What Does the Bookworm Say?: Review Writing Process
Hi and welcome to What Does the Bookworm Say?, a feature where I discuss bookish topics with my friends at The Reader’s Antidote, Books Unbound and The Windy Pages. Each week, we will discuss a new bookish topic. This week’s topic is favorite book series!
Writing reviews is the hardest part of book blogging for me. I often struggle with putting my thoughts about a book into words and it may take me days or even weeks to complete a review. There are the rare occasions when a review will just flow and come out quickly, but that’s not usually the case. I don’t have a strict process for writing reviews but here is a rough breakdown of how I write my reviews.
1. Take notes while reading – I don’t take a lot of notes or really detailed ones while I read but I do like to get the characters names and any random thoughts I might have about the book onto paper while I am reading. It’s easier for me to write down my feelings/observations while I am reading the book then to try to remember them later.
2. Soon after finishing the book, I try to leave a quick review (a paragraph or two) on Goodreads with my initial impression. I didn’t used to do this but I have found that it helps a lot. I usually do it in the Goodreads app on my phone. This is a really low pressure way of allowing me to just write whatever I want about the book without feeling like I have to write a whole review. There may be typing errors in this initial review since I just want to get my thoughts out and want to worry too much about formatting. If you follow me on GR, you may notice that some of my reviews say “in progress” at the top. This probably means that it was a quickie review done from my phone. Having that is very helpful for me later on when I go back to write the full review.
3. To summarize or not to summarize? I don’t have a fast rule about whether or not I write my own synopsis of the book in my review. Ideally I think having your own synopsis is a nice thing to have in a review but I don’t think it’s necessary. I have the publisher’s synopsis in the review post, so readers can refer to that if they need to. Sometimes it’s really easy for me to write my own synopsis, in which case I’ll do it. Other times, I will try to write a synopsis and I’ll struggle. In that case, I will just skip it and move on to the review.
4. Next comes the hard part, the actual review. If I have that short, initial review on Goodreads then the full review is much easier to write. It’s a lot faster for me to flesh out my initial thoughts into a full review than to just sit down and write a review from scratch. I usually write my reviews in Goodreads. For some reason, I feel a lot less pressure about writing in that Goodreads window than I do when I open a new Word document. I’ve been trying to do this less though because I will often forget to save in Goodreads and will just close my browser window. I have lost more reviews than I can remember that way.
5. As for the review structure itself, I don’t have a set format for it. I go with my thoughts and try to includes things about the characters as well as what I liked about the book or didn’t. I try not to have spoilers but, for a series book, that might not be possible. In that case I will usually put a disclaimer on the review for those who haven’t caught up with the series.
That’s about it. It’s not very scientific and sometimes a review will sit half finished for weeks before I feel like I can write it properly. That’s one of the reasons I usually only have one review a week. I don’t think I could realistically do more given the amount of free time I have each day.
Are any of you out there book reviewers as well? What’s your review writing process like? I’d love to hear if you have any tips or tricks to make the process easier.
Don’t forget to check out The Reader’s Antidote, Books Unbound and The Windy Pages to see what their answers are to today’s question.
