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The Writer and the Reviewer

October 15, 2009 By Mark 9 Comments

A couple of weeks ago, in a post touching on the question of reviews, I said this:

Turning a static review into a debate strikes me as a good thing, particularly as regards putting the reviewer on notice that they will also have to defend the merits of their words.

Today, Self-Publishing Review provides us a perfect illustration of the benefits and pitfalls of this kind of conversation in the review of Nathan Charlton’s Terra Nova: The Search, by Levi Montgomery.

I will not directly address the story, which I haven’t read, or the review, which I cannot judge because I haven’t read the story. In this case, the reviewer looked unfavorably on the author’s work. But in responding to the review, the author uncovered the fact that the reviewer had failed to read the entire story:

I’m actually curious if you read the whole thing, because everything you mentioned happens in the first 50 pages (and most of it in the first 30).

The reviewer’s defense of this novel approach to reviewing was weak:

I actually read the Prologue and Part One, which would be something over seventy pages, and I neither stated not implied otherwise.

Which prompted the site’s editor, Henry Baum, to weigh in:

I didn’t know Levi Montgomery hadn’t read the whole book. And didn’t assume I had to include the criteria – “in order to review the book you have to read it.”

That it did not occur to the reviewer that he was both required by ethics to read the entire work, or at the very least disclose that he had not read the entire work, seriously undermines his credibility in every other regard. Charlton’s book may be just as Montgomery describes. But having deceived the reader with a lie of omission, and having defended that lie of omission by blaming the victims (readers) for assuming that Montgomery was required to read the entire work before shooting it full of indignant holes, is probably not the right way to go about establishing your credentials as a reviewer.

If the internet is about trust, and in particular about building trust with individual readers, then that cuts both ways. It’s not only the case that authors have a test to meet, but reviewers as well, and in both instances I think readers profit by this kind of interaction. Even if the conversation devolves, as it did in this case, more information is better. Precisely because this existed we now know more about Nathan Charlton and Levi Montgomery and Henry Baum, and we can use that information to make more informed decisions about our content choices.

— Mark Barrett

Filed Under: Fiction Tagged With: reader, writer

Fiction is Truth

October 14, 2009 By Mark 1 Comment

I’ve been reading The Good Soldiers by David Finkel. It’s a factual recounting of the deployment of the U.S. Army’s 2-16 Battalion during the surge in Iraq.

Something about the book struck me as both familiar and true, despite the fact that I haven’t been in the army and I haven’t been to Iraq. Then I ran across this passage and the lightbulb came on:

On June 20, Kauzlarich was boack on the air on PEACE 106 FM.

“Sir, there is talk that security is bad and getting worse. What is the way ahead to improve security?” Mohammed, whose name was not really Mohammed, asked in Arabic, which was translated into English by an interpreter named Izzzy, whose name was not really Izzy and who had replaced Mark, who had been arrested and jailed for extorting money from other Iraqis working on the FOB, all with fake names as well.

Frankel’s book and the story of the 2-16 remind me of this:

“And the people you sell the eggs to at four and a quarter cents apiece make a profit of two and three quarter cents apiece when they sell them back to you at seven cents apiece. Is that right? Why don’t you sell the eggs directly to you and eliminate the people you buy them from?”

“Because I’m the people I buy them from,” Milo explained.

That’s from Joseph Heller’s novel, Catch-22. I could have pulled a hundred different passages from that book that would have said the same thing. Reality is insanity. Fiction is reality.  [ Read more ]

Filed Under: Fiction Tagged With: Fiction

Site Seeing: Guy Gonzalez | Loud Poet

October 6, 2009 By Mark 1 Comment

If I have a weakness for anything it’s simplicity. Where a lot of people like to dress things up or add detail, I like to strip things down and emphasize what’s essential. Neither approach is right, really, unless of course you’re trying to figure out how something works. In that case, ignoring the noise and focusing on the mechanics is not simply a subjective choice, it’s objectively necessary.

Guy Gonzalez at LoudPoet.com seems to have that same approach, and it’s one of the reasons I keep learning something every time I visit his site. In the hive-mind world of social networks Gonzalez often sounds like an old hand, and that’s not easy to do in a medium still in its infancy.  [ Read more ]

Filed Under: Fiction, Publishing Tagged With: Guy Gonzalez, Publishing

Character Blog Redux?

October 3, 2009 By Mark 1 Comment

I’ve mentioned in several posts that I’m interested in the idea of character blogs. It’s also clear from the fossil record that character blogs have been investigated by a number of writers and marketing departments over the past five or six years, yet there are no consensus successes to point to despite the effort and hype.

The attempts (so far) seem to fall into several categories.  [ Read more ]

Filed Under: Fiction Tagged With: blog fiction

Site Seeing: 1899.ca

September 29, 2009 By Mark Leave a Comment

If you don’t know who MCM is, I’m going to skip any explanations myself and instead quote from the 1899.ca About page:

Hi there! I’m MCM, an all-around lunatic.

