Nick Bryan

writing about writing

How To Review Stuff

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Come on, this post was at least a 7...

As a brief scan of this blog will reveal, I write a lot of reviews. It has now reached the stage where I can formulate a review of a TV show (or other things, but often TV) in a very short space of time.

So, since it’s something I have been asked for advice on, I figured the art of reviewing warrants a blog post. How do I assess stuff? Is there a technique, or do I just splurge?

And yes, some of this will be specific to reviewing TV shows, as that is my area.

How much synopsis?

This is fundamental, and the main thing that annoys me when I read some online reviews: do we need an epic, blow-by-blow description of the entire story? Isn’t that what Wikipedia’s for? If your article is headed “recap”, fair enough, but if your “review” is a painstaking description of the story, with a few words of opinion at the end, that seems bad form.

Of course, do mention plot points when you have an opinion to give about them, but synopsis without opinion is like a sheep with no wool or meat – cold and unappetising. (Or something.)

How much spoiler?

Spoiler use, however, is more personal preference. For TV reviews, especially episodes which aren’t the very first, I tend to write for an audience who have already seen it. So, yes, full spoilers in effect, complete with a warning.

On the other hand, for books or films, the audience might be reading your review for purchasing recommendations. So I avoid spoilers, especially last-third ending spoilers, and when I do give them, they’re clearly labelled or really vague.

But to be honest, there’s not a “right” answer here. Still, worth thinking about before ploughing ahead gleefully.

How much moaning?

How negative to go is another big question, and I could easily do a whole post on this alone. One day, I still might. But in general: there is a lot of negativity on the internet, because, hell, it’s easy to be snide. I try not to review things I know I’ll hate, because I don’t think the rage of someone who would never have liked the show in the first place is useful.

Case in point: over the last few years, various internet people tried to cover The X Factor. We mostly did this, to be honest, because others were doing it and seemed to be getting attention. Many of these faded away, and the ones that did well and thrived were write-ups like Stuart Heritage’s Guardian pieces which, yes, were glib and jokey, but still genuinely enjoyed X Factor when it was getting things right.

Hence why me writing about The X Factor was pointless, but I let myself give often-negative reviews to Sky1’s Sinbad, because although it wasn’t a great show, it was in my wheelhouse – family-aimed fantasy drama, yes, I’ve reviewed that. I truly wanted Sinbad to be good, I’m always happy for decent shows in that genre, and I made sure to acknowledge when it had a strong week.

In short, decent reviewing should come from a place of wanting to be positive. Grumpy, well-known reviewin’ misanthropes like Yahtzee Croshaw of Zero Punctuation and Charlie Brooker may overplay minor annoyances for comic effect, but they also tell you emphatically when they’ve found something they like, and that’s a major reason they have credibility.

There are other things I could write about, like structuring your reviews (try to structure by point, storyline or theme, as opposed to banging through in story order), but I’ve covered my main issues, really. And now you too could become a well known reviewer of TV shows online! (We’re looking for people on The Digital Fix TV site if you want to have a go. Email me. Self-service ends.)

As ever, add your own advice below, or tell me I’m talking complete arse. And obviously, like all my reviews, the above is just my personal opinion. Now, I’m off to review Black Mirror.

Zero Dark Thirty – Some Dark Thoughtys

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Jessica Chastain in Zero Dark Thirty - GOOD AT ACTING

I don’t often review films –not really my medium, and my opinions are usually in line with the consensus anyway. For example, I saw Django Unchained, thought it was fun and surprisingly emotional for Tarantino, much like everyone else.

But I recently experienced Zero Dark Thirty, and honestly, the reviews I’ve read didn’t entirely capture my opinion of it. So here I am, throwing my slightly contrary hat into the ring. Disagreements welcome.

Torture & Jessica Chastain’s Acting – Are Both Good?

Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t going to be a brutal flaying of the movie, I thought the first 50-60% were great. Despite the inevitability of the end, I enjoyed the search, the highs and lows, Jessica Chastain was as brilliant as everyone says in the lead role of Maya, and she’d totally deserve that Oscar.

I liked how we slowly warmed up to the character despite both her prickly nature and the few off-duty scenes. And as many have said before, there are some genuine ethical questions raised. We spend time with the CIA agents, seeing torture in action to gain crucial intel, and then Obama appears and starts declaring it shall never happen again. You can feel their dilemma, and feel guilty for sharing it at the same time – it’s intriguing work.

Oh, and the scenes on the ground in Pakistan, as Maya and her colleagues hunt down Bin Laden’s hideout, are stunning work considering they’re basically just some people driving around. It’s like a car chase, only realistic. As an investigation process movie, this part was brilliant.

