It Was the Best, It was the Worst

 

Terry here talking about reviews: my favorite positive review, and worst negative review, and how they made me feel.

I’ve had so many reviews that I enjoyed, that it’s hard to choose one. But my favorite is still one of the first I got, for A Killing at Cotton Hill, courtesy of Lee Lofland, founder of the Writers Police Academy. He said he rarely reviewed books, but landed on mine. He praised it effusively, and said although he could usually tell when a woman was writing as a man, in my book he had no idea. Nice. But the line he wrote that I cherish is, “There’s not one wasted word.” 

 My goal is always to write in spare prose. I edit again and again to pare it down and make every line count. I read a great many books, not exclusively mysteries, and I’m often struck by how much padding a book has. It’s as if the author didn’t have enough words to fill out his or her contractual obligation and “fluffed it up.”

Sometimes repetition is necessary: 

 -- to be sure the reader hasn’t forgotten a salient point. 

 --to illustrate a character who bloviates. 

 --to bring together elements of a story that might otherwise be confusing. 

 But... 

...when a character screams and cries repeatedly, there’s no need to belabor the point, as happened in one book I recently read. I got it, I got it. She screamed

and cried. Again and again until I was numb. And stopped reading the book. 

...when the landscape is harsh and unrelenting, I get it, you don’t have to tell me twenty times. 

...when a detective is a drunk, I don’t have to see repeated instances of him or her over-indulging. 

Pare it down! 

 I do like to read poetic prose. I recently read one that I kept having to go back and reread sentences that fairly sang. And poetic prose can be well…prosaic. Wordy. But if it’s beautiful use of language, extra words are fine. Otherwise, cut! 

 As for negative reviews, I’ve only gotten one that was truly negative. I’m not counting the one where they person said the book was slow. Yeah, my Samuel Craddock books are not action thrillers. And then you hear about reviewers complaining that a book came all torn up, or was delivered late, or some such nonsense that is out of the hands of the author. Those are to be ignored. And I actually got one that said the reviewer had to compare my mystery book with all fiction, including authors like Jane Austen, so she had to give it a 3. I’ll take it! 

 But I actually didn’t stumble across the negative review of my fourth book by a well-known reviewer until a couple of years after the review came out. I was talking to a friend and said I hadn’t gotten much in the way of negative reviews and he told me about this one. I looked it up and saw that the reviewer said words to the effect that I must have been laughing at my readers, that the book was preposterous and he ended up throwing it across the room. He didn’t fault the writing, just the content.

 My true response? I burst out laughing! The book was about a woman who had been humiliated and abused by her brother when she was a teenager. I suspect the reviewer didn’t like it because he hasn’t known a woman to whom such a thing happened. I got plenty of reviews from women who “got it.” 

And how did I feel? I felt as if I had finally “made it” as an author. Bad reviews are part of the process, and I had gotten so few that it made me feel nervous. What would a truly bad review say? That my writing was crap?That my characters were stupid and my dialogue stilted and my descriptions flat? That it was boring?

The bad review said none of that. He just didn’t like the story. Finally, I had arrived as an author who got a visceral response from a reader. When we write, we always hope to get a positive visceral response, but a negative one is just as valid. It means the book evoked an emotion. And it doesn't get any better than that.