No, this is not a whine about my beta readers taking my latest work apart (though we will discuss something like that in a bit.). Instead, it’s about the realization that there are fewer and fewer places to read criticism of books, especially genre novels. Given the AI sludge in movies and Amazon taking money to put AI generated “books” on the home page of Kindles, the lack of criticism seems to me to be a real loss.
The thought has been bouncing around at the periphery of my attention for a while but a Parker Molloy interview with a book critic starting their own newsletter crystalized the issue for me. The critic, Maris Kreizman, points out that no one seems to be paying for criticism:
And I began to realize that I loved writing as much as editing. So I do some book criticism and some TV criticism and I started freelancing. And I started my podcast for Lit Hub because I was getting frustrated that I couldn't pitch conversations or profiles with authors anymore at most publications now that aren't paying that much attention to books.
There really isn’t much literature criticism, even at the review level, especially in genre fiction. Vulture’s book section is mostly personality driven or organization stories. Tor.com doesn’t do much in the way of reviews. New Yorker still doses deep criticism, but it seems to be an outlier. The NyTimes and Washington Post don’t do as much, it seems to me, as they used to. It may be rose-colored glasses, but I before social media ate the internet, there seemed to be a lot more reviews. Blogs, newspapers, and magazines really do seem to have either faded away or seriously decreased their coverage of books. Big releases get attention, but most others don’t.
I miss those days. One of the joys of reading is discovery, and without people willing to talk about books, discovery is harder than it otherwise be. It diminishes reader’s ability to enjoy literature (you cannot enjoy something you cannot find) and writer’s ability to reach audiences, especially midlist or new authors. I hope Maris Kreizman succeeds, because there are just not enough sources of good reviews and criticism available.
Crap. Now that I have whined about it, I have to review more books, don’t I?
Weekly Word Count
I finished the script — about 40 pages. It came in at 93 pages total. I had it read by my beta group (an actual table read, which was very cool) and the consensus seemed to be that it was funnier than I thought people would see it and that it was too wordy. The last is understandable given that this is a first draft, and the first script I have ever written. The comments about it being funny were surprising. I am a sarcastic writer and I often drop in things that amuse me when I write, but I hadn’t really thought others would find it actually funny.
Though, to be fair, one of the characters I imagined as David Suchet’s Poirot, but stab-ier, so it’s not the most serious of works.
I was told it was worth continuing to work on. The consensus was to either pare it back and shoot for a stage play or go much larger and shoot for a short TV series. Neither, of course, are realistic, but both are a fun way to continue to explore scripts.
I enjoyed writing it a great deal. It is a very different way to tell stories as compared to a novel, but it was a fun way to stretch my imagination and writing skills. I recommend doing something like that. If you write scripts, try some prose stories. If you write novels, try turning one into a script. The changes in the format will force you, or at least that is what happened for me, to learn different ways of telling a story. It’ll likely be fun, and likely expand your toolkit.