the dog

I wrote this yesterday and then something happened and it didn’t publish. Then I sat down to re-write and THEN I saw it in the drafts. So here it is. I’ve been woken early by my husband’s chicken foot over my side of the bed. I wish he would cut his toenails. I also had two too many martinis last night so I have a little bit of a head. (I love the way I call them martinis – a martini glass, tumble olives into the bottom, usually about 5, pour vodka in. Drink. I had three.) I ALSO had rage last night about some stuff that has been happening at my daughter’s school.

Dear Sports Mistresses. Lay off.

So here’s what I wrote yesterday:

I’ve been writing this week, like really really putting out. Working on short stories and then yesterday and today, back to a novel project which will hopefully be my second to go out (whatever the hell that means.)

No publishing news other than it’s still out there, circulating. There haven’t been ‘nos’ from a few people and one publisher who did say no is asking about it again. Hopefully it is HAUNTING her and she will make an offer. Things just seem really bad in publishing at the moment – virtually impossible to get something accepted. Sometimes I wonder, though, whether my thing would ever have easily found a home. Who can say.

Early this week I think it was I received my latest copy of Australian Book Review with Kerryn Goldsworthy’s long essay Everyone’s a Critic which makes great reading. And timely for my next post (I know I keep promising) on book review writing, so I’ll include some snippets from that too.

I’m exhausted from just sitting here, reading, editing, stripping out words from my 99K manuscript. It’s down to 92K and I’d like to pull more out, and then possibly build back up a little. I’m just not sure what size this thing will be, and I’m still not entirely sure of the shape. Argh.

fraught /frôt/

Adjective – (of a situation or course of action) Filled with or destined to result in (something undesirable).
Synonyms – full – replete – loaded – laden – pregnant

Maybe fraught is the wrong word because I don’t want an undesirable outcome. But I have to keep my mojo.

The weather in Melbourne has been beautiful, and I’ve been having good walks with the Gigi. I don’t know if I’ve introduced her on here, I promise, I don’t do animal blogging, but here she is:

That’s an old photo – she’s much bigger now, and she’s turning nine this year I think. She’s in good shape, a big, fluffy pale Retriever, and I recently started walking her on one of those retractable lead things. (She’s always been bad on the lead – pulling so much, thinking she’s in charge.) Funnily, I didn’t want to spend $60 on one the right size for her (heavy duty for ‘big dogs’, weighed a tonne too, also didn’t extend to the length that the ‘small dog’ one did – 23 feet.) So I bought the ‘small dog’ one and it works fine but sometimes I feel like I’m holding a fishing line and there is a marlin on the end of it, or a whale.

Anyway, happy weekend. Happy writing. Don’t have too many martinis.

While I’m cogitating on the next ‘How-to’ book review post…

Tags

Anne Lamott, editing, grammar skills, how to write better, James Wood, proofreading, reading about fiction, Stephen King, writing fiction

I wanted to quickly list the books that I have on my shelves that I have found (variously) helpful in improving my writing skills but thought I’d also write a bit about my beliefs for revising work.

Editing
Knowing and clearly understanding what the different types of revision are is a first step and this bit isn’t really easy. A lot of people think editing is checking for spelling mistakes etc. From structural editing to checking voice and POV shifts, to making sure through-lines are intact and cohere, interrogating character motivations and what is logical and ‘right’ in the world of the novel, pace, chapter arcs and whole narrative arcs, right down to proofing for typos, there are lots of different ‘levels’ of things that need to be done. They can be done as several ‘sweeps through’ a manuscript looking for the specific category of problem, or some might be done as a person writes. It’s hard to edit your own work; we are too close to what we write to see it as another would but it is something that can be learned and you can train yourself to ‘swap hats’ and manage the task with discipline.

Learning more about grammar is important too. I did a subject in editing & sub-editing at RMIT in 1998, and my teacher was Ted Cowham, referred to in this Crikey article as ‘a grumpy… copy-taster with the world’s largest steel spike’. I remember him as impressive, exacting and really nice; he gave me a book at the end of the course, inscribed with his best wishes. I learned a lot about editing and subbing in that class, and after it was asked by another student (who was working as editor at Pacific Publications) whether I’d be interested in some part-time sub-editing work. I said yes. Of course. While working there, I met another woman, younger than me, who also was subbing I think. She told me about the RMIT Professional Writing & Editing course and said that it was a really good course but very hard to get into. Well, I applied and I got in and did the first year (Short story writing with Ania Walwicz and Professional writing with Malcolm King? I’m not sure of the name…)

So awareness was an important step. But before that, I’d done a certificate course in teaching English as a foreign language, the prestigious Cambridge RSA program, and it was there that I learned the most about English grammar so that I could teach it. Knowing how to teach it meant that I could also use those skills in my self-editing, twenty years or more later.

