Mette Ivie Harrison's Blog, page 43

12 Steps to Success in Writing (or anything else in life)

1. BIC (Butt in Chair). This means just sit down and get it done.

2. Don’t Make Excuses. People who make excuses tend not to accomplish much.

3. Make a Working Space. Work there on a regular basis. Don’t have fun there. It messes with the chi.

4. Find a coach. This might be virtually, but find someone who can give you advice, someone who is further along the path than you are.

5. Make Big Changes if necessary. This means throwing out hundreds of pages on occasion. It means not taking offense when someone tells you truthfully what you are doing wrong.

6. Stay True to Your Vision. (Which sounds like it contradicts #5, but doesn’t. You need to have a vision so you can keep moving forward, even if you make changes.)

7.Deal with Fear. Fear is a part of every success. You face the fear, and then you move past it.

8.Join the Real Competition. This means that if you are a writer, you send stuff out. To real editors and agents. In the athletic world, it means you have to compete with people who are a lot better than you are. You learn a lot this way.

9. Celebrate the Rejections. This may sound crazy, but you’ve got to do something to encourage yourself to keep taking chances, because that’s the only way to success.

10.Read good books. Or experience what is of the best quality in your own field. Watch good swimmers. Experience incredible art. You need something to aim for.

11. Build Community. You need people to compare yourself against, to encourage you, to make you see what is realistic in terms of time frame. You also need human contact, no matter what you may have heard about artists in the ivory tower.

12. BIC. Because it always comes down to the work. And you doing it.

10 Rules of Thumb for Writing

These aren’t hard and fast rules, but nonetheless are useful for most writing situations.

1. Tell us what your character wants as soon as possible. Make sure your character wants something and works toward getting it. I believe in some circles this is called making your protagonist protag. (If you’re writing a character who doesn’t know what s/he wants, good luck. I’m not saying it can’t be done, but you’ve set yourself up for a nearly impossible goal.)

2. Paint your protagonist with a full life, including friends, passions, an ambition in life—things that are likely completely different from the plot of the book, because the plot is what isn’t expected.

3. Don’t make up words for things that we already have perfectly good English words for. Also, only one new word (a really novel concept) per page.

4. Tell backstory in one paragraph chunks. Or, if you want to tell more than that, use flashbacks to set a full scene. But no flashbacks in the first chapter—too confusing.

5. Use your characters’ namea a lot at the beginning—more than anyone would in real life. Readers forget stuff like that easily.

6. If you have a group of friends or family members, think about cutting or consolidating them. More than 6 heroes is, IMHO, too many. In YA and MG, more than 3 is probably too many. In real life, we keep track of lots of people. In a book, it can be very difficult to make them all distinguishable.

7. Let us see your character’s emotions. Reading is largely about feeling vicarious emotions. If you don’t let us feel them, we will put down your book. Don’t say “he was sad,” but talk about how that is physically manifest.

8. Save the biggest event for the end of the book.

9. If you can, increase tension chapter by chapter from the beginning until the end of the chapter. Don’t let a chapter without tension go by, though it can be a different kind of tension.

10. Write your first chapter last. It sets up everything and rewriting it over and over before you’ve finished the rest of the novel doesn’t make much sense.

Writing Wednesday: The Critical Gap

There is an important gap between what we can produce as writers (or artists, musicians, or any other kind of skill-based art) and what we wish we could write. Some of the time, this gap is small enough that we can keep at it, encouraged with the idea that even if this isn’t perfect, it’s good—even very good. But other times, we look at what we can produce and can only see how far it is from what we wish we could produce, from our own standards and from the work of those we most admire.

While this is undoubtedly painful, it is actually something we should celebrate. If we had no critical gap, there would be no drive to improve. If we had no critical gap, we would be finished learning and getting better as writers. That is not what we want.

The only solution I have seen for this problem is to look backward at what we have produced in the past and compare it to what we are producing now. This is the reason that it is vital that all creators keep old pieces that they have moved past. Don’t throw away things that are embarrassing! Don’t burn them! Don’t erase them all from your hard drive. Keep them and celebrate how much you have moved past them. Keep them and remember how much even these terrible pieces once stretched your artistic capacity.

You are better now. You will keep getting better. As you grow as an artist, your critical ability must grow first. You must be able to sense in some way what is better than you can do in order to grow into that. So keep at it! And laugh at what you once thought was your best work!

