#50: Write Better Fiction by Reading like a Book Reviewer

Karen Russell, Cormac McCarthy

Hello friends! My apologies for not getting out an April newsletter: I had a family emergency that had me flying back and forth across the country three times last month. Thanks for your patience while I catch back up! The good news is that there’ll be two newsletters in May: this one, and then a guest post mid-month, from an excellent writer with a new book coming out. I’m excited to share their craft essay here! Maybe it’ll be a one-off thing, maybe it’ll be something I do more of in the future. So look forward to that mid-May!

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Write Better Fiction by Reading like a Book Reviewer

This past week, I turned in what I believe will be my 40th published book review. I don’t think of myself as a book critic exactly—I’m more a fiction writer who occasionally reviews books—but I did a lot of reviewing in the earliest days of my career and I’ve been doing a lot again over the past few years. (In between I did a good number of interviews with other writers, a complementary form that requires similar prep work.) Reviewing is a part of my broader craft that I’ve enjoyed developing oveer the years, especially because I believe it usefully feeds my fiction writing too.

That said, I’m not an expert on the craft of criticism, so I don’t think I can write a treatise here on how to write a great review. But what I can do is talk about what book reviewing has done for me as a novelist, via some of the tactics I use to prep a book for review. (These tactics are very similar to how I would ready a story or a book that I’m teaching.) The practices here are always part of my “reading like a writer” toolkit, but I do them more deliberately when I’m preparing to write or speak publicly about a book, as opposed to just consuming it for my own benefit. Hopefully they’ll will be useful to you too, in your own reading and writing.

Track the First Appearance of Character Names, Places, Terms, and Plot Points

This may seem incredibly basic, but as I read, I keep a notepad (either physical or in my iPhone Notes) where I simply write down the page number where new characters are first introduced, as well as prominent new locations, worldbuilding terms, and plot revelations, like the reveal of a new clue in a murder mystery. This list alone often ends up being a pretty solid outline of the book! It also helps me see the book’s rate of revelation, which Jim Shepard describes as “the sense we have of the pace at which we’re learning crucial emotional information about the stories’ central figures.” As a writer, I sometimes think rate of revelation is the whole game: it’s what we feel as "pace,” and when it’s calibrated right the story feels like it’s humming along. Keeping track of other people’s rates of revelation has always helped me calibrate my own.

Practice Predictive Reading

One of the most useful skills to practice is what I think of as “predictive reading,” which just means stopping every few chapters and asking myself a few questions: What do you predict will come next? Where are these characters headed? Can you see foreshadowing or setups being put into place? Is there groundwork being done for thematic issues? Later, I return to my earlier predictions: Does the story fulfill or subvert the expectations it set up? Is there missing causality or motivation? What plot movements or intellectual/emotional developments could be better earned? Where were you satisfied? Where were you surprised?

Readers are ideally always doing this kind of prediction but usually not consciously. Being purposely attentive to how skillfully the writer sets up and delivers on their plot promises will help you see more and better opportunities in your own fiction. Sometimes when I don’t know what comes next in my own book, I go back and reread what I’ve written, looking for “clues” that tell me what should follow. It’s sometimes surprising how often the answer to “what next” is right there in “what has happened,” just waiting for you to notice.

Underline, Highlight, or Otherwise Mark Passages for Further Investigation

I don’t write a ton of marginalia, in part because I have terrible handwriting that I can’t always read later. (A problem that’s worsened as my eyesight becomes middle-aged: it’s wild to have to put on my glasses to see my own handwriting.) But as I read, I do underline or bracket (in physical review copies) or highlight (in PDFs or eBooks) any passage where I feel my attention rise. What I’m looking for—beyond places I’m marking just to remember people/places/plot points, as above—is anywhere I’m moved. By that I mean, where was I moved emotionally, intellectually, morally, or aesthetically? I don’t usually take the time to investigate further just then—I want to stay inside the dream of the book, if I can—but I do go back after I’m done, often copying out many of my highlighted passages into a blank document.

Sometimes this document is enough to get me writing: I start working around the passages I was most interested in and soon enough I’m discovering what I really think about the book. At the very least, I look at each of the highlighted passages and ask myself, What was it that moved me here? And, How did the writer create that movement in me?

Answering those two questions over and over has taught me more about fiction writing than almost anything else I do. So much of a writer’s style, ideas, and ethics can found in these moments, and unpacking them for myself always brings me into deeper contact with the book I’m reading and the perceived author reconstructed from the choices it contains.