So these are tangible skills but what about attitude? You have to want to make your work better, and know that editing it will help to achieve that. If you don’t believe that editing is essential, then having the skills to edit are useless without the psychological distance you have to create to actually do it.

Some people pay for a manuscript assessment. I did (and it was too early I now realise). I think the answer is a mix (if you can afford it) of paid assessment (carefully chosen, mine was great but the ms was uncooked), voluntary readers and self-editing.

BOOKS:
Grammar ones
Practical English Usage – Michael Swan
The Australian Government Style Manual, for authors, editors and printers – AGPS
The Complete Plain Words – Sir Ernest Gowers
Fowler’s Modern English Usage – Revised by Sir Ernest Gowers
The Elements of Style – Strunk & White

These ones more for context about language, change and usage. Fascinating if you care about language and care about using it well.
Troublesome Words – Bill Bryson
Words and Rules – Steven Pinker
Weasel Words – Don Watson
Death Sentence – Don Watson

Another really important thing is to read heaps and read widely. Read the stuff that you enjoy reading, that you think is good (to see how it’s done) and read the bad stuff too, or the stuff you think is flawed (to see the how ‘not to do it’ aspects). Reading something that doesn’t work (for you) is an opportunity to analyse why. This building of awareness and critical skills can only be good for our own writing.

Some good references for this type of approach, sort of literary analysis skill-building:
Faulks on Fiction – Great British Characters and the Secret Life of The Novel – Sebastian Faulks
The Naive and Sentimental Novelist – Orhan Pamuk

And some old ones on literary theory:
Aspects of the Novel, The Timeless Classic on Novel Writing – EM Forster (heavy going, I haven’t read it all)
The Theory of the Novel, A historico-philosophical essay on the forms of great epic literature – Georg Lukács (likewise, pretty serious, turgid stuff)

Finally, the explicit ‘how-tos’ which are the ones starter writers should ahem start with. These are the publications that show specific examples (often) and clearly set out how to write better. If I could recommend the one to start with, and above and beyond the others above and below, it would be Stephen King’s ON WRITING. He says it all really, and says it well. It’s accessible prose and regardless of whether he is a genre writer or not (he is) and whether you like genre or not (I don’t), it is incredibly helpful. Before you poo-poo King, remember he’s also written some gorgeous short stories and novellas that weren’t horror. Here’s a story about how he’s perceived as a horror writer only [found at Neil Gaiman's blog.]

King is speaking in interview with Gaiman:

I was down here in the supermarket, and this old woman comes around the corner this old woman – obviously one of the kind of women who says whatever is on her brain. She said, ‘I know who you are, you are the horror writer. I don’t read anything that you do, but I respect your right to do it. I just like things more genuine, like that Shawshank Redemption.’ And I said, ‘I wrote that’. And she said, ‘No you didn’t’. And she walked off and went on her way.

Other specific and instructional ‘how-to’ books:
Dear Writer – Carmel Bird (Bird is working on a revised edition of this.)
The Little Red Writing Book – Mark Tredinnick
Writing Fiction – Garry Disher

Books that are more talking about doing it well (or badly) rather than explaining how to do it:
How Fiction Works – James Wood (I found this one brilliant)
Bird by Bird – Anne Lamott (this is fantastic too, more of a memoir of reading and writing)
Tasting Life Twice – Ramona Koval’s series of interviews with authors is terrific and show insight into process and form.

Good luck, next will be post # 3 on reviewing. Happy writing weekend.

Workshop in Brisbane – writing memoir

Tags

Augusten Burroughs, Dylan Thomas, fiction, happiness, memoir, Patti Miller, writing workshop

On Sunday I flew up to Brissy to attend a workshop at the Queensland State Library, run by the QWC. Facilitated by Patti Miller, it was on Writing the Real Story. While my focus is fiction, and novels (although am working on a novella en ce moment, god knows why, it seems from my reading that publishers aren’t interested in them unless you are someone like JM Coetzee say), I have had some thoughts lately of a small, neat memoir with a title that has already been used by an Australian writer. Poo. Along with small thoughts of essay and slightly larger intentions for book reviews as I’ve mentioned here before.