Stop Telling Yourself You're Not Good Enough

There is a bizarre kind of pleasure in repeating to yourself the message that you hear from your worst critics. You’re not good enough. It narrows the vision to a single pinpoint. It makes the world very simple. It doesn’t matter what you want anymore. All those complicated, big dreams that you have—forget about them. The people who love you—they don’t matter. Your world narrows to one reality: not good enough.

I am not sure why this particular negative message is so attractive to so many of us. I suspect there is a component of mental illness there. Possibly bad childhoods where we heard this message so often that it became familiar to us. And we humans will almost always choose the familiar, no matter how bad, over the unfamiliar. Good things, no matter how much we want them, often require us to change because they are new. It can be easier to turn away from them and go back to what we were used to.

To crowd out this message sometimes takes me hours of intense concentration. I have to force myself to make a list of 3 good things to tell myself about myself. It feels like this is wrong somehow. We aren’t supposed to compliment ourselves, especially women. It’s not proper. It’s bragging. It shows you think you’re better than other people. It’s an invitation to be cut down by God, the universe, or by anyone around you.

But if you keep telling yourself you aren’t good enough, you make it come true. You stop trying. You stop putting yourself out there. You stop taking risks. You stop wanting more. You stop imagining a larger future with you in it.

I know that you think it’s the truth. I can’t tell you how many times I have argued with myself (and with other people I am close to who have this same problem). It doesn’t matter if it’s true or not true. There is no “truth” about such a subjective thing or not. Newton’s laws aren’t even one hundred perfect true. What makes you think that this is more true than that? It isn’t. So stop telling it to yourself. Stop making it true.

Start making a new truth. You are good enough. In fact, you’re better than that. You’re incredible. Maybe people around you haven’t realized it yet. Maybe you haven’t realized it yet. Maybe you’re still an embryo of awesome. Let yourself grow. Be your own womb. Be a mother to your tiny ego and tell yourself all the things that you should have been told, if you weren’t.

Friday Feminism: Strong Female Characters

So I was on a panel last weekend titled “Strong Female Characters.” One of the first things I pointed out was that there were no panels on “Strong Male Characters” anywhere at any panel ever. And why aren’t there? Because we don’t have discussions about whether or not male characters are strong or not. There simply isn’t an expectation that male characters have to be role models. There are no screaming readers out there who insist that male characters have to be strong in one particular way. If you write one kind of strong male character, no one yells at you as an author that you have written a “weak” character. And I suppose that on some level, this gives writers an unconscious reason to write more male characters, because they are “easier,” even if you are a female writer.

But moving on, I took over the panel’s moderator position (which I do sometimes) and asked questions. What kinds of strong female characters are there? Well, surprisingly enough, there are different kinds of female strength. There can be strong female characters who are very feminine and who are strong only in verbal ways. There are strong female characters who are strong in typically masculine ways (including sword-wielding, magic-wielding, and generally butt-kicking). There can be strong female characters who are mothers and crones. And there can be strong female characters who are young girls.

There is not one kind of female strength that should be validated over other kinds of strength, though this often happens. That is, masculine strength in a female characters is often values over feminine strength. No surprise there since we live in a sexist world in which all things masculine are valued above all things feminine. Nonetheless, if you write a female character who has masculine strengths, be prepared to get told that your readers cannot “connect” with this female character or that she is “abrasive.” Some critics will be more blatant and say that she doesn’t feel “feminine” at all and will accuse the writer of not being able to write “real” female characters.

One person asked me how we avoid writing a strong female character who ends up becoming “The Evil Queen.” And I sort of shrugged. What’s wrong with writing about the evil queen? I asked him if he’d ever heard of Darth Vader? No one ever told George Lucas that Darth Vader wasn’t an appropriate character to be the main character of his epic movie series, did they, because Darth Vader wasn’t a good role model for young boys? Young boys pretend to be Darth Vader all the time, and no one cares. Darth Vader moves the plot. He’s an active, interesting character with a past. Nothing wrong with writing a female version of that, if that’s what you want to write. And maybe you can look at how society itself demands that if women take power, they are automatically going to be seen as “The Evil Queen,” because quite simply, power isn’t feminine and it’s not right for women to have it. Many female characters with power are going to be seen as evil and usurping. So what?

