How to Critique a Book

Critiquing a book isn’t so much about telling someone what they’re doing wrong, but helping them see their book better. This means not only telling the author when I think something’s not working, but also when I think they’re doing something right, and more importantly, why.

This helps the author to really see their book again–which is a small miracle after drowning in it for so long–so that they can pull that book into alignment with the shape of it in their heart.

But also, selfishly, being able to articulate why something in someone else’s book works for you–or doesn’t–brings you one step closer to adding those techniques to your own toolkit.

Force Yourself to SEE the Book

When a book is good, it becomes more than the sum of its parts–it resonates and becomes whole, the way we humans are bundles of bones and muscle and organs that, when put together properly, are so much more than our squishy biological parts. It becomes hard to look at a living person and see them in terms of their parts, unless there’s something visibly distressing them. For example, when coughing, you might think of a person’s lungs. But just as a healthy person’s body can mask disease, it’s important to check all the parts of the book you’re critiquing to make sure the shiny surface isn’t hiding something that could be made better.

One of my favorite tools is to state, as baldly as I can, the character arcs and plot arcs. I usually start with characters, looking strictly at character trajectories–their motivations, their relationships to others and the world around them, the events that change those motivations and relationships, and the fallout that results.

This should give you a clear picture of how the character has changed or grown over the course of the book, the things that influence them, and their motivation and methods for doing so. This is where one can often discover hitches in an arc—a place where a character acts like an earlier version of themselves, or doesn’t actually change, or changes in ways that don’t appear to line up with their motivations. Even if the character arcs are perfect, this process will help you understand what kind of a book you are critiquing.

When you’ve finished sketching the plot and character arcs, even if you don’t see problems yet, that distracting resonance should be broken, allowing you to see all the muscles and bones and organs beneath.

Calibrate Your Instruments

Once you can see the book clearly, you might get a nagging instinct that something is off or wrong. Before embarking on the task of figuring out what that is, and how it might be fixed, it’s important to strip away your assumptions as to what the character and plot arcs should be and figure out what the character and plot arcs are trying to be. Especially when an author is doing something new and exciting, a character arc can be off by a hair, and read as if it’s off by a mile.

This is because unexpected elements have to work twice as hard to earn their place. With expected elements, readers will connect the dots. They know what a traditional character arc looks like, so if that’s what you’re serving, you can leave some bits out, and it will be fine. But if you have an unexpected character arc, and you leave some bits out, the reader won’t be able to connect the dots—for this is something they haven’t seen before—and when they try to do so, it will be with the model of the traditional character arc, the one they’re used to. And by that measure, anything unexpected is terribly wrong. Because of course, that’s not what it’s trying to be at all.

The most helpful thing I’ve found is to remember that the author made the decisions they did for a reason, and to try to piece together the author’s intentions—try to see the shape of the arc they want for their character and plot. Equipped with the author’s intentions—the shapes, traditional or otherwise, of all the elements of the story—you can offer a critique that helps them achieve their goals, rather than a critique that tries to make them change their goals.

Trace the Patterns, Hold Them Up to the Light

Now you have both a feel for the author’s intentions and a rough outline of what they have achieved. At this point, you can start to look for patterns. At first, this is about making sure that all the character and plot arcs match the author’s intentions—locating any bits that stick out or don’t fit, or could be tied tighter in. But then, it becomes about finding ways they could increase that resonance, ways they could make the pattern even more beautiful.

A couple of things I look for when looking to increase resonance are:

1. Circularity. When there is change in the story, be it in a character or in the world, you want to show it. One of the most effective means of showing change is to bring back the same circumstances as the beginning, and show how it differs now that the story has happened. For example, presenting a character with the same choice they made in the beginning, and showing how they make that choice differently now. But it can extend to so much more than that..Look for ways you can bring the reader’s mind–via careful use of repetition of place, dialogue, vivid description, etc–back to the beginning of the book, so that we can feel how they and the world have changed, due to the story.

   Though often just a line or two of change, this is often one of the most poignant moments in the book, if you do it right.
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2. Mirrors. In many ways another form of circularity, mirrors and dark mirrors are usually characters who reflect each other, offering foreshadowing for possible paths each of them could walk, as well as illuminating the differences between the two characters. Mirrors being positive reflections of the character, and dark mirrors being negative reflections of a character—often a character given a similar situation to the protagonist, who makes an unheroic choice. This can also be done with other elements of a story—for example, in-world history often provides a mirror or a dark mirror to the events of your book. They provide a fantastic, invisible structure to your book, setting expectations without ever being obvious..
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   Once you identify a mirror, it can help the author refine a character’s actions. It can also help you to explain why a particular scene or choice a character makes is the right choice.

