Tag Archives: novels

Why Review Books? A Personal History

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Why review books? What’s the point? To what useful end is one reader’s take on someone else’s art beyond her own delight, neutrality, or regret for having engaged?

One might return a question: why review ANYTHING? Opinions, everybody’s got ‘em, right? So.

So. Memory . . .  

In the 80’s and 90’s, my brother and I rocked the summer reading club scene at both libraries we frequented. That’s right, we competed in reading against other, unseen children, jockeying for the coveted position of Most Books Read. My brother and I weren’t opponents –these races were more like track and field where one challenges his history: his past record, his younger self.

At summer’s end, we’d conclude with fistfuls of Pizza Hut personal pan pizza coupons and, for me at least, zero memory of what I’d read beyond titles listed on a colorful sheet of paper, forgotten ever more deeply as summer’s expansiveness compressed into rigidly structured fall.

Learning . . .

My brother has four years on me and, other than a few shared Spider-Man and Garfield comics, a Robotech novel or two, we didn’t have many cross-over reading interests. Despite this, I hold dear titles that I myself never read, such as Dear Mr. Henshaw by Beverly Cleary and From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E.L. Konigsburg. The book reports he wrote for school were as amazing and sophisticated sounding to me as what he was reading. I felt eager to compose my own reports–craft construction paper covers, hand-letter the titles, staple along the edges, and present proudly to a teacher one neat bundle.

Sadly, my schooling was not his; I didn’t score any grade school teachers who assigned book reports. By the time I was invited to commune with literature, I was in high school where the culture was less about connecting with written words and more about strategizing to achieve A’s. I loved and identified with novels and poetry but still removed myself from an Honor’s English class because I didn’t care to compete and had a growing dislike of lit-tret-ture.

Memory . . .

I have a micro-myth, goes like this: I was reading The Hero and the Crown by Robin McKinley, so into it, awww YEAH! This book is GREAT, this book is fantastic. Nearing the final pages, situations started to feel a tad . . . familiar, and then really familiar, and then. Oh, no. I’ve already read this book. I KNOW HOW IT ENDS. 🙁 🙁 🙁

Thus, I started keeping reading journals in high school, hardbound books usually gifted to me by my brother. Curiously, the practice failed to save me from accidentally reading The Hero and the Crown a third time (consistent, that kid), but it did help cement the awareness that I shouldn’t attempt to keep everything in my head. I quickly devised my own rating system consisting of smiley faces and frown-y faces and wavy lines. The journals doubled as a study of the writing field and I recorded authors, illustrators, publishing houses and imprints, and award-winners.

Learning . . .

The result of eight-straight-years of writing instruction in high school and college is that I’ve learned systems and strategies for analyzing the narrative arts. I peek behind and betwixt typeset words for clues about work and writer both. The why of it: to read deeper, write better, understand our lives and our world(s) in the moment of the narrative, and then again and again with each unique book-poem-play, even as those books-poems-(comics!)-plays sometimes meld together into a mash of ideas. They soak through, get integrated and because of my . . .

. . . Memory, or lack thereof, I review books and STILL forget them. Alternately, there are poems I’ve heard just once that stick with me. It’s unpredictable. It’s delicious.

When the Internet arrived (for me) in college, so too arrived ingenious applications like Goodreads. At current count, I’ve posted approximately 400 reviews. Sure, one such review (for Microcrafts: Tiny Treasures to Make and Share by Margaret McGuire) is a simple exclamation: “So cute! So tiny!” but that’s an honest reaction, yeah? It’s me talking back to the writer/artist as much as my six-paragraph rant about Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. Sometimes other Goodreads users click the thumbs-up button, declaring their affinity with my analysis and I get a nice energy boost.

Aaaand learning . . .

As my world has expanded via the 0’s and 1’s, I’ve grown more careful with the reviews I pen. Words on a website are not the same as ideas on paper, bound by twin case covers, sitting on my shelf at home. I’m aware that the authors I watch from afar may one day be close-up peers. Taking care is a must. After all, care is the reason I’ve engaged, why I’m talking back to a writer or artist, explaining: this is how you reached me. See? Here’s how I’ve changed.

-Phoebe Sinclair, 2018 WROB Ivan Gold Fellow

 

Writers’ Math

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Some writer’s math:

The protagonist of my novel manuscript, Jonas Adams Abraham, is 12 going on 13. The manuscript itself is 12. When I started writing Jonas’s story, I was 26.

Liaa, the 15-year-old protagonist of a manuscript I put to bed in order to focus on a potentially more commercially viable book (see above) can be counted, in effort-years, as 7. I conceived of the novel while I was an undergrad at Emerson College, probably age 19.