Note that ‘lunatic’ here is not pejorative. In fact, I think MCM is the only person I’ve run across so far who manages to take online fiction and self-publishing seriously and not seriously at the same time. For example:

Next Tuesday, I’m going to embark on a very intense adventure to write my next novel Typhoon in three days. To achieve this goal, I will need some help from you, and also a whole lot of structure. Here’s the general idea…

A day (as you may have heard) is made up of 24 hours. I am going to set aide 4 of those hours for sleep, because I don’t want to die midway through the event. I’ll wake up at 6am and stop work at 2am the next morning (all times Canadian Pacific time). I will also need 3 more hours a day for eating, bathing, and bringing-kids-to-schoolness. All in all, about 17 hours of solid work time, repeated three times. 51 hours.

Read the whole post and it makes complete sense — except for the insanity of the premise. Then again, people volunteer themselves for Ironman Triathlons andultramarathons, so why not a novel in three days?

When MCM is not at home you’ll see sightings on other sites like this one, and this one. Those two links are a well-thought-out two-part series on why online writers need good reviewers and vice-versa. (Incredibly, there’s almost no lunacy.)

You can also find MCM in the comments here, on another thread having to do with online reviews of online works. Which, if you take the time to read them along with the other links, will make it clear that this is someone who’s thinking hard about how to turn online and self-published works into viable products.

And that’s not as crazy as it sounds.

— Mark Barrett

Filed Under: Fiction Tagged With: MCM, site seeing

Site Seeing: Kassia Krozser | Booksquare.com

September 28, 2009 By Mark Leave a Comment

Kassia Krozser is the proprietor of Booksquare.com. I don’t know her, but I feel like I know something about her from reading this post on her site:

Welcome back from whatever you did this summer. Me, I spent my time building a digital publishing company. It went mostly okay, though, in the end, there was no company to show for it.

It’s a smart piece written in the face of real loss, but among the ashes Kassia not only finds useful lessons learned, she takes time to map her own experience onto the broader publishing revolution.

Then again, Booksquare is a quiet site not given to spasms of pop-culture linkage, but rather to more considered thought and analysis of the rapidly evolving book world. Which means it’s my kind of site.

— Mark Barrett

Filed Under: Fiction Tagged With: Kassia Kroszer, site seeing

The Agony of Success

September 28, 2009 By Mark Leave a Comment

Why do storytellers tell stories? There are as many reasons as there are writers. Here’s a sampling.

One thing I’ve never been comfortable with, however, is a storyteller — and particularly a successful storyteller (however you gauge success) — who talks about how difficult, unbearable, agonizing, hopeless, unrewarding, soul-destroying, righteous, brutal, painful, exhausting or heroic the job of storytelling is.  [ Read more ]

Filed Under: Fiction Tagged With: storytelling, writers

Transmedia, Level 26, 90-9-1 and Transparency

September 24, 2009 By Mark 1 Comment

One of the hallmarks of storytelling over the past few thousand years is that the majority of people who are drawn to stories are not interested in creating stories on their own. They don’t even want to confront the means of delivery, or to understand how stories are imagined, created or produced. What they want is an imaginative, emotional narrative experience that is transparent to all of these mechanisms and processes. They want to consume in the same way that you or I might prefer to consume a meal without having to gather ingredients, cook, season, serve, or do much of anything except taste and chew.

I mention these points to re-frame the context surrounding transmedia storytelling and a recent example of that exploratory narrative form: Level 26, which you can see here, and read more about here and here.  [ Read more ]

Filed Under: Fiction, Interactive Tagged With: transparency

Site Seeing: Novelr

September 14, 2009 By Mark 3 Comments

When I was first making my rounds on the web to get up to speed on the state of online storytelling, it took me very little time to come across Novelr.com. Busy as I was, however, I filed the URL away in my ever-growing list of sites-to-visit, and promptly got lost in other things.

A few days ago Janoda kindly thought to suggest the site to me on Twitter, whereupon I immediately vowed to visit the site before promptly getting lost in other things.

Which brings me to yesterday, when Eli (the person behind Novelr) stopped by and added a comment to one of my posts, innocently punishing me for being such a slacker. Of such self-induced slights are my better motivations born.

The post Eli commented on was called Taking Stock, in which I updated myself and you about my current level of interest in all things digital and storytelling. One of the things I said I’m less interested in now is the broader question of online fiction, in part because it’s just so damn broad. If not unending.

Happily, as my dedicated visit to Novelr revealed, Eli and the Novelr community are very much on top of the subject, and very much probing the further reaches. Which means Eli and Novelr can do the heavy lifting on this subject for all of us. Wink!

Stop by, take a look around, and if you’re new to subject, say hello before Eli finds you first. You’ll be glad you did.

— Mark Barrett

Filed Under: Fiction Tagged With: Fiction, site seeing

Site Seeing: The Hayfield Forever

September 5, 2009 By Mark 4 Comments

I was pointed to The Hayfield by a link in the comments, and I wrote in reply at that time that I wasn’t sure I really ‘got’ what the site was about. After taking another, longer look, I think I get it now, but I’m not sure that it’s having the intended effect on me. And it’s an open question whether that says something about me or something about the site.

To be fair, it’s all very well done, and I really don’t know the extent to which I’m supposed to actually care emotionally about any of the content. If it’s a gag, but for some reason I’m waiting to be shaken to the core, well, that’s a problem of expectations on my part, not execution. But the very fact that I’m not quite sure what’s going on means to me that I’m thinking more than I’m feeling, and that I’m studying more than I’m reacting.  [ Read more ]

Filed Under: Fiction Tagged With: site seeing

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