In the workshop, we discussed memories and how they are stored in the brain, how to access them effectively to produce richer, more patterned work. How to use things like photographs, or music, or thinking about the five senses. If most of this seems quite basic and quite obvious, well that’s what I thought too. But when we did a couple of 10-minute writing exercises, I felt that I had tapped into something quite easily and naturally. I’ve always said things like ‘Oh, I have a terrible memory’ but I don’t, it’s really quite good. I think years of keeping a journal and filling it with the most banal, tedious detail made me stop using a particular part of my brain for storage. I know it’s all there in the diaries (although, when I look back, I can see I have censored and left out things that I remember on my own for no significant reason other than maybe time) so when it comes to retrieving details about something, it’s recorded, pretty much EVERYTHING from 1980 to around when my daughter was born, or shortly after in 1996. Sixteen solid years of diarising. Then I started my blog in 2005, so from then to now is another eight years. I wonder whether I didn’t write fiction during those years because I was doing another form of writing OR whether I was just biding my time, collecting material and processing ideas. During those years I have clipped newspapers and made notes for ideas and the other day I found some old story beginnings, and even a story from Grade 5 which is pretty good, even though I had no idea about using quotation marks. Maybe I’ll publish them here one day for a laugh.

At the workshop, one exercise included an imagining of a particular stimulus and then we spent ten minutes writing about something that came to mind; just letting it flow. This is what I came up with:

The first ‘person’ I see is Aldous, our cat. Smoky and lithe she stretches on the patio, the door mat, the planter box. Around my ankles. She escorts me in, running to the kitchen, to the back door where her bowls are.

Aldous is a cat who thinks she’s not. Sometimes she’s a piece of fruit – languid and curved in the fruit bowl. Other times, you find her settled in a half-open desk drawer, looking at you as if to say: Ruler? Eraser? Pen? What now? Empty grocer boxes, washing baskets, beds. These are her domain, she can fill any vacuum and she entertains us with each new spot.

‘There’s something wrong with her,’ we laugh.
‘All our pets are strange. Remember Bon? That dog was mad.’

My mother shakes her head as she reaches around the cat who sits on top of the cooling oven.

‘Whose turn is it to feed her?’ she asks.
‘Not mine.’
‘Not mine.’
‘It’s not mine. I did it last night.’

My mother sighs and tells me to do it. I whine and drag my feet, making the rubber come away from the toe. Like a flap it bends underneath.

‘Don’t do that,’ my mother says. ‘I need to get some glue.’

Aldous is so thin her neck is single bone and as wide as my thumb and forefinger in a circle. When I do this to her, making a finger necklace, and call to my brother to look! Aldous sits calmly, trusting I won’t snap her.

‘Don’t,’ says mum. ‘Don’t be cruel.’

This is how I wrote it, but I would make changes on a second pass through, of course. I would change Sometimes she’s a piece of fruit – languid and curved in the fruit bowl to somehow avoid the repetition of the word ‘fruit’ – maybe just have bowl. That would also make the rhythm tighter. I would adjust: Ruler? Eraser? Pen? What now? Empty grocer boxes, washing baskets, beds. And take out probably ‘eraser’ as well as probably beds because that is too obvious. And I’d also adjust ‘I need to get some glue.’ to ‘I must get some glue.’

I had wondered whether I would find much of value and if I did, what I would do with it. But I took notes and found value and shall store away (for now) my intentions, and these beginnings of learning about memoir. My novella has become much darker over the last day or so, and I would like to have the memoir work as a piece about happiness to offset my reading for the other one. So many people write memoir about difficult, sad, traumatic times. I wonder how many there are about happiness; those fleeting times when (if you are lucky) you know you are happy and you make it stretch for as long as possible, knowing that the lived moments will be the ones possibly out of your whole life that you’ll look back on, thinking them ‘the happiest or best.’ I think you can recognise these times when they are happening, they are pretty rare.

