The First Bad Review (gulp)

Yeah, so I knew it was bound to happen. A bad review. As far as bad reviews go, it wasn't even that bad. More meh-ish, really. I only read the first paragraph, took in the two star out of five star rating, and then handed it to my husband to read the rest.

He was adorably defensive on my behalf, pointing out how ridiculous it was and wrong, etc. I nodded along, and weirdly, defended the reviewer. Oh well, I said. She read the whole thing, right? And she took the time to think and process her reaction. Her review--um, the paragraph I read of it--was thoughtful.

The rest of the day, I'd click on my Goodreads account (this is where the review went up) and, yup, it was still there, the two star review. I kept waiting to feel something. Anger. Depression. Annoyance. But nope. What I actually felt was more like relief. I got my first bad review, and apparently, I'm going to be okay.

Not all writers have the same reaction. I've heard that some argue back to the reviewer, a faux pas in my opinion, but then I've had good training taking criticism.

This goes back to college when I was a creative writing major and we had these marathon workshop sessions where we tore each other's work apart. Our professor jumped in here and there when things got a little too personal, but for the most part he let us go. The poem, the story--the writing--speaks for itself, he told us. What you meant to imply was either there on the page or it wasn't, and hearing readers articulate their responses was something a writer was just going to have to deal with.

Use it as fuel to work harder, ignore the critic, or call him a dingbat in your head, but never EVER argue back.

I grew an even thicker skin when I began submitting my work. Here's a cool perk of being a publishing late bloomer: you get LOTS of practice absorbing criticism. I have a wonderfully bulging file of rejection letters from agents and editors that spans over 20 years. They range from bland form letters to very personal and specific signed handwritten notes. Some of the phrasing sticks in my head even now.

Fun sampling:
"full of authorial mistakes"
"depressing"
"unbelievable characters"
"no teen appeal"

The nice thing about rejections is that once you absorb the blow, you really can use them to make your writing better.

Negative reviews, unfortunately, can't be used that way. The book is as finished as a book can be.

Even when a book is in ARC form, there's not much that can be fixed, aside from formatting issues or typos. True story: when I did my final pass through Thin Space, my editor pointed out that I'd used the word "clench" 33 times. So, yeah. Gotta nice clench in my stomach upon hearing that. And then, clenching a thesaurus in my clenched hand, I opened the manuscript back up and got rid of 30 of those clenches.

Reviews aren't for authors. Reviews are for readers.

As a reader, I read reviews to help in my decision-making process. A million+ potential books to read-- which one should I pick up next? Or maybe I've just finished reading a book and am grappling with what I thought about it--something didn't quite work for me or I wasn't connecting with the story. I read a few reviews and find that other readers felt the same way. Or not.

There's a whole community of readers out there weighing in and digesting and mocking and passionately loving books, and they're talking and sharing and complaining and defending.

The writer truly plays no role in this equation except possibly to lean in now and then and marvel that a book she wrote is now being passed around in the world. Hated. Loved. Thrown across the room in disgust.

Or cherished so much it is read, again. And again.

Why I Won't Write a Bad Review

Someone asked me the other day if I LOVE every book I read. They noticed that all of the book reviews I do are so gushingly positive. Yes, that’s true. But what I haven’t been mentioning is that for every book I blog about, there are a good four or five others that I don’t review. I read a lot of books. And sadly, most of what I read isn’t that great. These unreviewed books seem to fall into two categories, each kind of depressing to me as an aspiring writer.

1. Simply bad. These are the ones that I question how in the world they ever got published. They’re over-written and/or poorly written. The characters are stereotypical, cardboard cutouts. The plots are plots I’ve seen before. Predictable. Boring. The English major in me has an extremely hard time closing a book without finishing it. But this year I have done that several times, ignoring the accompanying twinges of guilt.

2. Decent but “meh.” Somehow these books depress me even more than the badly written ones. There’s nothing wrong with them. They just lack something. Heart, maybe. I heard an editor talk about this once at a conference. She said she could work with an author who had issues with plot or characterization or even grammatical problems. But if the “heart” wasn’t in the book, there was nothing she could do to save it. Heart is one of those elements that’s hard to explain, but you know it when you feel it. A character’s voice that immediately resonates with you. Maybe the story meanders or nothing much happens but somehow you want to keep reading anyway. Finish a book like that and it’s still tugging at you. Meh books disappear the second you put them down. I feel sad about those books. Somebody worked on them. Somebody loved them. And yet my only reaction in the end is: Yeah. Whatever.

I used to review books for a regional magazine. The editor made it clear that my job was to promote authors from that region. This meant no bad reviews. If I truly didn’t like the book, he said, I could simply write up a summary of it. That was fine with me. Until I came to a book that was so terrible I could barely plow through it. I don’t want to get into a big discussion here about self-published books, but this one took the stereotypical self-published prize. I read the whole damn thing out of some sense of obligation. (The magazine didn’t pay me for writing reviews. The payment was a copy of the book.) I tried to write up a summary. I really did. But every sentence veered into snarky territory and then I started worrying about my name being on top of that review. What if someone bought the book because of me? I just couldn’t go through with it.

