Three Approaches to Writing a Review
Below are three possible approaches to writing your book review, all named for Aretha Franklin hits:
(A) “Jump to It”––shortest route; results in a solid review
(B) “This Is for Real”––more time; more creative and deep; more rewarding for you and your readers
(C) “Freeway of Love”––most time; most creative and deep; most rewarding for you and your readers
None of these is an approach for trying to get it right the first time, even if you’ve done an outline first. Why? Well, as weird as it may seem to actually plan on making a mess at first, that’s usually how the writing process works best. Trying to come up with original, interesting thoughts while simultaneously editing ourselves ties us into knots and leads to dead words. With a process approach, the exploratory, somewhat incoherent mess you make initially does get cleared up and the writing that results is way more original, way more you, and way more exciting to read. The key is to take a leap of faith and trust the process. If at any point you feel stuck, let us know––we’ll gladly help unstick you so you can bring forth your truest response.
All of these approaches assume that you have read and taken notes on the book you are reviewing.
If you have a preferred writing process, feel free to use that instead. Reach out to us for help at any point––to be an ear while you’re brainstorming, or to help you get past a stuck spot.
The writing guidelines that follow owe a great deal to Peter Elbow, in particular his book Writing with Power: Techniques for Mastering the Writing Process. We urge anyone who wants to develop their writing further to visit his website and read his books.
(A) “Jump to It” (2.5–5 hours)
This approach takes the least time. It will likely lead to less creative/deep thinking and be less personally transformative than the “This Is for Real” or the “Freeway of Love” approach, but it will help you produce a solid review that you can stand by.
Step 1: Warm Up (20–30 minutes)
5 minutes: Flip through the book and review your notes. Mark book pages and/or notes you took that leap out at you for any reason.
5 minutes: Picture your audience. This includes anyone who visits the website, but it might be more helpful to visualize friends, family members, and/or members of the communities you participate in––people you plan to share the link with once your review is posted. (If you sense that picturing everyone you’ll share the piece with is shutting down your process, visualize only your biggest fans, or shut everyone out and write for yourself.)
Do one or both of the following to get your creativity and ideas flowing:
10 minutes: Freewrite nonstop. You can write about inner and outer distractions, ideas and feelings you’re having about the book or about writing a review of it … anything goes. This is invaluable if you’re feeling any resistance or anxiety about writing. Keep your pencil moving or your fingers typing.
10 minutes: Tell someone else or talk out loud to yourself about your ideas and feelings about the book.
Step 2: Brainstorm (50–100 minutes)
Set a timer for the number of minutes you have available for this phase. Then, write everything you can think of about the book. As with freewriting, write quickly and don’t bother correcting anything as you go or trying to order your thoughts. Unlike freewriting, stay focused on your thoughts about the book. Incorporate references to places in the book that demonstrate a point you want to make (even just the page number, or a few words, is fine for now). You’ll probably flip through the book periodically to find remembered passages so you can connect dots or check hunches. If you get stuck at any point, grab another idea from your notes and/or the book and use it to keep going.
When the timer goes off, stop.
Step 3: Draft (50–100 minutes)
Picture your audience as you draft. (Again, if you sense that picturing everyone you’ll share the piece with is shutting down your process, visualize only your biggest fans, or write for yourself.)
Read through your Step 2 writing and mark the parts you think are important.
Try to identify your main point, and mark it. If you’re not sure what your main point is, move on.
Order the parts you marked in an outline that expresses each idea as one to three sentences. You are likely to think of new ideas that will help fill out your outline; add those in.
Look at your outline. Do you now perceive a main point? If so, mark it or write it. If not, move on.
Write a draft of your review, minus the introductory paragraph. You are writing your ideas in the order you created, and adding flesh to the bones, including quotes from the book that demonstrate your thinking (be sure to include a page number in parentheses following each quote). If you haven’t yet identified your main point, you are likely to do so as you write this draft. Your main point may come midway through (“The important thing is…” “The point is…” “Ultimately…”) or at the end, when you’re summing up your thinking. Don’t sweat the small stuff––precise word choice, grammar, spelling, etc.––at this stage. Do let new ideas and insights flow into your piece as they come.
Now write your introductory paragraph, in which you state your main point. If you figured out your main point as you drafted your piece, for example while you were writing the conclusion, state it in a way that is accessible to someone who hasn’t read your piece yet; then tweak the conclusion to state it again but more briefly.