Strong female characters are often evaluated on the basis of whether or not they are good “role models” for children, which is one of the things that male and female athletes both get, though not so much other career choices. Is there an obligation from authors to readers to create characters who are role models? I don’t think that is the purpose of writing books, not even for children. Perhaps especially not for children. Adults would not, I suspect, put up with reading books only who have been approved for their good moral content. Why should children expect differently? Why should they not see their own flaws reflected in books? And why is there a higher standard for female characters than male ones (beyond, of course, the fact that female behavior is, indeed, highly regulated and proscribed by our current culture)? Saying that women are angels means that we tell women that they can’t act in all the ways that men act. It tells them that they already have power, so they don’t need any more—especially not the “wrong” kind. But this is a topic for another day.

I talked briefly about a character like Troi from Star Trek who uses a typical female strength (emotionality) as a kind of super power. It always bugged me as a teen, but really, should it? You can discuss whether or not her super power works in a particular episode, but is there anything wrong with this kind of feminine power? Probably not. It’s my own prejudice that prefers a character like Tasha Ya, who was so disliked by fans that she was killed of by producers to appease them. So, yes, interesting to think about acceptable kinds of female power and strength.

Barrier to Entry and The Rose Throne

Lower barrier to entry is one of the key distinctions between YA and adult writing, whether it is contemporary or genre or literary. And by this, I don’t mean (although many people are going to hear it anyway), that stupid people write/read YA books. It isn’t true. I don’t think that reading YA means that you don’t want to work your brain harder. But it may mean that you don’t want to work your brain in the same way.

Barrier to entry can be seen in a variety of ways:

1. Elevated language (meaning words with more syllables, more likely Latinate or Greek roots rather than Germanic).

2. More jargon (particularly in fantasy and sf, you see this with a barrage of “new” or “scientific” words page by page)

3. Complex world building (I gauge this sometimes by the number of pages devoted in a book to glossaries, family relationship explanations, and maps)

4. Number of characters (cast of thousands is a lot harder to keep track of than a cast of a dozen, for instance)

5. Number of pov’s (Look at George R.R. Martin’s Song of Fire and Ice series to see how many pov characters can work in an adult series).

6. Pages devoted to recapping the previous book in the sequel.

7. Pages devoted to explaining lore, legends, and history of the past 1,000 years.

There is nothing wrong with either George R. R. Martin’s book, which have a huge barrier to entry. There is nothing wrong with readers who love complex worlds and stories. I love Game of Thrones, as well (the books—I haven’t seen the TV series yet).

But it is also true that there is nothing superior about people who like complex worlds and stories, either. I suspect that part of the prejudice within the adult genre community is a defense mechanism. After being looked down on for so long by the mainstream literary world, we have survived by telling ourselves that we are actually smarter than everyone else and that’s why we love this stuff.

YA genre does have less barrier to entry. Sometimes this can mean that there are certain rules that are not followed. I have certainly seen YA genre books that spend the first chapter simply info-dumping, as if the YA readership cannot handle a more subtle way of world building. I have seen YA books that have an absurdly small number of characters doing important things. I have seen YA books that show a sadly average ability with real science, and some that have something worse than that. But none of these are really unique to YA.

I love YA genre in completely different ways than I love adult. I don’t think that this makes me stupid or lazy. I don’t think that enjoying being able to read a book in a single setting makes me a worse or less complex reader. Nor do I think that a focus on a single pov character means that I am less capable of stretching my mind and understanding the complexity of the real world.

But I do think that low barrier to entry has made it possible for YA genre books to gain a wider readership. In addition to that, YA genre books are targeting a group of people who have largely not yet decided that they read one category of books and no other. I think this is a good thing, not just for YA writers (who obviously want to sell their books in larger numbers), but also for the world in general. I think it’s a good thing that more people are able to enjoy sf/f.

I have advised many writers to follow a few simple rules of thumb if you want to avoid too much barrier to entry in a YA genre book.

1. Don’t use more than one new word per page.

2. Don’t spend more than one paragraph in a row telling backstory.

3. Whenever possible, use real English words to describe your world and its rules.

4. Give your characters names that are pronounceable and which follow the rules of some known Earth language.

In The Rose Throne, there are five new words:

weyr (magic—actually related to the current word “weird” and its roots in old English magic)

newyr (female magic—derived from the nasal sound “ma,” the typical sound for mother, and the “n” sound, which is as formed just slightly farther back in the mouth)

taweyr (male magic—derived from the sound “pa,” the typical sound for father, and the “t” sound, which is again, formed slightly farther back in the mouth)

unweyr (those without any magic at all)

ekhono (those without the proper magic).