And yes, the Turkey novel. Waiting for my attention; it stands at 99K and is still only second draft’y so will need much more work. I plan to get back to that in a couple of weeks and go gangbusters on it. I’m quite busy during May with teaching, and another quick trip to Hong Kong which will be great.

Publications I noted to look up after the memoir workshop:

Patti Miller’s The Memoir Book & Writing Your Life
Viktor Shklovsky’s work
Natalie Goldbery’s Writing Down the Bones
Dylan Thomas Under Milk Wood
Augusten Burroughs Running with Scissors

Writing book reviews: How to post # 2

Tags

John Updike, Lev Grossman, literary criticism, writing book reviews

I have three new books:

Madeleine: A Life of Madeleine St John by Helen Trinca
The Memory Trap by Andrea Goldsmith
All That Is by James Salter

I don’t know when I’ll read them. I already have so many unread. But I’ll put them into my inventory and put them beside the bed and get to them eventually. I’m going to one of Andrea’s launches (I was lucky enough to do a Writers Victoria year-long course called Advanced Year of the Novel with her, in 2011 I think it was.) I’ll be my usual fan-girl and get it signed. There’s something about getting a book signed by the author.

On Sunday I’m flying interstate for a day’s workshop. Should be fun.

And I’ve been giving lots of thought to my trying to write reviews. Today’s snippets are care of an article written by Wyatt Mason on the critical reviewing of John Updike, and also another note from my reading thus far, something that resonated deeply and I think will prove to be the entry-point for my approach to writing reviews.

The article titled Among the Reviewers, John Updike and the book-review bugaboo by Wyatt Mason from Harper’s Magazine, December 2007, has some useful bits. It mentions Zadie Smith’s call for a ‘far more thorough reader’ and then contextualises an imminent dipping into Updike’s reviewing methodology by telling the reader about a little bookshop in a small town in Massachusetts which houses a bunch of publisher review copies sent to Updike for his perusal and notations, and how you can visit the store and sit on a couch and look at them and read over Updike’s margin notes. It’s reassuring, to me anyway, to read that sometimes these marginalia would consist of things like ‘ugh’ and ‘clichéd’ and ‘good’ beside something he liked. If it were as simple as then transposing these sorts of responses onto a page and calling it a review, then we could all do it easily. Mason makes the point that to read any of these books that Updike read with a view to reviewing makes clear his attempts to be thorough (Zadie would be pleased). Comments are not only in the margins but in the appendices and footnotes. (I wonder if Updike ever reviewed Infinite Jest – now that is some marginalia I would like to see.)

Mason says that it’s clear that Updike’s notes are on the top-level seeking to decide whether a piece is good or bad (something that is ‘one of the immediate jobs of criticism’ according to Mason) but then also indicate the intention to drill down to a  more nuanced criticism (which Terry Eagleton said ‘[is a way of] looking at meaning not as an object but as a practice’). Mason adds, Updike also undertook a ‘more considered task “that of interrogation”‘ and says the most often-occurring punctuation in the margins is the question mark.

What one is witness to is a patient reader’s private conversation with a book.

There are 6 points that Updike listed as guidelines for writing book reviews. In this Mason article, there are 5 but I know there’s been a sixth added in some versions because I’ve seen it. I can’t lay my hands on my copy so you’ll just have to trust me, or google it yourself. When you read these five though, bear in mind that Updike was Christian in thinking and so the do-unto-others credo informs his outline of tips:

1. Try to understand what the author wishes to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.

2. Give enough direct quotation – at least one extended passage – of the book’s prose so the review’s reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste.

3. Confirm your description of the book with quotation from the book, if only phrase-ling rather than proceeding by fuzzy precis.

4. Go easy on plot summary, and do not give away the ending…

5. If the book is judged deficient, cite a successful example along the same lines, from the author’s oeuvre or elsewhere. Try to understand the failure. Sure it’s his and not yours?

[This last point is curious to me: sure it's his and not yours? I'm guessing this refers to matters of interpretation? Understanding? Is it connected to point 1?]