If you still haven’t figured out your main point, pick the best idea in your draft, make that the main point, and focus your introductory paragraph on it. In this case, you’ll probably need to tweak the draft (cut, add, and/or rearrange) so that everything in the piece supports the introduction and flows logically.
Step 4: Revise and Polish (30–60 minutes)
Now put the Writer into the passenger seat and put the Editor into the driver’s seat. This step is all about objectivity and keeping your audience and purpose front and center. (Now that you’re revising, it’s time to picture whoever you think your actual audience is, if you haven’t been doing so from the beginning. Your primary purpose might be something like: Give a concise summary of the book’s form and content and convey your assessment of the work.)
Make sure you have included quotes and examples (with page numbers) from the text that demonstrate your thinking. When quoting, include just enough language to get the job done.
Read your draft aloud to locate problems with syntax and flow; make corrections as needed. Flesh out ideas that a reader would need more help grasping. Increase the energy and pace of your writing by asking yourself how you can state each idea in the fewest, most vivid words possible.
Read through again to correct spelling, punctuation, capitalization, and grammar.
Add a title that grabs interest and gets to the heart of your thinking.
Step 5: Send Us Your Piece!
We can’t wait to read it! We will edit it for clarity, liveliness, and proofreading errors. We’ll make sure you agree with our edits before finalizing and posting the piece.
Note that if we think the piece needs significant revision before being published on the site, we’ll let you know, and provide specific, supportive guidance.
(B) “THIS IS FOR REAL” (4–6 hours)
This approach leads to way more creative and deep insights than the “Jump to It” approach will, but doesn’t travel quite as far into the unknown during the early steps of the process as “Freeway of Love” does. You choose a few among several ways to generate ideas while always keeping the end goal (your book review) in mind.
Step 1: Warm Up (10 minutes)
5 minutes: Flip through the book and review your notes. Mark book pages and/or notes you took that leap out at you for any reason.
5 minutes: Picture your audience. This includes anyone who visits the website, but it might be more helpful to visualize friends, family members, and/or members of the communities you participate in––people you plan to share the link with once your review is posted. (If you sense that picturing everyone you’ll share the piece with is shutting down your process, visualize only your biggest fans, or shut everyone out and write for yourself.)
Step 2: Freewrite Exercises (100–150 minutes)
Do a few of the following. Enjoy seeing how each exercise helps you gain fresh insights into the book. Refer to the book and/or your notes as needed. How creative and divergent can you let your thinking get while staying close to the text?
Beginner’s Mind: Zen teacher Suzuki Roshi asked us all to have “beginner’s mind”––open, present, relaxed. Freewrite thoughts about the book, without second-guessing your ideas or trying to write polished prose. If you can’t think of anything to write, take a quick glance at the book and/or your notes and use that to launch your freewrite. You can do that periodically if you run dry.
Already Done: Pretend you only have 20 minutes or so to write the whole piece. Imagine you can open the gates of your mind and the final essay will come galloping out like a fast, powerful horse. This isn’t going to actually end up being your final piece, but it can propel you forward.
Yeah But: Write dialog in which different voices are arguing different opinions about the book. You might set this up as different parts of you, or you and someone else (friend, family member, the author, a different author, your cat). It could be two or more voices. Try not to treat them as puppets; rather, let them listen and respond to one another.
X Y Z: An interesting review isn’t just a recounting of what happens in the book, in order––but linearity can be useful in the idea-generation stage. Write what happens in the book and what you thought as you read each event or part. Or, write the history of your ideas about the book: “From reading the book jacket I expected X, but a few pages in, I realized Y, and then … (etc.).”
Story Time: Write about events and/or people from your own life that come to mind in relation to the book. Tell more than a word or a phrase, but less than fully written out stories. List as many as you can.
Close-up Shot: Delve into details in the book that ignite your imagination: an image, a scene, a character, a poem, a rhythm, the use of space on the page. Do this for several different kinds of such details.
Let’s Pretend: Imagine the audience is different than what you think is your likely audience (visualize your third grade homeroom, or the cast of characters in your favorite movie, or … ), or that you’re a different person (the author of the book you’re reviewing, your cousin, Ayodele Casel, Malcolm X). Write about the book as if this is so.