Other than that, the only foreign words a reader should encounter in the book are words that are from the time period of Tudor England, or place names and person names. Place names I admit I simply made up. Most person names are taken from a list of Dutch equivalents of English names. When the Dutch names did not work, I altered them for a name that was easier to read.

But even with this careful attempt to make this book very low barrier to entry, I get frequent complaints from readers that they don’t understand the rules of the magic system. I suspect this is because I never stop to explain them in more than a paragraph at a time. I don’t want to halt the movement of the story.

In The Princess and the Hound series, I tried to find an even lower barrier to entry by refusing (in the first two books) to ever make up a word for the magic. I simply called it “the animal magic” or some other combination of English words. I was very fierce about this because I felt like there was no need to make up words if you had perfectly good ones already in English. English is a rich language with words from all different sources. Use it.

Writing Wednesay: Do One Small Thing

This is truly the secret of life. No one has ever gotten anywhere based on what they did one time, no matter how hard or wonderful it was. What really matters in life is the sustained effort of days and weeks and years accrued over a lifetime. And that effort need not even be anything super-human. It just has to be continued, day after day, even when there is no feedback, even when no one is cheering for you, even when you are sure it doesn't matter. Do one small thing today, and another small but connected thing tomorrow, and pretty soon, you will have an actually recognizable piece of a large thing. And after a year, you may finish something that is worthwhile. It may take longer than a year. Don't be discouraged. Don't give up.

One small thing a day means sit down for 15 minutes. Write one page. Even a bad page. Even a page you erase the next day. Keep writing your one page a day. You will get better at it. You might find you want to spend more time writing. You may write more words than ever before. At the end of a year, you will have 365 pages. Or less. But you will have done something that other people didn't do. While they were sitting around thinking about how useless their lives are, you will have done something to make your life less useless. While they complained that their dreams were over, you will be chipping away at the dream sculpture that will one day be you. While other people are sitting down to rest or chatting with a friend or simply cleaning the house one more time, you will have done one small thing that matters most to you.

You don't need to share that one small thing you are doing with other people. You don't need anyone to tell you that you are doing the right thing. You don't need to be told that you should be spending time doing what they do. Just do your one small thing, whatever it is. 15 minutes a day of piano practice won't make you a concert pianist, but it will give you a start at a musical education. 15 minutes a day of yoga won't cure scoliosis, but it may give you some significant relief from pain. 15 minutes a day of walking isn't going to make you into Chrissie Wellington, but it will give you a foundation of peace and calm, and it will be a beginning of a new life. 15 minutes a day of cooking your own food won't make you a gourmet chef, but it will make your eating habits better and that may cascade through the rest of your life.

If you want your life to change, if you want more than you have now, you don't have to throw everything out. You don't have to become a new person all at once. You just have to do one small thing. Don't make a list of all the big things you want, or all the big goals you want to achieve. Just do one small thing today and one small thing tomorrow. Don't make excuses about how it's too much for you to think about. Don't let your self-doubts tell you to accept an ordinary life. Take a breath and do your one small thing. It's bigger and more important than you can possibly imagine!

Why I Hated Star Trek: Into Darkness

I will say that I probably should not have gone to this movie. I didn’t like the first reboot in 2009. But my oldest daughter has become a firm Trekkie since then and I wanted to share the movie with her. My general feeling is simply that the movie has become so Hollywoodized that most of the things that originally drew me to Trek were taken out of it. It was dumbed down.

1. Stupid action sequences

The sequence with Spock in the volcano? I felt no sense of suspense because it was just so ridiculous. So deeply stupid. Also the sequence with Kirk and Khan in skin suits shooting through a debris field to the other ship. Hello? Transporters? And the final battle between the two Enterprises—deeply boring to me. No one dies who matters because the franchise can’t allow it. No suspense to me at all.

2. Lack of any interesting idea

To me, the original Khan had some really great scientific ideas at its base. The genesis project was a great one, and so was the idea of Khan and his people. I suppose here we have the idea of Khan and his people, but completely recycled and not added to, but rather stripped back.