It’s okay to be critical but the reviewer needs to make an argument and give reasons why. This is what builds credibility, and with reviewers such as Michiko Kakutani, whose reputation for brutality is renowned, I wonder how her reviews are structured and what guidelines or personal limits, if any, they follow. I’ll look her up for another post. And as Mason states, an early critical review by Updike of JD Salinger’s Franny and Zooey, published in the New York Times in 1961, did not negatively affect Salinger’s reputation because Updike’s review left the reader ‘thinking not about negativity, nor about Updike, but thinking, as good criticism makes us, about a writer’s choices.’ It doesn’t matter if a reader then reads a book and agrees or not, what’s important is that ‘the assessment is clear and well-founded’. Mason says, a text is not exhausted by a work of criticism, only informed by it.

Mason goes on to suggest some questions a reviewer might ask herself as she is making notes while reading and collating her responses, questions that he believes Updike employed as his notes show a curiosity: How is this made? Why does it work? Why did it fall apart? To me, these are helpful. If I can keep my focus on simple things like this then I can see a way forward. It’s about focus, not getting lost in synopsis or character description; more about working out why the plot failed, or why there was no plot and it worked, why the main character did or didn’t ‘work’ – it’s about going deeper than the external appearance to look at the skeleton, muscles and circulatory system. About focusing on my response and possibly why I have reacted in such a way.

Whether writers or not, readers will often prove more responsive to certain effects than to others, those that in some way speak to them directly. (“What else have you underlined?” asks one character looking at the marginalia in the book of another in Philip Roth’s Zuckerman Unbound. “What everybody underlines,” she says. “Everything that says ‘me.’”)*

This is true. I find myself doing it all the time. Passages or descriptions or actions or character inner-worlds that either reflect myself or ways I like to write or my ideas of other writerly aesthetics. They don’t have to be elements that I ‘like’ or approve of or agree with; there just needs to be some sort of connection made, and it can be negative.

A couple more quotations from the article, Frank Kermode said of the critic’s role:

we shouldn’t get above ourselves… [the critic's job is to] serve literature.

So my ‘take-home’ points from the above are these (in addition to the 5 tips listed):
be thorough / decide if it’s good or bad and then drill down to look at meaning not as object but as a practice ** /  interrogate and be curious / make an argument (presumably if response is positive as well as if negative: say why – How is this made? Why does it work? Why does it fall apart?) / leave the reader thinking about the writer’s choices.

*

The second article I have here is called Confessions of (Another) Book Reviewer, by Lev Grossman, May 9 2012 from Time Magazine. Here are some quotations I underlined, and I think they flesh out my learning from the above Mason article.

On the question of reviewing only books that you ‘like’:

I review books if they do something I’ve never seen done before; or if I fall in love with them or if they shock me or piss me off or otherwise won’t leave me alone; if they alter the way my brain works; if I can’t stop thinking about them; if for whatever reason I absolutely have to tell people about them.

This is interesting. There is a book that I read last year and while I haven’t recommended it to anyone, and I haven’t raved about it in my head to myself it has stuck with me. Certain descriptions of place have stayed in my brain; certain of the characters have stayed in my brain. If this isn’t a sign of a successful book, then I don’t know what is. But does a book need more to be considered successful? Maybe these could be one of my points (if I made a list) – that aspects of the book need to stick with me and become a part of my thought landscape well after reading?

Grossman says:

Over time I retreated to the following position: I am a book-loving human being, and if I love something, then some other book-loving human elsewhere will probably love it too

Yeah!

And:

John Updike advised reviewers: “Submit to whatever spell, weak or strong, is being cast.” And I do insofar as I can. But the book critic is in the weird position of being there on behalf of both the writer and the reader. You submit to the spell, but if the anaesthetic wears off during the operation, you reserve the right to wake up and scream bloody murder.

Yes to that too.

I don’t write hatchet jobs, though… I used to. There was a time when I actually believed, because I was an ass, that as a critic I was an avenging angel with a flaming sword, and that part of my job was to help rid the culture of books that were sucking up more of the literary oxygen than they deserved. So if I read a book and hated it, I said so.

Then I grew up. Don’t get me wrong: I am as bad-tempered a reader as you’ll ever see, and I’m a great hater of bad books, and possibly even of good ones. I enjoy a well-reasoned rubbishing as much as the next reader… James Wood on Paul Auster in the New Yorker for example – “The pleasing, slightly facile books come out almost every year… and the applauding reviewers line up… to get the latest issue.” And so on. I think pieces like that do something important. They open up space in the culture where we can actually talk honestly about writers whose work is in danger of becoming sacred and critically unassailable. Books that aren’t actually scripture shouldn’t be treated like they’re sacred… But I don’t write hatchet jobs. A thoroughly negative review needs to justify its existence thoroughly, and for that you need a lot of words, and TIME’s book reviews don’t run long enough. So if I don’t like a book, I leave it alone.

