Try telling a roomful of ardent book lovers that they’re writing reviews all wrong. I’d never given a presentation – ever – yet I had to wean my favorite kidlit bloggers from thinking that reviewing is all about their opinions.
It isn’t. Nor is it necessarily even about individual authors or books.
No, it's about what former Los Angeles Times book review editor Steve Wasserman called "a cultural conversation of critical importance."
I took it to mean that no book exists in a vacuum. It’s part of a genre or it breaks from it; it’s typical of the author’s work or it’s a departure; it’s of the moment or reminiscent of another era. It has its hyper-specific niche or is part of a movement. There’s always a larger something or other to say about it, and a reviewer’s job is to pin that something, as nebulous and slippery as a jellyfish, to the wall.
I decided to wallop the kidlitosphere with the particulars of this “cultural conversation” at a first-ever conference in early October. Librarians, booksellers, authors and the similarly obsessed emerged from their virtual worlds into the real one for one day in a conference room at a Radisson hotel in Chicago, the tables arranged so we all faced one another, who’d been avoiding the light of day like those tube worms at the ocean’s bottom, pale and shy and blinking uncertainly.
When my turn came, I scrambled beneath my table to the center well and faced the writers I admired enough to reprimand.
The review genre
Of course, all these people are ridiculously nice or they'd be blogging about politics or law or other grouchy topics. So I had nothing to fear, right? Except that I was there to tell them that the fun can't go on forever. That to write at a professional level means understanding that reviewing is a genre, with its own tropes and quirks and readers' implicit expectations.
Function follows form in reviewing, and I’ve adopted the mission of teaching those forms to whoever will sit still long enough. It's anathema even to nice bloggers, however, who are accustomed to the freewheeling, unedited, unexpurgated Express Yourself theme park that’s become the blogosphere. It’s tough to be told there are forms to follow, and they make sense, and the wheel doesn't need constant reinventing.
Plus, there was no getting around the fact that my 12-page handout did not fit neatly into the allotted 50 minutes, after I had prepared for a 90-minute workshop.
I raced through the material and there were many salient points that I had to skim or drop altogether. People were slow to get started, perhaps lulled by the easygoing nature of other presentations. Mine was high key, and I think many were startled at the size of the handout and the announcement that there would an editing exercise.
Where we are now
I began with an overview of the print vs. blog reviewers animosity. I stated flatly that print reviewers are gatekeepers, with an impulse to keep the barbarian hordes (that’s us) at bay out of self-preservation.
And one look around the book blogging world does indeed reveal a gap in skills, to put it gently. But the gates to the castle are easily opened; by knowing what a good, meaty book review looks like, you can join that cultural conversation Mr. Wasserman asserts in his excellent, if somewhat bitter personal essay on the subject of reviewing.
Everything else, to me, is book chatter – also valuable, of course, but it doesn't employ the same analytical thinking or provide the same depth of insight.
Forms vs. Formulas
Before I could launch into the forms of book reviewing, I reminded people that forms aren't formulas. I used a shopping analogy (payback for all those overused sports analogies – I'm not much of a "team player" and I never "hit one out of the park"):
This isn't like going into a department store looking for size-12 sportswear and all you find are size-8 cocktail dresses. This isn't about one-size fits all.
Switching metaphors (you can do this when you're talking a mile a minute), I said imagine the structured review as a dinner plate. Just because everyone uses a dinner plate doesn't mean we're all eating the same meal. What you prepare and how you present it are entirely your own.
Having an Ideal Reader
I spent only a brief time asking bloggers to consider not just readers who routinely visit their blogs, since writing for this immediate circle eventually becomes limiting and self-referential.
You unwittingly erect your own gates, admitting only those who "get" you and your stylistic quirks. To reach a broader audience, you have to imagine who they should be.
I never imagined that Book Buds would draw so many librarians, and while I love every one of them, my ideal reader is still the lost parent in the bookstore, afraid to venture beyond what they loved from their own childhoods into the wilderness of all those new titles. I always write for that parent, imagining him or her anew each time.