Kneel Before The Almighty BUT

And now, the BUT.  The last hour or so of Zero Dark Thirty didn’t really work for me. The Maya character, who I was starting to really like, gets marginalised and most of the action shifts from espionage drama to bureaucracy, which means loads of men yelling at each other.

Yes, one of them was Captain Jack from Torchwood, but even that only made me giggle for a few seconds. The first chunk of the movie was exciting enough for me to forgive already knowing the ending, the second… less so. I basically sat there waiting for them to take that damn house.

When the raid finally happened, it was an exciting sequence, but by then I was already a little bored. I’ve heard anecdotal points about the film being on the verge of shooting when Bin Laden was killed, leading to extreme rewrites, and that could be one reason why the ending seemed odd.

Anyway. Lovely storytelling, good acting, still glad I saw it, but shame I emerged disillusioned with the climax. Have you seen Zero Dark Thirty? Do you agree with me, or am I talking gibber?

Turning Writing Into A Game – When Do I Win?

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I will settle for the kettle.If you enjoy the nausea-inducing November writing challenge of NaNoWriMo, maybe you’ve found yourself wanting to find other ways to turn writing into a game. Myself and a friend, both living in the Nunhead region of London at the time, once attempted a second 50k writing challenge in the month of March, under the name “NunheadWriMo”.

You may laugh, but it kinda works with the abbreviation. Without a forum to motivate us, we pushed each other by exchanging trash talk on MSN. For those of you without a kindhearted friend to hurl verbal abuse, though, how can you keep “winning” at writing?

Well, if a daily target and willpower aren’t enough, here are some other incentive schemes.

Camp NaNoWriMo – If It Ain’t Broke, Start It Up Again

Sensing an appetite for NonNovNaNo, the NaNoWriMo people have started Camp NaNoWriMo, where you can link up with other like-minded people to support each other through a 50k push outside of November.

There’s also some hut-based system that I don’t really understand, because they love that camping metaphor. Hopefully next feature is a campfire to burn unwanted writing. But anyway, 1667 a day is quite a lot, so let’s check out less masochistic targets.

750words.com – When 500 Is Too Little, But 1000 Is Too Much

The idea here is that you do 750 words a day, come rain or shine, and the website at 750words.com keeps track of them for you. This is based on a similar exercise called “Morning Pages” where you churn out a few pages of typing every morning, simply to get the writing muscles working.

So your 750 words could be journal dream-writey stuff, or they could be the mid-length building blocks of your novel. Personally, I have to do a thousand a day before I can relax, but 750 is pleasantly unintimidating, I can see the appeal.

Word Count Game – I Can’t Help It, I Have To Beat My Friends

If you want both the doable word counts of 750words and the satisfying friend-killing of NaNo, I’ve recently started playing a word count game with my writing accomplices Alastair and Claire. The aim here is to reward consistency as much as word counts –do at least 250 words a day, and you get daily points for your unbroken run of productive days (1 on your first day, 2 on your second, etc), plus points each day for words written (250 words = 1 points, 500 words = 2 points, 1000 words = 3 points, 2000 words = 4 points).

So producing intermittent huge amounts actually gets you less points than building up a long chain of days. It’s an interesting game, and 250 is definitely an achievable amount – it’s pretty small, in fact – I have to stop myself from clocking out after doing it. Still, this is the method I’m currently using to make myself write – the prospect of “beating” my two friends. (Currently boosting my points for said game by writing about it, and winning by 12 points as of this post, so feeling good.)

If you want to join this game, there’s a spreadsheet obtainable here. We’ve made our own copy and shared it between the three of us, rather than joining the communal pile-on. You may wish to do the same with your friends.

Has turning your writing into a game worked for you? Is there another scheme that has proven useful? Or does this kinda stuff cheapen the artform somehow? Thoughts welcome.

Monkeys with Typewriters by Scarlett Thomas – Timely Book Review

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Scarlett Thomas - Monkeys With Typewriters

Monkeys With Typewriters by Scarlett Thomas came out in October 2012, making this less untimely than most of my book reviews, and features the popular novelist and creative writing lecturer setting down, in a mere 400 pages (plus footnotes and appendices), her secrets to good writing.

There are, you may have noticed, a lot of books on writing out there. So, as someone who has already done a whole Masters on the subject, did I get anything extra out of Thomas’s contribution to the genre? Well, yes and no.

Part One: Shall I Kill Them And When?

Broadly, this book splits into two sections: one on how to structure a novel, another covering the nuts and bolts of writing it. The first of these is the more interesting – Thomas has a lot to say about story structure and plotting, her feelings on “basic plots”, etc.

You might get more out of this if you work in a genre similar to her – fictional novel, probably literary. For any story, though, if you’re struggling to crystallise your ideas into a story shape, this book provides a thorough exploration, including tables and the like.

