For many of you, we’ll bet that your love of writing is rivaled only by your love of reading. But have you ever read a book, not solely for pleasure, but for the sake of critiquing it? We certainly want the experience of writing a review for our Book Review Competition to be pleasurable, but we also challenge you to peel back the layers of the work and to share your deeper insights and musings. Today, Irish Times book reviewer Seán Hewitt introduces us to the task of analyzing a text and shares a glimpse into his own wonderfully chaotic review writing process.
What does your book review writing process look like?
Messy, probably. I don’t have a particular system or method. I read the book from cover to cover, I scribble all over it, I put post-it notes on it, I crack the spine and I fold the pages. As I read, I make notes in the margins about particular plot points (just in case they slip my mind later on) and themes, and write down my impressions as they come to me. Those impressions often change once I’ve finished the whole book, but when it comes to writing the review, I find it useful to be able to look back over my notes, and get a fresh perspective on my reading experience.
Does reading a book you plan to review change how you interact with the text?
Yes, I think so. It’s a much more tiring experience, in a way. Not only because there are deadlines involved, so I often have to read at a pace that is quicker than my usual one, or at times when I’m not really in the mood to read; but because I’m consciously trying to untangle a book in a way that I’m not when I’m reading solely for pleasure. When I’m reviewing a book, I’m asking myself, What is this book trying to do? And is it succeeding? When I’m reading for pleasure, the main thing I care about is whether I’m enjoying the book or not.
We encourage all of our writers to post their drafts on the site so they can be reviewed by their fellow writers. What do you see as some of the key benefits of having your work reviewed by an editor?
An editor is great because they help you to say what you want to say. Often, our writing can be messy on the first draft, or we think we’ve explained something clearly, but we haven’t. A good editor, like mine, helps you to be better at your job.
What advice do you have for young writers who are interested in turning their passion for writing into a career?
The best advice I can think of right now is to keep going. That sounds a bit toothless and clichéd, but there will be a lot of rejection, and you have to get to a point where you believe in your work and recognize its value. Do some unpaid work to begin with, but don’t let people tell you that you don’t deserve money for your writing, or that book reviewing is fun and so isn’t a real job. It is both. So, after you’ve got a decent portfolio of work, approach publications that pay, and offer to review for them. Keep submitting your writing; keep emailing people; keep turning up to readings and interviews and engaging with the literary world. You never know who you might meet, or where it might lead.
In addition to your work in The Irish Times, are there other writers or publications that you’d point students to for solid book reviews?
I love reading long reviews–reviews that turn into essays about subjects I don’t know anything about, written by people who have taken time to really understand them. For that, I usually turn to reviews in the London Review of Books, which are long-form and eclectic. As for individual reviewers, I love the work of Sandeep Parmar, who brings a deep engagement with context, form, and political nuance to all her reviews, and the work of reviewers on the Ledbury Emerging Critics Programme (now opening in the USA too) is always interesting and exciting.
About Seán
Seán Hewitt works as a researcher in English Literature at Trinity College Dublin, and as a book critic for The Irish Times. He read English at the University of Cambridge, and received his PhD from the University of Liverpool. He is also a poet, and won the Resurgence Prize in 2017. His debut chapbook is Lantern (Offord Road Books, 2019).