3. Stupid female characters

I like Zoe Saltana, and I really wished they had let her scene with the Klingons matter. Here she is, supposed to be brilliant with languages, and she’s got this chance to really show the Klingons who she is. And they blow it. They use it as just another chance to show Kirk and Khan using their fists. Why couldn’t one scene with diplomacy work? And Carol Marcus? She was the most damsel in distress of anyone ever in a Star Trek movie. And why is Christine Chapel missing? It seems so disrespectful to Majel Barrett and Gene Rodenberry.

4. Predictability

Is there anyone on the planet who believed that Kirk would be sent back to Star Fleet Academy? Or that Pike would survive the movie? Is there anyone who didn’t immediately know that the Tribble would survive and provide the solution to Kirk’s death?

5.Tiny details that made no sense

Why would Kirk, Spock, and Carol Marcus discuss a top secret mission on a shuttle where anyone could overhear? How was Kirk able to contact Scott when he had apparently resigned his commission? (Wouldn’t he have turned in his communicator?) Why doesn’t anyone worry about the enemy listening to their comm when they are in Klingon space? Why were Khan’s people in the photon torpedos? This made no sense at all.

6. Fight scenes

How many times did this movie have people using hand-to-hand combat? And when it made no sense at all, because they all had phasers? Is this supposed to please some part of the population that demands hand-to-hand combat for men to be manly? I just did not understand or like this.

7.The “bigger, badder” Enterprise

Um, mine is bigger and badder than yours? Seriously, this was the only new idea in the whole movie, and it was dumb. Was anyone excited by a Starfleet ship that was bigger than the Enterprise and simply had more firepower and speed? Why couldn’t there be something else about the ship that made it cool?

8. Predestination

So the thing that is supposed to be fun about these movies is the idea that it’s a new time line with the same people. We’ve got a chance to do a “retelling,” where you mix up the original elements and make them interesting. But to me, it felt like we were talking about predestination. The world may be completely different, but people will always act the same. In particular, this bothered me with Khan. I thought the whole movie would have been far more interesting if he had ended up a good guy rather than just the same old bad guy as before, with Spock telling Spock to stop him.

I know there were good things about this movie. I liked many of the actual scenes in which the characters were allowed to interact. I think the actors here are wonderful. For instance, I loved the scene where Khan is in the brig and Kirk goes back to talk to him. I loved that manipulation and that Kirk opens himself up to it, not Spock. I also loved the argument between Spock and Uhura in the shuttle down to Klingon. Great, great writing!

Maybe this is just a case of me being too much of an old-school Trekkie, but this felt like Transformers to me. Not even Star Wars, which while it doesn’t pretend to smart science, at least has an interesting mythic base. I don't think this movie has anything other than expensive pyrotechnics and that's just not enough to keep me watching.

Two Kinds of Writer's Block

1. Story-related Block

When you have story-related block, you feel sick every time you think about the story you're working on. You find yourself avoiding sitting down. You wonder if you were made to be a writer. You being to make lists of everything you hate about your book. You even hate thinking about it.

It may be hard to see it, but sometimes you can get rid of this kind of writers block by:

A) Going back to the beginning of the story and seeing where it went wrong. You have to be courageous enough in this situation to cut as much of the words that aren't working as you have to. This may well be most of what you have written. But unless you do this, you will never be able to feel any interest in this project again. It may already be too late for that. And so . . .

B) Trying to write something new might be the solution, as well. If you can think of anything else you are interested in writing, maybe something completely different from the failed project that is haunting you, try it out for a day or so. Fiddle with it, play with it. See if you can make writing fun again. If it works, keep going. But be watchful. If you start to feel a niggling sense that you've gone wrong again, stop before you get too far in. You don't want to keep throwing books out.

2 Life-related Block

In my mind, life-related block is completely different, but I think that there may be some writers who confuse life-related block with story-related block. Both come with a lack of interest in writing, and a dread whenever the idea of work comes up. In addition, life-related block can also cause you to question if you were made to be a writer.

However, life-related block is far more pervasive. When I have life-related block, I don't want to watch movies or television. I don't want to read books. I don't want to talk to friends. I don't want to eat my favorite foods. It is a bit like depression in this way, in that it can feel like it takes over your whole life and makes it impossible for you to feel happy.

