Hi all!
I just got back from a most amazing 10-day Institute on arts criticism. Those of us who were fellows have started a blog and someone pointed out an article that I thought had a lot of interesting things to say for book critics.

The article critiques the critics: http://www.timeout.com/newyork/Details.do?page=1&xyurl=xyl://TONYWebArticles1/584/features/judgment_day.xml

Here was a quote I particularly liked:

"The books category was surprisingly vibrant: Book reviewing is the only field in which authors are evaluated by their peers, making it pathologically incestuous and laden with conflicts of interest. Not by coincidence, this category had one of the highest rates of participation in our survey."

It's also interesting to read the comments about the reviewers.

I really should put together a post. The problem is, there was so, so much packed into the 10 days.

Here's a quote, though:

"Screw completist thinking."

The critic said that a review shouldn't try to cover absolutely every detail. It makes for boring reading and keeps you from getting at the heart of what the review should be about.

He also said that there is nothing more deadly than a plot summary. If you have to mention plot, weave it into the analysis of the work.

I don't usually mind a block of plot either. But I agree that briefer is better, and beyond the basic premise of the book, details of the plot ought to be related to points you're making in the review.

It can be just as off-putting for a review to provide too little detail about the plot and characters, and only give evaluation or reviewer navel gazing.

The most important thing a review does is provide a brief evaluation of the book. But as nice as it is to have a personal touch, the review still needs to be about the book and not about the reviewer. That's a line that's crossed too often by professional reviewers. It's not that they get too personal, it's that they use the book review as a platform for their own musings.

-Andy, who's often guilty of the same thing

I have to admit, one of the things I like about writing at EPinions is that I can write more personal thoughts and musings--things I would never include in a professional review.

When I write theater reviews for the newspaper, I have only 300 words and I usually try to hit the plot of a play in a sentence or two, but I'm definitely guilty of making it a nut graf near the beginning of a review. It's one of the challenges I came home with--to find a way to weave it in more naturally.

It was also quite freeing to realize that I needed write only about what is important--that I don't have to cover absolutely everything.

In addition to the classes we had all day long, we also had writing workshops. We'd go see a show in the evening and the next day we'd have to write a review and submit it to our peers and to a professional critic/instructor from one of the major newspapers. They'd critique it and give us feedback. My group leader was a drama critic from the Los Angeles Times. Those were challenging sessions that I sometimes came out of thinking I should give up writing. The main thing I was told was that I needed to be braver and more willing to criticize.

One of the interesting things he said in response to someone else's review is that you have to "earn the I." It's OK to use first person, but you have to earn the right to do so in the context of the review. He had a really good quote that I'll have to look up in my notes and post here.

It is tough and something I need a lot more practice with. You can't NOT mention the plot, because people want to know it.

I'll quote a different session, this one by John Lahr, the senior drama critic for the New Yorker. He said the plot is not the story. The plot is "a codified experience of a fiction that allows the author to speak. So figure out what the work is really about."

He said that is where the critic and the artist come together--in discussing what the work is really about as opposed to the device of the plot.

And I can understand the feeling that you have to do that. Some of it comes from school and the need to turn in papers that were "complete." It can also come from a lack of confidence in identifying what is "important."

Now, I'll also admit that when I get going on a theme-related review, I can still write 1,000 words and still realize I hadn't mentioned the plot. Part of that is because writing about the book's (or work's) actually theme can incite passion if the book is done well (or really horribly).

I've certainly written my share of overly long reviews. But yeah, it's usually the discussion of themes that gets me running more than the plot.

And like Amy's first example, I find that effots to briefly capture the substance, meaning, or underplot (or whatever you want to call it) instead of the actual plot, can be extremely boring and ineffective. It's an easy way to delete any interest the plot may have held. We tell stories because they're stories, not because they're lectures. So we should treat them like stories, not lectures, in our reviews.

-Andy

Ideally, we also tell a story with our review. The best reviews aren't those which are most complete. In my opinion, the best reviews are those that have their own theme and tell the story of that theme in an interesting, compelling way.

Personally I've always thought (at least since I started thinking about it--after I started reading/writing on Epinions) that weaving the plot into a review as opposed to blocking it out is a much better way to go. When giving advice about writing on Epinions I'll generally suggest giving a brief plot blurb but I'll also give a caveat that the plot details aren't necessarily vital.

Generally a solid review will give a sense of what the work is like (feeling, theme, whatever) and give an opinion on the work (and support that opinion). Just from my perspective I suppose but that seems to be the essentials to me. The 'sense' can be at least partly (or even substancially) covered by a plot synopsis but doesn't have to be. The opinion doesn't necessarily have to be directly stated but that might be easier too.

Ander