And this, the best, most resonant part (for me):

I think of the reviewer’s role now as being more about providing context for a book, tracing its lineage in the tradition and locating it in the literary topography of the present, and all that touchy-feely sort of thing. The critics I love these days do something slightly different from what they used to: they don’t just judge, they open up that weird, intense, private dyad that forms between book and reader and let other people inside. They tell the story, the meta-story, of what happened when they opened the book and began to read the story.

And it’s this quotation that I think makes meaning of the bit above, where Mason talks about meaning not as object but as a practice. It’s in this passage that I think I see my reviewing light; focusing on that intense, indefinable space that happens when a person reads a book, that opens up between book and reader, or even between author and reader. And to let other people inside what that space has been like for me; maybe that’s it.

* have tried to fix this stupid punctuation explosion here, but cannot manage to. Och wordpress, why are you so weird?

** Not sure entirely what this means. Requires more ponderage.

If you watch one thing today, watch this

Tags

Shane Koyczan, spoken word, The Crickets Have Arthritis

The Crickets Have Arthritis by Shane Koyczan.

I’m not a big poetry or spoken-word person. This is amazing and it will probably make you cry. My only ‘not-like’ bit is the mention of God but other than that, it’s perfect. You can google the words too, but how they come alive when he speaks them. Brilliant. Genius. Beautiful. Heartbreaking. All those superlatives.

Learn with me: Book reviews ‘How to’ post #1

Tags

8 Mile. Marshall Mathers III, Eminem, John Updike, reviewing

So, I feel I’m crap at writing the sort of book reviews I want to write. I know good ones when I see them, I enjoy lengthy and meaty reviews, ones where the focus can shift from the specific book at hand and include other works by the same author, and indeed relevant pieces by other people too.Where the themes are dissected and the language choices considered and analysed. What I want to learn to do is more ‘book autopsy’ or ‘book archaeological dig’ rather than a ‘book review’.

I am going to methodically and conscientiously try to gain some knowledge and skills about how to write good book responses and I thought it would be helpful if, as I gather material and try to learn how to write fab reviews, I shared my findings here. Sometimes I think of this as a depository of good stuff I find, like a big box that can hold a lot of tips and links and articles and jottings and being a teacher I like to share learning, but bear in mind this may be more Prep Show and Tell rather than an erudite exposition on the Art of Reviewing (in keeping with my review efforts so far.)

My search thus far has brought me to this website, which is a WikiHow page containing 11 steps to writing book reviews. The first step is: read the book. I do wonder sometimes whether all the reviews I see, and usually skim over or skip, are based on books that have been properly read, ie completed and even if completed, understood. (When you think about it, it’s fairly easy to fake a review. You can get the cover from anywhere. You can get the author information as well as publishing info from anywhere too. You can ALSO look up other people’s reviews – heaps of them – and therefore you could cobble together a content-lite piece and no one would be the wiser, APART FROM knowing that it’s a piece of fluff.) This leads to point 2 which is ‘understand what you read’. Sometimes, understanding comes after a period of pondering and processing. Often I will finish a book, having made notes, and then later be reading something else or thinking about the book or an idea, and I’ll make connections. I think it’s these connections, lines of thought that can lead off in quite different directions but link to other works, either by the same writer or other authors, or link to ideas I’ve had, beliefs or attitudes about something, that can be revelatory and enhance understanding of the book and/or hopefully enlarge some sort of understanding about the human condition and about life.

Number 5 is interesting to me: Find more about the author and the works he or she had done. In this way, the review of one particular work can be contextualised. I think this is what is most often missing from reviews that I find lacklustre. And points 8 and 10, where plot and reader responses are summarised also to me are what seem to constitute many reviews that people do. It’s like this is all they focus on.

I know I’m being critical here about reviews but it’s one type of review that I’m thinking of: those reader reviews that are churned out and consist of a couple of paragraphs and which don’t offer any real information or response. Maybe some readers have worked out that if they do lots of reviews and have a good blog audience then publishers and authors will send them books to review. Some writers would think this too, it helps with platform. And that’s all good but when the focus is on something other than writing and publishing a quality review that is helpful to readers wanting to find good stuff to read, and to writers wanting to also find good stuff to read, as well as learning more about writing, then to me it can be a superficial and cynical business.

