And the reviews keep coming...
May. 23rd, 2006 12:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seawasp... and amusing the hell out of me. For Boundary, that is. According to Eric, the pattern of reviews we're seeing is not only common, it's a GOOD one. "You don't want all good reviews; makes it look like a bunch of sycophants are stuffing the ballot box. You don't want weak reviews. You want both good and bad reviews, and both of them really energetic."
And it's certainly funny for me to read them, because not only are they clearly dipolar -- generally people love it or hate it, no real lukewarm feelings here -- but even the things that are loved or hated are often dipolar. People think Boundary has wonderful characters... except those who think they're "not even cardboard, more like tissue paper". The information and action are well integrated, except when they're huge infodumps. And so on.
I suppose what I love most about these things is that it demonstrates one of my most basic writing beliefs: that aside from totally incompetent writers -- as in, people who really have trouble stringing coherent thoughts together -- it's not really POSSIBLE to arrive at an objective definition of some of the most critical components of "good writing" -- like "good characters". If the same exact words, read by different people, simultaneously project "well rounded, likeable character" and "thin as tissue paper", well, I think that whether a character is perceived as "well rounded" is probably much more a matter of what the reader WANTS from a character than whether the writer wrote the character "well". The writer probably KNOWS the character very well. But you may not find the person believable, and so therefore he's cardboard... even if he turns out to be a fictionalized real person, with all the details a real person might have.
(the other really nice thing about the Boundary reviews is that so far I haven't really gotten any of the ones that I DON'T like -- the ones which appear to get annoyed that the book wasn't something that it wasn't even TRYING to be. I got a couple of those for DK.)
And it's certainly funny for me to read them, because not only are they clearly dipolar -- generally people love it or hate it, no real lukewarm feelings here -- but even the things that are loved or hated are often dipolar. People think Boundary has wonderful characters... except those who think they're "not even cardboard, more like tissue paper". The information and action are well integrated, except when they're huge infodumps. And so on.
I suppose what I love most about these things is that it demonstrates one of my most basic writing beliefs: that aside from totally incompetent writers -- as in, people who really have trouble stringing coherent thoughts together -- it's not really POSSIBLE to arrive at an objective definition of some of the most critical components of "good writing" -- like "good characters". If the same exact words, read by different people, simultaneously project "well rounded, likeable character" and "thin as tissue paper", well, I think that whether a character is perceived as "well rounded" is probably much more a matter of what the reader WANTS from a character than whether the writer wrote the character "well". The writer probably KNOWS the character very well. But you may not find the person believable, and so therefore he's cardboard... even if he turns out to be a fictionalized real person, with all the details a real person might have.
(the other really nice thing about the Boundary reviews is that so far I haven't really gotten any of the ones that I DON'T like -- the ones which appear to get annoyed that the book wasn't something that it wasn't even TRYING to be. I got a couple of those for DK.)
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No, there isn't.
Date: 2006-05-23 06:32 pm (UTC)Something went wrong.
Re: No, there isn't.
Date: 2006-05-23 06:41 pm (UTC)Re: No, there isn't.
Date: 2006-05-23 06:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-05-23 08:27 pm (UTC)What I look for in a review, regardless of what is being reviewed, are strong, detailed, *detached* opinions. If it contains profanity or other highly emotional content, I'm more likely to ignore the review as an unreliable review.
Like anything else, the more professional a "reviewer" sounds, the more likely people are going to give it credence.
Here's hoping you keep getting the positive (yet professional sounding!) reviews.
no subject
Date: 2006-05-25 12:09 am (UTC)I did refrain from pointing out to one of rasfc's recent crop of PA spammers that it was very obvious that he and his family had written all the glowing reviews of his book on Amazon. :-)