There are sections where Thomas spends ages picking apart concepts, rather than ploughing ahead; I also don’t really agree with her about writing strictly “from experience” (and I’m not even a hard fantasy or sci-fi writer). Still, if you want to learn broad story shapes before playing with them, this is interesting foundation stuff, especially as my particular creative writing MA didn’t go into this material in such detail.

Part Two: How Do I Make Their Deaths Beautiful?

The second part, rattling through such piffling items as “sentences” and “characterisation”, isn’t quite as strong, and considering how fast we skip through such large ideas, I’m not sure Thomas is as interested in these aspects. The back half’s still worth a skim, and if you’ve never read any writing books/advice before, you’ll get more from it. But yes, for those of us who have reached the point of starting blogs about writing or doing an MA, a lot of this might sound familiar.

Still, Monkeys With Typewriters gave me a lot to think about in terms of broader plotting and working with themes, I may even try a few of her matrices. I don’t know if this is a single writing book to live by, exactly, but as a solid introduction, it’s intriguing.

Also, if you’re a huge fan of Scarlett Thomas and want an insight into her process, this book is obviously great. But if you fall into that category, you’ve probably already bought it.So, anyone else read this? Did it redefine your writing process?

Twenty Thirteen And All That

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So, happy new year! As you might notice, I’ve made some 2013 changes. As in, we’re now on Blogger (because Tumblr kept crashing), and the site has a new look. For anyone reading this on the RSS feed, why not go check out the new design?(And if you’re not yet on the RSS feed, why not subscribe? It’s easier than remembering to check the site. Previous subscribers should have come across.)

Anyway. Aside from a new look website, with added staring eyeball, what else is new?

Editorsomestow?

One big change, which I didn’t really plug on here much: I am now Editor of the Television @ The Digital Fix section! Yes, a promotion. I now get to write about whatever I want, or at least, whatever the TV channels dump in front of me. Also, if you desperately want to review TV for a website, get in touch.

Writers always welcome.In other news, I finished one novel, started another. I also have an array of short stories left over from my MA, which I am hoping to get out there soon.

Oh, and I moved out of South London to Walthamstow, home of East 17 and the dubious nickname “Awesomestow”. That might’ve been the biggest adjustment.

So, that was your new year news post. I might try and get the weekly writing posts going again next week, it seems a shame to have a new website with nothing on it except links to other websites. For now, hope you like the site, let me know if you spot a broken link. I have already spent quite a while trying to eliminate them, but Tumblr links are a tricky breed, they get everywhere.

Anyway. Hope the rest of you also had a fabulous new year, I know I did. May 2013 be good and joyful for us all.

NaNoWriMo 2012: The Halfway Point

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You may remember my blog post of a fortnight ago, where I unveiled my plans for NaNoWriMo 2012. Well, I’ve done some writing today, so have time to post a midway update. As I slap this up on the blog, at nearly-midnight on the fifteenth, NaNo is exactly halfway over.

So, how am I doing? How are you doing? How are our friends and families doing?

Quality Over Quantity – The Reality

As I said in the previous entry, I’ve been promising myself I’d slow my NaNo pace, accept a lower word count in exchange for a more considered plot, better prose and, y’know, actual themes and shit. Most previous years, I have made this vow and failed, allowing myself to be caught up in the competitive rush to 50K, and “won”.

Well readers, I’m proud to announce this sickening run of success and achievement is definitely over now. Unless I completely lock myself indoors for the remainder of the month, I’m not going to hit fifty thousand. But I am fairly pleased with what I’ve written so far, a mere fifteen thousand.

As the properly NaNo-brained of you already know, that is a fair way below the proper midway target of twenty-five thousand. But the writing itself doesn’t suck, I’m pleased. Still hoping to finish the first major segment of my novel, too.

How To Fail Gloriously

So, have I learnt anything, aside from accepting non-success?

To be honest, my main lesson was one I’d suspected from the start: for me at least, planning is key. I’m trying to produce something with themes, threads and an interesting plot, mostly to avoid having to ram them in later. These do not tend to appear by themselves.

Not that making it up as you go along, then going back and editing heavily once you’ve worked out what the book’s actually about, isn’t a valid approach – it’s just I’m a little tired of having to rewrite NaNo novels basically from scratch before I can read them without wanting to cry in a bin.

Maybe finishing that Creative Writing MA has left me with a new sense of quality control, who knows. Or I just spent enough time sobbing in skips whilst finishing my thesis. One or the other. (I got a merit in the MA, by the way. Which means graduation! Party time.)

Anyway, based on boring multiplication, I should finish out the month at around thirty thousand. Check back in early December to see whether I got anywhere near it.