Unlike depression, however, a life-related block can actually be solved by fixing a specific problem in your life. I don't know what that problem is for everyone, and sometimes depression medication can help by letting us see our lives more clearly. Sometimes a life-related block is  over-work or over-stress from a day-job, from family emergencies, or from the long illness of a loved one.

Sometimes a life-related block is the unconscious realization that there is something going terribly wrong in our lives, a relationship that has to be ended (and we don't want to do it), or a change has to be made. It can be related to the physical space you're trying to do your writing in. It can be related to money problems.

Whatever it is, if you have life-related block, starting a new project isn't likely to help you. You probably need to just take some time off your creative endeavors and really figure out what change is needed. Then, when you've got your stuff taken care of, the desire to create will naturally come back to you, slowly but surely.

Who is keeping you from writing?

There are people keeping you from writing in your life. Some of them may be small, squirming, cute little creatures who think they need you constantly and weep piteously every time you try to move away from them. I had five of these and I understand the temptation to give up writing time for them. But there are other people who are stealing your writing time and I urge you to identify and stop them.

1. You are keeping yourself from writing. You have a million excuses. Sometimes you are keeping yourself from your best writing by working on projects you think are “more commercial,” but which you don’t actually love. Sometimes you are keeping yourself from your writing because you are afraid or because you don’t believe you are good enough. Sometimes you are keeping yourself from writing because you are refusing to admit that you need some medication or assistance with other work or because you need to say no more often to other things.

2. Old voices from your past. It could be an old teacher who told you you could never become a writer because you don’t know your grammar well enough. It could be a parent who told you that writing isn’t a “real job.” It could be an old “friend” who read one of your first works and then ridiculed you mercilessly about it the rest of the time that you were “friends.”

3. A spouse is actively sabotaging your writing. I have seen this happen on occasion. Most of the time, writers struggle with spouses who simply don’t understand what it means to be a creative type. They often mean to be supportive, but sometimes are doing it in the wrong way (by offering suggestions that are completely useless). But there are spouses who are competitive and simply mean. If you married one before you knew you were a writer, you may have to choose between the marriage and your dreams.

4. Your writing group acts like crabs in a barrel. They have stopped really trying to get published and they have certainly stopped trying to help you become a better writer. Instead, every group meeting devolves into a rehashing of all the old problems your earliest manuscripts showed and a list of everything wrong with the current book, with no kind words about how you’ve improved and no useful suggestions.

5. Children or parents who are afraid that your writing may in some way embarrass them. They are constantly asking to see manuscripts so they can “vet” them by giving you approval that your version of them is “correct.” This can happen whether or not you are writing anything remotely non-fictional. Sometimes people see themselves in characters where they are not. But even if you intended the comparison, it doesn’t help to have them give you “feedback.”

6. An agent who never sends anything out. If you have an agent who acts more as a block to you finding the right editor for your book than as a guide to the publishing world, it may be time to part ways. I often tell writers that the problem isn’t their agent, it’s themselves, but there are times when it’s the agent. If your agent doesn’t like anything you write or can’t see potential in it, then you have the wrong agent for you.

7. An editor who has damaged you so badly by rewriting things for you that you stare at the blank page with horror. I have heard stories of this, though it has never happened to me. Editors should NEVER EVER rewrite for an author. On rare occasions, I have had editors suggest “something like this?” But an editor who is writing lines for you is an editor who is trying to usurp your position as a writer.

8.A friend who keeps talking about the books you used to write. It may be that this is intended kindly, I don’t know. But in my experience, looking backward is not a good thing. If you have abandoned a project from the past, there is probably a good reason for it. Hitting your head against the same wall again and again is not productive creatively.

9. Co-workers at your day job/neighborhood friends who are constantly giving you advice on what book you should write next to “make it big.” What sells big and what you want to write are completely different things. What sells big and what you are uniquely able to write well are completely different things. You need to write from your heart more than you need to write what someone thinks is “easy.”

10.Critics of your last book that sold badly. I know this one intimately well, believe me. One of the problems here is reading reviews of your own books. Reviews are not meant for the author. Really, they aren’t. They aren’t kind attempts to help you become better. If they were, the reviewers would send them to you and to no one else (although sometimes on twitter, it can feel that’s what they are doing). Reviews are for readers. They are to help readers find books like other ones they liked. They have nothing to do with writing. NOTHING.