3. Details and Symbolism. Every detail in a book is an opportunity to shape the reader’s experience—from the food they eat to how they describe the dawn. For example, a character’s favorite food describes their culture and home, their tastes and their relative wealth. Cooking and giving and sharing food is a common way of expressing love, such that knowing how someone takes their tea is a sign of intimacy. And particular foods—important foods that reoccur over our life, like the holiday cookies you decorate with your sister every year, or the fried potatoes with fresh lemon you got from the corner store your first day at college, or the meatballs your mom always made for your birthday—are often imbued with memory and emotion.
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   Of course, food is hardly the only—or even the best—source of symbols. It’s objects and colors and animals and even scents and the way something feels. It’s any detail has been established early and imbued with emotion and meaning and a sense of time and place. And once you have a symbol, you can use it to evoke the emotions and memories tied to it, creating resonance without ever having to state them explicitly. Identifying symbols, as well as resonant details that are on the verge of becoming symbols, and working out how they fit into the patterns of a book is an excellent way to explain or work on resonance.

4. Grounding. I read somewhere that in opera, there comes a point where you stop adding new songs, and instead they start interweaving and complicating, all coming together at the end. I don’t know if this is true in opera, but it’s an excellent metaphor for books. Sometimes an element—be it a location, or aspect of character or plot—will feel… lightweight, or too fast, or just off somehow. Not resonant. Often, this is because the element could benefit from being woven in more earlier. Sometimes, this means working in the element earlier quite literally. Other times, it means carving the space for the element in its absence, through the use of mirrors, dark mirrors, and foreshadowing.
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5. Themes. Looking at the character and plot arcs for patterns can help you realize what its themes are. For example, if characters consistently act alone and fail, and then work together and succeed, one of the themes might be teamwork. If one of your themes is teamwork, and a character succeeds at the end by acting alone, it can either undermine (usually bad) or complicate (usually good) that theme.
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   Of course, not all themes are so easy to spot. If you’re having a hard time spotting the themes, one technique for figuring them out is to look at threads of the plot or character through the lens of metaphor. Once you find an extended metaphor that fits, it can help the author to understand what their book is saying, and whether they’d like to adjust that message, change it, leave it the way it is, or just disrupt the metaphor by tweaking the book, so that the comparison no longer resonates.

If Outmatched, Stick to Reactions

Sometimes, you just can’t pinpoint why something works, or why something feels off. And that’s okay! It’s tempting to pin it on something, anything, to show the author that you paid attention, because you want so badly to help. But critical comments that are not grounded in the text and your perspective can actually do more harm than good, distorting the mirror you’re holding up for the author, and making it harder for them to see their book.

In these cases, it’s often useful to scrape off all your assumptions and stick to what you know is true.

1. First, mark points in the story where you have a specific emotion or reaction—here, I cried; here I was confused about X. These are true. These are the bones of your critique. And even if you can do nothing else, this is useful.
2. Next, if you can, add in some muscle—the assumptions you are making at those specific points in the story that lead you to that reaction.
   1. Here, I was confused about X because I assumed Y.
   2. Here, I cried because the characters are so full of hope, so sure they will achieve Z, and I want them to achieve Z, but I know they can’t, no matter how hard they try.
3. Finally, and this is the hardest part of all, add the connective tissue. Try to pinpoint what specific sentences, scenes, or word choices formed the assumptions that led to that reaction. This doesn’t necessarily mean telling them what they did wrong—you can only make an assumption about what’s wrong if you make an assumption about their intentions, and that is a dangerous assumption to make. It means tracing, as literally as you can where your brain’s “cursor” is at any given moment, and what its trajectory is.
   1. Here I was confused about X because I assumed Y based on line Z in this scene, and because of this assumption about this character, based on these notes in their character arc.
   2. Here, I cried because the characters are so full of hope, so sure they will achieve Z, and I want them to achieve Z, but I know they can’t, no matter how hard they try, because of POV character’s intentions A, foreshadowing element B, and the mirror of character C’s arc.
      
      In particular, marking “reader promises”–places where you develop an expectation for the text (that a particular question be answered, or that a particular detail be proved important in some manner) that you as a reader will be disappointed if left unfulfilled–down to the sentence if possible, is exceedingly helpful.

The goal is not to tell the author how to fix their book, but to give the author the clearest picture of your experience of the book, and what specifically caused that picture, so that they have the tools to fine-tune your reaction.

Caveats Galore

Of course, everyone’s needs are different, and what works for me might not work for you. If this rings true for you, that’s awesome! And if you’ve found something that works that is super not this, that’s also awesome! The most important thing is that you figure out something that works for you and your critique partners. After all, what works for me has changed a lot over time, and I’m sure it will change a lot in the future, as I continue to learn and my needs continue to change :).

What are some of the things that work for you?