#50: Write Better Fiction by Reading like a Book Reviewer

Hello friends! My apologies for not getting out an April newsletter: I had a family emergency that had me flying back and forth across the country three times last month. Thanks for your patience while I catch back up! The good news is that there’ll be two newsletters in May: this one, and then a guest post mid-month, from an excellent writer with a new book coming out. I’m excited to share their craft essay here! Maybe it’ll be a one-off thing, maybe it’ll be something I do more of in the future. So look forward to that mid-May!

In June, I’ll be doing another Zoom craft lecture for paying subscribers, on June 3, 2025, at 7pm ET. Next week, I’ll send out a survey with a handful of potential topics to anyone who is currently a paid subscriber at that time, so that you can vote on which lecture you want this time out. If you’d like to be part of that vote and/or the June lecture, all you have to do is subscribe. Thanks again!

Write Better Fiction by Reading like a Book Reviewer

This past week, I turned in what I believe will be my 40th published book review. I don’t think of myself as a book critic exactly—I’m more a fiction writer who occasionally reviews books—but I did a lot of reviewing in the earliest days of my career and I’ve been doing a lot again over the past few years. (In between I did a good number of interviews with other writers, a complementary form that requires similar prep work.) Reviewing is a part of my broader craft that I’ve enjoyed developing oveer the years, especially because I believe it usefully feeds my fiction writing too.

That said, I’m not an expert on the craft of criticism, so I don’t think I can write a treatise here on how to write a great review. But what I can do is talk about what book reviewing has done for me as a novelist, via some of the tactics I use to prep a book for review. (These tactics are very similar to how I would ready a story or a book that I’m teaching.) The practices here are always part of my “reading like a writer” toolkit, but I do them more deliberately when I’m preparing to write or speak publicly about a book, as opposed