A short graphic story featuring a 11-year-old (and later her 15 and 17-year-old selves) is approximately 7 years into endless-tiny-revisions. 3 or 4 years younger than Jonas in terms of sequence, the script represents hours rather than years of effort.

Other writing has similarly aged, as I have aged, moving further and further from our society’s specter of the overnight (and enviably young) author-sensation. As I stretch into my fourth decade of being an animal on this beautiful, awful, bizarre, heart-breaking planet, my gift of experience and dreams for what-might-be enter with me.

Together we are growing up.

[/end math!]

I attended a lecture by Pulitzer Prize winning author Junot Diaz where he described himself as a slow writer. In my memory of his self-depreciating story, Junot painted his peers as writing circles around him —his works requiring long years of incubation while theirs stacked like shiny red apples at a city grocer. It was the first time I’d heard a published author describe this phenomenon and the truth hit me with a spine-straightening zap of static electricity. I took notice.

I tried that idea on: slow writer.

Some pondering:

Slow writing. Manuscripts that catch up to and then out-age the characters who roam their pages. Words with enough history to manifest their own internal humor—self-referencing for the benefit of no one in particular (beyond the author.)

What does it mean to be slow now, when fast is culturally mandated? I pose this question while typing on a tiny, high speed iPod keypad, this mini computer that I slip into my pocket as I zip across a major city in our nation of nations —where many cultures move together at different paces, generally not peaceably.

I write this understanding that time is a construct by which my body must abide. But time doesn’t truly exist in my manuscripts. And the manuscripts exist without relation to time. They are or they are not. On my good days, I do not blame my works for being what they are. I can neither stop them nor speed them up. Nothing I do has much impact except for my resolve to arrive again and again, twirling time fluffily onto a white paper cone, or maybe creating an elastic loop as I build on ideas and cultivate the gifts of my characters’ laughter and heartbreak, their triumphs, mistakes, and revelations.

It seems this could go on forever, but it won’t because I cannot. My physical self is limited in a way art will never be. Really, which one of us is slow? Which of us just is?

[/end pondering!]

Pretty words, huh? Existential thoughts even as I, in the more practical sense, park my butt on a chair, or stand leaning over a laptop, and plant a hand on the keyboard, typing in that curious one-handed way I do where the craft spools out —my right hand magically comporting itself through the middle-school-taught positions, keyboard-left and keyboard-right, without having to peek. Slow going. Real slow.

Real and slow.

-Phoebe Sinclair, 2018 WROB Ivan Gold Fellow

The Gap

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I’ll always remember when I sent my first query letters. It was two Winter Olympics ago, Vancouver 2010 – I distracted myself from my inbox by watching Johnny Weir and Evgeni Plushenko, and watched my first rejections roll in a few minutes before alpine skiing.

(I took a shot of vodka for each rejection. I realized a couple of weeks later that 1 shot per rejection was quickly becoming unrealistic.)

It was my third manuscript, but the first one I deigned may be good enough to take that next step. I got five requests for more material out of 79 queries. The first full manuscript rejection was maybe one of the kindest I’ve ever gotten to this day, the first time an industry professional ever called me ‘talented.’ And I remember how excited I was that I’d worked hard enough to trick someone into using the t-word.

Because I was, by this point, painfully aware of the gap that existed between the story in my head and the story I was putting down. I knew I wasn’t naturally talented, but I was going to make it up by wanting this more than anyone else, and hopefully that would be enough.

Eight years later, I sent another round of queries. This was my seventh manuscript. My last agent search had taken three years.

This time, it took three weeks. Responses came fast. Rejections still came faster, but form rejections were few and far-between – they were personal, they were complimentary, and the t-word was used over and over again. It was incredible. It was like all of my most self-indulgent daydreams rolled into a one-month period.

And it was weird as hell. I’d spent so much of my career feeling like I needed to catch up, and suddenly, like a switch had flipped, people were treating me like I was there already. I still kind of felt like I was tricking people. But it occurred to me, an entire eight years after that first rejection, that the people reading it couldn’t tell what was natural talent and what was hard work. On the page, it looks the same.

Progress isn’t always a thing you can track, especially not when you’re so close to it. But sometimes after a particularly good session, when I look at the scene in my head and the scene I just typed, I don’t feel the shortfall quite so keenly. Sometimes it even feels close.

Now, I’m watching a new set of figure skaters and alpine skiers dominate the Olympics. I’m working through an edit letter I’m thrilled about. And I’m catching up to the story in my head, bit by bit. I’m not watching my inbox, not yet. That comes, with any luck, later this spring.
I haven’t completely bridged the gap yet. But now I’m not sure anyone ever does.

That is, however, what revisions are for.

It’s been such a pleasure contributing to this blog over the past year. Congratulations to our new 2018-19 fellows, and happy writing!
-Rebecca Mahoney, 2017 WROB Fellow