Step 3: Draft (100–150 minutes)
Picture your audience as you draft. (Again, if you sense that picturing everyone you’ll share the piece with is shutting down your process, visualize only your biggest fans.)
Read through your Step 2 writing and mark the parts you think are important.
Try to identify your main point, and mark it. If you’re not sure what your main point is, set your writing aside for a day or two. Because you’ve already given some effort to trying to identify the main point, your unconscious mind will work on the problem during this break.
If you’ve taken a break, now revisit the parts you marked and identify your main point. (If you’re still not positive what your main point is, just decree one.)
Make an outline by selecting the parts you’ve marked as important that support your main point and writing them each as a one- to three-sentence bullet point in the order you think is most logical. You will have generated many more interesting ideas than you can probably use; be fearless about letting go of good material if it doesn’t fit your main point.
Write a draft of your review. You are writing your ideas in the order you created, and adding flesh to the bones, including quotes from the book that demonstrate your thinking (be sure to include a page number in parentheses following each quote). Don’t sweat the small stuff––precise word choice, grammar, spelling, etc.––at this stage. Do let new ideas and insights flow into your piece as they come.
Sometimes while writing a draft, a writer realizes that they missed something major about what the book is doing, and this radically shifts what they see as the main point of their review. For example, a reviewer struggling to write their draft suddenly realized that the narrator of the novel they had read was the Cloud (as in the internet). This shed light on the seemingly garbled, verbose way the narrator spoke, and radically shifted what the reviewer thought of the book’s writing style and meaning. Everything fell into place. The reviewer wrote a new main point and a new outline that consisted partly of bits from their raw writing and partly from new insights and observations based on their now much deeper understanding of the narration. Because of all the reading, thinking, and jotting they had already devoted to the process, writing a new outline and drafting a new piece was easy.
Step 4: Revise and Polish (30–60 minutes)
Now put the Writer into the passenger seat and put the Editor into the driver’s seat. This step is all about objectivity and keeping your audience and purpose front and center. (Now that you’re revising, it’s time to picture whoever you think your actual audience is, if you haven’t been doing so from the beginning. Your primary purpose might be something like: Give a concise summary of the book’s form and content and convey your assessment of the work.)
Make sure you have included quotes and examples (with page numbers) from the text that demonstrate your thinking. When quoting, include just enough language to get the job done.
Read your draft aloud to locate problems with syntax and flow; make corrections as needed. Flesh out ideas that a reader would need more help grasping. Increase the energy and pace of your writing by asking yourself how you can state each idea in the fewest, most vivid words possible.
Read through again to correct spelling, punctuation, capitalization, and grammar.
Add a title that grabs interest and gets to the heart of your thinking.
Step 5: Send Us Your Piece!
We can’t wait to read it! We will edit it for clarity, liveliness, and proofreading errors, and make sure you agree with our edits before finalizing and posting the piece.
Note that if we think the piece needs significant revision before being published on the site, we’ll let you know, and provide specific, supportive guidance.
(C) “FREEWAY OF LOVE” (5–7.5 hours)
Of the three approaches, this one is a great choice if you want to access creative and deep thinking, experience personal transformation, and blow your readers’ minds. Relying on the process described, you take a ride into the unknown and arrive at a place way more exciting than your current, conscious mind can conceive.
Step 1: Warm Up (20–30 minutes)
5 minutes: Flip through the book and review your notes. Mark book pages and/or notes you took that leap out at you for any reason.
5 minutes: Picture your audience. For this “Freeway of Love” approach, visualize only those people who you feel have utter faith in your beautiful, fertile mind––people who will love seeing you stretch and being stretched a bit themselves as they read your piece. Sometimes it’s helpful to include in your audience a few different people who embody facets of this view of you––for example, your favorite [cousin/coach/teacher] plus your favorite musician, sports hero, spiritual leader, etc.
Do one or both of the following to get your creativity and ideas flowing:
10 minutes: Freewrite nonstop. You can write about inner and outer distractions, ideas and feelings you’re having about the book or about writing a review of it…anything goes. This is invaluable if you’re feeling any resistance or anxiety about writing. Keep your pencil moving or your fingers typing.
10 minutes: Tell someone else or talk out loud to yourself about your ideas and feelings about the book.