Sharpen Complaints with Evidence (Which May Soften Them Instead)

Very few (possibly zero) books are perfect, and so there are always parts of a book I’m reviewing that rub me the wrong way: a plot point that feels unearned, a stylistic choice that irritates, an idea that seems false or weakly argued. Obviously, sometimes I feel I’m right with my admittedly subjective take. But I’m often surprised how when I sit down to write and begin gathering evidence to back up my critique, I instead do the opposite: the more I study the “flaw,” the more I see why the writer did what they did and what else it’s accomplishing or making possible. Novels are incredibly complicated machines, and sometimes a choice that feels “wrong” in one light is what allows some more enjoyable part of the book to shine. I also sometimes find that I was just plain wrong in my earlier assessment: I’d missed a detail or some foreshadowing that makes a plot point earned, and so it’s my fault it feels like it comes out of nowhere, not the writer’s.

The opposite happens too, of course! Sometimes I start pulling on the thread of a minor problem and the whole book unravels. It’s certainly possible for a story to have a fatal flaw or for a stylistic choice to undermine a book’s argument. I’ve learned as much from studying what I don’t like as studying what I do—but if I’m going to negatively critique a book, I try to be sure I’ve done my homework first.

When You Don’t Like a Choice, Ask Yourself Why the Writer Made It

Along the same lines, whenever I don’t like something a writer has done, I ask, Why did they make this choice? It’s pure speculation, of course, but putting myself in the writer’s shoes almost always leads to me to interesting lines of thought. I work from the assumption that the book I’m reading was written by a smart, sensitive human being, even if their literary aims don’t necessarily match mine. What can I learn from the choices they’re making that I wouldn’t?

Consider Cultural Context

Books are not written in a vacuum. In the two or three or five years it takes most of us to write and publish a novel, a lot necessarily happens in the real world. Sometimes a book comes out at the exact moment the culture is ready for it. Sometimes a book misses its moment by arriving too late or even too early. Sometimes a novel feels out of time entirely, as if it was written by a space alien who has no idea what’s happening on planet Earth. In all three cases, the environment the book was written in and the one it emerges into on pub day matter to how it’s received.

With new books, this next bit is less of an issue, but when reading even slightly older novels (or reprints of the same), it’s always worth exploring the moment the books emerged from and taking that into account. What were the big questions in the culture at that time? What were the political or social forces the book is aligned with or pushing against? What can we learn from this writer’s response to their own time and place to help guide us in how we want to respond to ours?

Look for Literary Ancestors and Influences

Cormac McCarthy famously said, “The ugly fact is books are made out of books, the novel depends for its life on the novels that have been written.” The book you’re reading almost never exists in a vacuum. Writers respond to the literary culture around them, chasing or rejecting trends in genre, subject, and style. They also frequently have surprising influences that aren’t obvious or come from completely outside the present moment. The more you read, the more of these connections you’ll see. Paradoxically, I believe the writers who have the most influences (and the most varied ones) will seem the most unique. But that doesn’t mean they got to that uniqueness on their own. Situating books into their various lineages is useful in a multitude of ways, including unearthing new veins for you to later mine for your own work.

Let Assignments Expose You to New Styles and Subjects

One of the best parts about being a book reviewer (or a student) is being assigned books you might not otherwise have read. I’m frequently assigned books I didn’t even know were coming out, often from writers I haven’t read before. It’s always good to be shaken out of my usual reading habits, or even to be exposed anew to an older writer who I haven’t read in a long time. There are so many realms to our literary world, and reviewing (and teaching) has put me in contact with more of them than I otherwise might’ve have found on my own.

Remember that Every Writer is a Human Being, Like You

When reading, it’s best to keep a little grace in your heart for the person who made the book you’re holding in your hands. Be a reader of the best faith, one who takes books on their own terms as often as possible. It’s the way you’ll want to be read, when it’s your turn. It’s also the way you want to approach your own work while you’re writing it, when it’s not yet the great story you hope it will become.

Good luck with your writing this month! More soon, friends.

What I’m Reading:

The Antidote by Karen Russell. Russell’s been one of my favorite writers from the very first story of hers to appear in The New Yorker, almost twenty years ago. I’m only about a third of my way into The Antidote, her latest novel, and I’m absolutely in love with it. A great premise, memorable characters, and so so much beautiful writing, like this perfectly compressed bit of backstory: “I sleep in my dead mother's childhood bedroom. Every morning I wake up and I don't know where I am. Then I remember and I wonder, Where is my mother? Then I remember more and I want to be dead. Then I go outside and I play basketball.” Who wouldn’t read more?

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Matt Bell’s novel Appleseed (a New York Times Notable book) was published by HarperCollins in July 2021. His craft book Refuse to Be Done, a guide to novel writing, rewriting, & revision, is out now from Soho Press. He’s also the author of the novels Scrapper and In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods, as well as the short story collection A Tree or a Person or a Wall, a non-fiction book about the classic video game Baldur’s Gate II, and several other titles. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Esquire, Tin House, Conjunctions, Fairy Tale Review, American Short Fiction, and many other publications. A native of Michigan, he teaches creative writing at Arizona State University.

His website can be found at www.mattbell.com.