The Three Forms of Book Reviewing
I taught that book reviewing – or really, any kind of reviewing – breaks down into three forms based on length: capsule reviews, mid-length or daily reviews (so called because they appear in the daily sections of newspapers instead of Sunday) and long-form essays topped by a billboard (explanation below).
We spent the most time on capsule reviews, because we find it most often on blogs and it offers the easiest opportunities for freelancing. It's also a pain to get it right, and therefore the most flagrantly abused.
My advice: write tight, eschew too much plot rehash, have a distinct perspective, be authoritative.
I had people edit a short, highly critical review of a Hanukkah book that had been sent to me by a writer looking for editing advice. I was surprised when many people (authors all) stalled on the idea that the writer would even bother with a negative review.
Many authors simply couldn't emotionally grapple with the reality of negative book reviews, of their being a vital part of that "cultural conversation."
Daily Reviews
We moved on to the dailies, which I insisted must have two characteristics: thematic consistency and brisk writing.
My advice:
Simply listing all your likes and dislikes doesn't make for a review, even if you think you're being thorough. Especially if you think you're being thorough!
Ruminate on the book as deeply as time allows. Where does it fit in its genre? Or into the author's body of work? Or in pop culture? If there's one notion in your head that shines brighter, there's your theme, which acts as a thread to pull readers through to the end.
Organize all your quotes, plot details and exposition around that ONE theme. That's all there's room to do in a daily. As with capsule reviews, keep plot rehash to a minimum. Weave in only those details that make sense for the theme you've chosen. If there are plot details that MUST be included that DON'T fit your theme, you may have the wrong theme.
The long form
The long-form essay deals not necessarily with one particular book -- unless it's a seminal work -- but with a writer's career, or a trend or movement in literature, or it paints some much larger picture than is possible in the 500-800 words usually reserved for dailies.
I didn't get to say this, but the long form can go very long -- up to 25,000 words or so, after which it's time to get a book contract!
To keep it manageable, the long form features what's known as a "billboard," basically a signal of what's to come. Its two characteristics are the anecdotal lead of 1 or 2 extremely large paragraphs or 3-6 shorter paragraphs, plus what's called the "nut" paragraphs because they contain the kernel of your arguments.
The opening anecdote -- often but not always drawn from the subject's life -- ends in an "aha" moment when the reader finally learns why he or she's reading this.
That's when biography stops and the hard work of laying out your themes begins. A longer piece needs more than one theme, and EVERY SENTENCE in the nut graphs lays out a different theme, each subsequent sentence building on the one before.
I used an excerpt from a recent piece on Jack Kerouac (his "On the Road" turns 60 soon) and quickly pointed out where we shifted into "nut" mode and labeled the anecdote as "A" followed by themes B, C, D and even E.
Throughout the piece -- indeed, every long piece -- writers will wheel through ABCDE (or however many letters) again and again. To put all the plot rehash or anecdotes or quotes (the "A" stuff) together would make little sense except as a book report; to put all paragraphs on theme B or theme C, etc., together gets wearisome. People like patterns and the mind absorbs them without effort.
If, each time you dip into the well for "A" matter, you then work it through each theme, you create a circular movement that propels readers along, always coming back to A again, and so forth. You build momentum.
(This is tough to explain without showing, but if you want to peek in at Book Forum, any Sunday book review section or the New York Review of Books, you'll find plenty of examples to dissect this way.)
Reactions
The reaction? Most people were gracious and approving. A few were shell-shocked at having to do actual thinking. But that’s exactly my point; jotting down newsy tidbits gleaned from press releases or rounding up links doesn’t require critical analysis. Dashing off comments isn’t a conversation. A thumbs-up, thumbs-down cursory reaction isn’t a review.
All those factoids and quips serve their purpose, but if we’re going to bury beleaguered book review sections, unwittingly or no, we ought not replace them solely with the printed version of a five-minute quickie. Just as a book still requires some luxuriating, even in our haste-addicted society, a sustained argument in a long essay is still a slow, deliberate seduction that engages the senses, lingers in the memory, and satisfies the spirit.
http://www.forewordmagazine.com/blogs/shelfspace/CategoryView,category,Reviewing.aspx#ae03c07dd-c286-40df-97f3-02d53e65f417
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