*

Another website I found is this one which outlines reviewing, entitled How to write a book review like a human (cheat sheet included) in which the writer gives tips on writing ‘reputable, honest and real reviews.’ Great, this is what I want, I think.

Their first instruction is: If you bought the book, show it. Yes, I think, this can be one of my rules. Then they say Attach your compliments to details. ‘Compliments are flighty things. If you don’t tie them down to examples and evidence, they’ll just fly away.’ There is a little diagram of text boxes tied to balloons. Cute. And true, I think. When you say (as I often want to) ‘I really loved this, it was beautifully written’ and if I don’t say why or how the author created the beauty, giving examples, it does just float away. Next is Don’t be afraid to be critical. I think this is where lots of blog reviewers falter; none of us want to be publicly negative about someone’s work; any of us who has written even a short story and laboured over it knows how precious a thing it is. But if the book review is going to do its job, then it has to be fair and balanced, and this doesn’t mean just saying nice things. Some people choose only to write reviews on books they enjoy. This is fine and is quite a neat way of managing this conundrum. Others are able to write fair and balanced reviews, where any criticism is delivered helpfully. Still others just are no-holds barred attacks – there are a few high-profile reviewers who do this, Michiko Kakutani of the NYT I believe is one. I recently read that there is a golden rule that reviewers don’t bag a debut book, but when I raised this with my writing group, the others pooh-poohed it saying that it wasn’t true. There is no protective force-field enjoyed by first-time authors. I also heard that a reviewer who did a bit of a hatchet-job on a debut novel has been ‘black-listed’ by certain publications; again, not sure how accurate this is. As the website above says: Helpful criticism can be great for everyone: readers get a balanced review, authors get useful advice, and you may have a hand in shaping your favourite indie author’s next work. (That last bit about the indie author is quite blech, but anyway.) I’m not sure about the next tip which is Act like you’re talking to a friend. I need to think about that, but finally, the last one: Make it a habit makes sense. Like any blog or web content, readers always want fresh meat (I know I do; there’s nothing quite like going to a favourite online reading spot and seeing the same content day after day.)

And finally, for our convenience, at the end of this post there’s a checklist/cheat sheet to get started:

• plot
• dialogue
• characters
• pacing
• description
• sentence structure
• believability
• continuity
• emotional response
• humour
• re-reading potential
• writing flow
• ease of immersion
• themes

Next: John Updike and reviewing

PS Seriously tempted to include the words ’8 Mile’ here or ‘Eminem’ because the one time I did, my stats went beserk. Oh, look at that, see what I’ve done?

Game of Thrones – Friday video

Tags

fantasy genre, Fire and Ice series, Game of Thrones, George RR Martin

While I’m getting my act together to put up some more stuff about book reviewing, please enjoy the interview below with George RR Martin, creator of the Fire and Ice series (Game of Thrones). Even if you are not a GoT watcher/reader, or ‘fantasy person’ (I’m not ordinarily but I will confess to loving this show/these books) there is still value in watching the interview below with Grace Dent for the fiction pointers. (I’m going to look up Grace Dent – how dare she be so poised and articulate and gorgeous. And where did she get her dress? And those earrings? Who is she?)

I’m going to start using his term the ‘ego-boo’* from now on. I also note that while George, by the end of the ’70s, was ‘on his way to becoming a full-time writer’ he was also on his way to becoming a full-time wearer of unusual hats. (His preferred model seems to the the ‘Train Driver Cap.’

I love the way he says about writing the first chapter of the Fire & Ice series:

it came from nowhere… the opening chapter took three days to write.

He had the images of ‘summer snows’ and of a boy and a group of medieval people, finding wolf pups and their dead mother. Once he finished that chapter, he knew what the next chapter would be about, and the one after that. Somewhere in that process of writing the first few chapters, he drew a map, knowing he had to create and name the world for this story.

And on character:

character is the heart of fiction. If you make the characters real then the rest of the furniture around them is almost incidental… for me the characters is what fiction is all about.

I love hearing this, again and again, from writers I respect. Because it’s what I feel too.

