Thoughts From a Book Reviewer: Part 1 – The Early Years

Some people casually read a book, watch a movie, or binge a TV show, and then move on to the next form of entertainment. Others absorb stories entirely differently. They love to break them down, analyze them, and get lost in their favorite worlds. It’s why comic cons, book discussion groups, and online fan clubs exist. These super fans can make a single story stretch in an infinite discussion about every detail, line, and action.

In the book world, these fans become reviewers. A hardcore reader-turned-reviewer absorbs a story beyond the external text on the page. And in a combination of formal training and personal taste, they find themselves able to articulate what makes a story good or bad, what works and what doesn’t and why.

I’ve been reviewing books professionally on a part-time basis off and on for the last 15 years. It started as a way to earn extra cash in college and developed into a personalized platform to promote other authors and have a place to consistently write and publish my own original material.

Whether I’m writing a piece for my blog, for another website, or just rating a casual read on Goodreads, my goal is to inspire a reader’s next read by sharing my opinion of the story. Whether they’re a casual reader or a super fan of books, I hope to give them the motivation they need to pick up a new story. In my three part series, “Thoughts From a Book Reviewer,” I’ll chronicle the stages of becoming a book reviewer, starting with the early years of learning how to analyze stories beyond the surface of the page.

The early years of story analysis

When you first start reading books in school, you read them as a class (either aloud or as homework). Then, the teacher tells you what’s going on beneath the surface of stories like Bridge to Terabithia. Critical thinking is limited. You’re really just learning the plot points you need to pass a multiple-choice test or to create a diorama of Island of the Blue Dolphins using your little sister’s Pocahontas figurines.

I remember my first high school English class when we really started to deep dive into story analysis. Every day we sat in a circle and discussed the latest chapters of The Catcher in the Rye or Animal Farm. The transition was jarring, and I was too intimidated to really speak up. Discussion participation was a crucial element of our grade. But I froze at the idea of just blurting out your thoughts and trying to come up with something deep and original to say.

At the same time, it was interesting to challenge my mind to really think about what was going on in a story beneath the surface and the larger, sometimes buried points that the author was trying to make. I never did get the hang of the discussion aspect of high school English. But I did figure out how to write A-level papers by deep diving myself.

By merely listening to the discussion and taking notes over the next four years, I learned to internally grab onto those fleeting thoughts that form the basis of an analysis as they passed by. I brought the unconsciousness into consciousness. I then transferred those thoughts into an organized paper.

Training for a career in writing

Nobody can teach you how to write a book, short story, or poem. You have to teach yourself by just doing it and draw inspiration from the books you’ve read, the mechanics you learn, and the feedback you receive.

What college teaches you to do is to workshop other people’s writing and take constructive criticism of your own writing. With practice, you, in theory, get better not only at writing but at deciding what advice to take and how to interpret criticism.

In college creative writing workshops, I now had the authors themselves sitting in front of me while I dissected their work and they dissected mine. It gave us the advantage of asking questions and sharing our theories about the deeper messages we were interpreting.

We were all amateurs sharing unpublished and unpolished pieces to a group of 10 or less. So, the pressure was off in terms of being judged by the masses.

It was also a safe space to share and receive criticism. Every professor warned us to be kind in our criticisms. Just framing a critical sentence in a nice way gets your point across without offending the author. It’s humbling to hear that your draft isn’t perfect, and it gets you in the mode of saying, “where can I improve” and “what can I leave alone.” This keeps you from thinking, “my story sucks” or “I’m a bad writer.”

These techniques translate into reviewing. They showed me how to be truthful without being ruthless in my reviews. It gave me the outline I needed to craft my review style. Also see my post, Should You Go to School For Writing?

From college papers to writing for blogs

When I was a college student in the early 2000’s, I decided to spend my summers writing. I also wanted to get paid to write. So, I found some blogs that paid for content. Aside from writing news blogs, I found a site where you could request books, movies, and other media to review.

Here, I was able to write my first book reviews and get paid to do it. There was no direction. I just wrote like the college student that I was, and I gained a lot of experience as a result.

More to come in “Thoughts From a Book Reviewer: Part 2 – Reviewing Professionally.”

What early training helped you to learn how to write a review? How did you first utilize that training? Leave your answers in the comments below!

Buy it!

Buy a copy of Island of the Blue Dolphins as referenced above here, and help support local bookstores! This is an affiliate link, and I will earn a commission on any sales.

Pin it!