Step 2: Freewrite/Reflection Cycles (120–180 minutes)
Freewrite for 10–20 minutes. The only difference between this and the warm-up freewrite in Step 1 is that what you write is now about the book. But unlike the approach described in Step 2 of the “Jump to It” approach, let yourself write anything that’s even tangentially about the book. For example, you might scribble free associations to memories, dreams, people, conversations, soundbites. Or you might write about feelings of excitement, dread, hope, boredom, doubt, enjoyment in relation to the book or part of the book. You’re engaging with the book and with the notes you took while reading the book––you’re finding and jotting down passages or phrases in the book or your notes that connect to your memory, soundbite, feeling––but beyond that constraint, give yourself a lot of room.
Stop after 10–20 minutes, when you feel a bit loose and tired and before you feel like you’re running on empty. Read over, or think over, what you’ve written. Pick what you think is the most important idea generated by what you wrote. This might be something you actually wrote or something that now, sitting back, comes to you. If you’re not sure whether it’s really the most important thing, pretend that it is. Write it down as one to three complete sentences and mark it so you can easily find it later.
You have now completed one freewrite/reflection cycle.
Start a second freewrite/reflection cycle by using the important thing you wrote down as the new launching pad. You might extend your thinking about that important thing or you might bounce off it in a new direction. You might continue in the same mode as before (for example, relating to the book in a very personal way) or you might change modes (for example, writing very analytically). Have fun with this. You’re engaging with the book and with the notes you took while reading the book––when you make claims about the book or jot associations to or feelings about it, you’re finding a passage or phrase in the book or your notes that aligns to your claim, association or feeling––but beyond that, anything goes.
After 10–30 minutes, pick out the most important idea in your new writing and write it down in one to three sentences. This also might feel different than it did the first time. For example, let’s say the first time, you had already written something that felt important and that’s what you wrote as your important idea, but this time you really don’t see anything that feels most important, so you pluck something out of thin air, claim it’s the most important thing, and then use it as your new launching pad.
You have completed the second freewrite/reflection cycle.
Repeat the cycle multiple times, until you feel like you have located thinking about the book that (a) is clearly more connected to what the book is trying to do than your initial thinking and (b) surprises and excites you.
Step 3: Draft Your Review (120–180 minutes)
Picture your audience as you draft. (If you sense that picturing everyone you’ll share the piece with is shutting down your process, visualize only your biggest fans, or shut everyone out and write for yourself.)
At this point, you have some choices. Pick the one that intuitively feels right:
Go through all your freewrites looking for and marking what feels important. Write each out in a full sentence, and then order them into an outline. Then write a draft of your review. You are writing your ideas in the order you created, and adding flesh to the bones, including quotes from the book that demonstrate your thinking (be sure to include a page number in parentheses following each quote). Don’t sweat the small stuff––precise word choice, grammar, spelling, etc.––at this stage. Do let new ideas and insights flow into your piece as they come.
Or, just start writing the draft review based on where you’ve arrived in your thinking through the cycling process.
Or, if you know you’ve gotten closer to the book but you don’t know how to formulate that into words yet, look over the important ideas you’ve jotted throughout the cycles; then freewrite in a directed way, trying to figure out what you’ve learned about the book through the process. Then pause and look for the most important idea to emerge from this new freewrite. Then make an outline or go straight to writing the draft review.
Step 4: Revise and Polish (30–60 minutes)
Now put the Writer into the passenger seat and put the Editor into the driver’s seat. This step is all about objectivity and keeping your audience and purpose front and center. (Now that you’re revising, it’s time to picture whoever you think your actual audience is, if you haven’t been doing so from the beginning. Your primary purpose might be something like: Give a concise summary of the book’s form and content and convey your assessment of the work.)
Make sure you have included quotes and examples (with page numbers) from the text that demonstrate your thinking. When quoting, include just enough language to get the job done.
Read your draft aloud to locate problems with syntax and flow; make corrections as needed. Flesh out ideas that a reader would need more help grasping. Increase the energy and pace of your writing by asking yourself how you can state each idea in the fewest, most vivid words possible.
Read through again to correct spelling, punctuation, capitalization, and grammar.
Add a title that grabs interest and gets to the heart of your thinking.
Step 6: Send Us Your Piece!
We can’t wait to read it! We will edit it for clarity, liveliness, and proofreading errors, and make sure you agree with our edits before finalizing and posting the piece.
Note that if we think the piece needs significant revision before being published on the site, we’ll let you know, and provide specific, supportive guidance.