The question of sex is interesting too. I avoid sex in my writing, I think because so often when I read sex scenes in literature they are clunky and awkward. It’s hard to write good sex scenes, but really: it’s hard to write good scenes. So maybe, like reviewing, I shall endeavour to change my attitude to this as well. Because as George says:

[sex] makes us do noble things and it makes us do incredibly stupid things – leave it out and you’ve got an incomplete world.

And on violence versus sex:

I can describe an axe entering a man’s head in exquisite detail and describe the blood and brain splattering everywhere: not a peep [from readers]. But I describe a penis entering a vagina in the same detail: the world has ended

And on killing his characters:

If you’re going to write about war and death and intrigue you have to establish to your readers that you’re playing for real

* Short for ego-boost.

The art of reviewing

Tags

aspiring authors, Australian Book Review, Australian Women Writers, brooklyn heights, knee jerk reaction, macaroni cheese, Sydney Review of Books, The Writer's Room

There’s been a bit of talk around the traps lately about literary criticism, blog reviewers (or should I say bloggers who review) and readers who review. Also aspiring authors who review. I was recently asked if I would be interested in doing reviewing and my knee-jerk reaction was to say NO. There were various sentiments behind that no: I don’t know how to review properly, I don’t like reviewing books that I haven’t enjoyed or that I’ve actively been (in my head, and in my private notes) very critical of. Also, I see lots of writer and reader blogs, especially links off twitter, which are total suck jobs and/or really badly written. I also don’t want to scatter-shot my creative/writing energy towards projects that I have doubts about. I want to conserve my already limited time and juice for my fiction, my reading, my online stuff and then of course there are those little ‘extras’ aka family, paid work, friends, domestic stuff.

I’ve been thinking in the week since I knee-jerked that NO out of me, propped at a bar in funky-fash Brooklyn Heights, mulling over red wine and the best macaroni cheese with a side of perfectly-cooked broccoli.

I’ve been thinking I was too hasty to say no and that this is an opportunity for me to expand my skills and learn how to do it in the way I would like to. I’d like to learn how to write reviews a la the ones you see in a few of the best spots.* This doesn’t mean I think I can write reviews like that; this would be my aspiration though, to aim for those heights and not do piddling ones. I don’t want to write book reviews that are scathing; I don’t want to write ones that are so light-on the four paragraphs would blow off the page if you coughed on them. You know the ones where there are maybe three paragraphs of synopsis and then a line or two of what the reader made of the book, usually couched in terms of ‘it was a great read/fantastic/compelling’ with no information on why the reader enjoyed it. What did the writer do that made the book compelling? Was it plot? Were the characters especially nuanced and richly-drawn? What was the complexity of the structure and how did that work? Did the writer let some cliches slip in and how did that affect the reading? Was it an intellectual novel, did it have heart as well? Was it sentimental or did the writer keep a handle on emotion, keeping it just this side of full-blown heartbreak so that emotion is conveyed deftly and with skill.

If I can learn how to write reviews that are of a kind of learning/PD interest to other writers as well as readers, then I think that would be good. I would like to write longer pieces, reviews that are robust and meaty, and ones that are for me as a writer/reader, for an audience that is composed similarly. It would be like The Writer’s Room series of interviews**, in terms of length and depth. Not fluffy and surface-skimming. Not for commercial publication and not for the purpose of trying to ‘get in’ with the writers of the books and their publishers. One way of doing this would be to focus on books other than Australian. The community here is small and tight which is great, but it also means that you write a review on your blog, it is likely to be seen – this is a good and a bad thing. But I don’t want to exclude Australian fiction, there is great stuff going on and I love reading new Australian fiction, from both women and men. So. I will continue to ponder and muse. I’m going to start reading some how-to articles, start making a list of books I would like to review. Be considered about it. The thing is I always have responses to the books I read. I always have an opinion about everything. It’s about trying to find a form and a structure and an approach. This could even help me with my fiction.

UPDATE: I also want to include this comment thread on reviewing from Devoted Eclectic (Elizabeth Lhuede’s blog. Elizabeth founded the AWW). There are insightful comments about how people review/don’t review, how they feel about reading reviews from writers versus other readers. All good stuff.

* Sydney Review of Books; Australian Women Writers; Australian Book Review

** The Writer’s Room Interviews are seriously one of the best new things to come out of Australia recently. They are of such interest to me as a person who wants to learn.