When the owner of the children’s bookstore Cover to Cover asked me to review advanced copies of young adult books for her, remembering that previous experience, I made the deal that I would send her a short review of every book she gave me but only blog about the ones I really liked. I have nothing against literary critics. I appreciate their analyses of books—both the positive and negative. You’re not going to get better if you don’t have someone pointing out areas of weakness or plot holes or whatever. But being a writer, I understand what goes into creating a book, and I’m not going to spend my time or energy crafting a negative response to someone’s precious manuscript, no matter how crappy I think it is.

So for whatever it’s worth, if I review a book on this site, you can rest assured that it’s pretty darned good. (just my opinion, of course) I’m not getting paid. I don’t know any of the writers. And I have no reason to plug them. Except that something about the book stood out to me and I hope it might appeal to you as well.

Bad Books

Lately I am on a bad book reading roll. In my younger more vulnerable years I felt obligated to finish every book I started. I made it to my college graduation having put down only one book, Clarissa by Samuel Richardson. In case you’re curious, Clarissa is what they call an epistolary novel, meaning it’s written entirely in letters. From what I can remember, Clarissa is kidnapped? And her morals are compromised? I guess, she’s date-raped? I don’t know. I stopped reading when I got to Clarissa’s letter where this horrifying moment supposedly occurred. This is how boring the book was: I had to be told by my professor what happened. (I ended up writing my final paper about the other 18th century novels on the class list. Strangely, I don’t remember what those books were. All I remember is that I didn’t read the second half of Clarissa. And truth be told, I felt guilty for years about quitting this book. But apparently not guilty enough to go back and finish it.)

Well, I am here to say that I vow never to feel guilty again.

The past few weeks I’ve given up on several bad books. Some I have literally thrown across the room in disgust. I’ve also plowed through a few borderline bad ones out of sheer morbid curiosity, wondering if they could get any better and feeling despair when they didn’t. I should’ve quit on those too. It’s depressing and terrifying to me (as a would-be writer) that there are so many ways a book can go bad. I heard an editor say once that in order for her to want to publish a book, she has to LOVE it. This stands to reason because she will likely read a manuscript at least a half dozen times (or I suppose, more) before the book is out in the stores. If she’s not head over heels nuts about it at the first reading, why bother?

So when I read a few pages into what’s turning into a bad book, my first thought is: Who the heck LOVED this?

I used to be in a book club with a bunch of writers. They were merciless in their criticism, picking apart things in a book that I hadn’t even noticed. They didn’t seem to enjoy many books, which I thought was a shame. I think of myself as a reader first. Every time I pick up a book I want it to be good. I’m looking for reasons to like it. So I can forgive a lot of things.

Take bad writing. I just put a book down that had the writing maturity level of a Scooby Doo episode. Pretend example: “Thanks so much,” she said, thankfully. There were whole paragraphs devoted to meals eaten, lists of descriptive features of an airplane, and cataloguing of the contents of a bedroom closet. In two paragraphs the author used the word “creamy” three times. Okay. Not good. But I can forgive bad writing if the book is a page-turner. Not to go off on a Twilight tangent, but I liked that series because I couldn’t put it down. I’d never knock that writer because she did something that few writers can do, she hooked the reader (well, millions and millions of readers) from the first page. I don’t know how you do this exactly. Believe me, I wish I did.

“Bad” characters. No matter how cool or interesting or original a plot is, if I don’t care about the main character, then I have a hard time reading on. This doesn’t mean the main character has to be good or even 100 percent likable, but she/he has to have some quality that makes me care. Case in point: I recently quit on a book that had dozens of characters thrown into a potentially tense plot, but I had no reason to turn the pages. I didn’t care about any of them (and there were too many) so I didn’t care what happened.

Forced/overly-planned/false premise. I don’t know if I’ve just read too much, but lately I’m seeing retreads of retreads. Knock-offs of knock-offs. For the love of God, why are there so many books with a girl main character torn between two handsome tortured boys? (Okay, I know the answer: Twilight) But I keep reading this love triangle over and over and I have to wonder: is THIS a real issue for most girls? For ANY girls? Sadly, I never faced this dilemma when I was a teen. Maybe I missed out on that very common problem of two gorgeous boys fighting each other over me. Sigh. At least authors can mix this cliché up a little. A boy with two girls? (okay, no girl wants to read about that) A girl with THREE boys? How about just a girl and a boy who’s more than a one-dimensional tortured stalker with pale skin and a chiseled chest?

Here’s another thing I’m seeing a lot: absurdist, over the top, satirical stories in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy/Monty Python category. Usually a group of one- dimensional characters are caught up in some ridiculous situation. For this to work, at the very least the book has to be funny. But I’ve read several of these books lately that just make me roll my eyes.

And a note to publishers: please stop publishing books about vampires and fallen angels. Also, tread carefully around post-apocalyptic novels. I'm despairing enough about the precarious state of our world.

Okay. I’m getting off my soapbox. Here’s my new philosophy of reading: No more suffering through crappy books. There are too many good books out there and my time, damn it, is precious.

(Here are a few of my favorite books just to remind myself that there is lots of good writing out there:
1. Anything by John Green but especially An Abundance of Katherines. Funny and brilliant and real
2. Anything by Laurie Halse Anderson. The last one I read was called Prom. Don’t judge this book by its cover. Rare book that features working class kids and doesn’t pity/judge them.
3. Anything by Sara Zarr. Best: Sweethearts. Makes me wish there was real YA literature when I was a teen and yearned to know I wasn’t alone.

If anyone has another good title/author to share, I would love to hear it. Please!