What ARE books on writing?

My views on what constitutes a book on writing are fairly catholic. Indeed, it would me more accurate to denote the books I review as books for writers, rather than books on writing. The latter tend to have titles like “How to write fiction”, or “How to write magazine articles”. However, in my opinion any book about any subject can potentially be a book for writers, depending on the context and circumstances.

For example, I am currently reading some graphic novels, and books about graphic novels. I don’t intend to write a graphic novel myself, but I do tend to illustrate my articles with my own photos and drawings whenever possible. My abilities in both areas are somewhat limited. Nevertheless, looking at how a different kind of author achieves an effect, whether in the words or the pictures, can be very educational.

Similarly, I sometimes review novels. I have no ambitions to write a novel myself, but again the process of close reading is useful. I read a sentence, think to myself what a great sentence that is, and then go back and try to work out why: what did the writer do there to make me laugh, or feel sad, or whatever?

What’s the purpose of the review?

Still, I think it’s useful to draw a distinction between reviewing fiction and nonfiction books because the reasons for doing so are different. It would be dishonest of me to write, for instance, that the novel “Slovenly Scoundrels” (a title I just made up, by the way) is useless because a would-be novelist will learn nothing from it. Why? Because the author wrote the story as a cracking good yarn to read on the train, not as a manual for writers.

In other words, when reviewing a book, a key consideration has to be: what were the author’s intentions in writing it. You have to judge a book on its own merits — although I will qualify that statement in a moment.

The process of reviewing

I tend to go through the following steps:

Thinking

1. What am I expecting to find in the book?

2. What is the problem it sets out to answer?

3. What initial questions do I have?

Reading the paratext (or some of it)

1. What does the inside flap or the back cover say about the book’s contents?

2. What does the book cover according to the table of contents?

3. Does the book have a good index?

4. Does it have a references section?

5. Is there a bibliography?

6. Is the author qualified to write this book? (For an example where this wasn’t the case as far as I knew, I came across a book about self-publishing — published by a mainstream publishing house. That didn’t strike me as a huge vote of confidence on the author’s part!)

Reading the introductions and conclusions of the whole book, and then of each chapter

This is a good way of quickly getting an overview of the book. At this stage I can start to refine and add to the questions I formulated in the “Thinking” stage.

Note taking

I tend to take notes as I’m working my way through the book. Not detailed notes, but things like “Agree with point three on page 35.”, and “Page 73: Yes, but what about x?

Reading the whole book

Having read the outline, as it were, I now have a basis from which to start reading the book from beginning to end, and thoroughly. My mind is no longer a tabla rasa, and so I have mental hooks on which to hang questions, observations and links to other points. The process of note-taking continues.

Comparing this book with others

It would be most unusual to find a book on writing that is completely unique. There are bound to be other books which cover the same or similar ground. Thus a legitimate question to ask, even if the book does solve the problem it sets out to answer, would be: is this book better than its competitors? Another question is: would it benefit the reader to buy this and another book on the same subject?

Reading my notes

Then I look over my notes, and usually a narrative starts to form in my mind. I have a good idea about whether or not I like the book, what its strong points are, and its weak ones. Are there any glaring gaps?

On the omissions issue, I will double check to make sure I’m correct. It would be both embarrassing and misleading for me to write something like “I am surprised that Professor Podges fails to mention Kafka in this regard”, only to be told by an irate reader or the author that there is a whole section about Kafka in the middle of chapter 9!

Writing the review

By this stage the review almost writes itself. Then having made sure it’s within the word count, proofread and as polished as I can make it, I publish it or send it off to the editor who requested it.

Concluding remarks

I hope you found this article useful. Every review has their own process, so this isn’t intended to be the definitive how-to guide. I’d like to make a couple of points before I take my leave.

Firstly, do templates help? I created my own reviewing template, but found it better to regard it as a checklist rather than a framework: have I included the ISBN number, have I said what’s good and what’s not so good etc. The problem with using a template as a framework is that it can easily cramp your style, and make your review start to read like a shopping list: tick, tick, tick. If you abandon the framework approach, you can begin to be more creative.

For example, you might open your review with a quote from Oscar Wilde, or with a question to the reader: do we really need another book about the Oxford comma? (Bear in mind, though, that research has shown that the tone of the title and the opening paragraph of an article tends to colour the readers’ perceptions of the whole article.)

Secondly, I’ve assumed that the purpose of your review is to advise the reader whether or not to buy the book, as opposed to showing the reader that you’re more qualified than the author on this subject. You can establish your authority in the matter by including relevant facts in your bio (“Terry is the author of Writing in cafes”) or in allusions (“This ties in with Stephen King’s observation that…”). What would be really obnoxious, though, would be to pepper your review with lots of sentences like “As I wrote in…”, “As I advised in my talk to the Royal Society…”. That would make most readers, I think, say “Oh for heaven’s sake, I shall leave this latter-day Narcissus to their own self-love-in; I have better things to do with my time.” Egoism is never a good look!