Episode 30: Do you ever get bad reviews? -with Laurel Snyder
Welcome to Episode 30! Join us with author Laurel Snyder as she answers the kid question: “Do you ever get bad reviews?”
TRANSCRIPTS:
Grace Lin: Hello, I'm Grace Lin, children's book author and illustrator of many books, including the middle grade novel Where The Mountain Meets The Moon and the picture book A Big Mooncake For Little Star. Today I'm here with Laurel Snyder, the author of middle-grade novels like Orphan Island and My Jasper June, as well as the early readers series, Charlie and Mouse. Hi, Laurel.
Laurel Snyder: Hi, Grace. How are you?
Grace Lin: Good. I'm so glad you're here today. Are you ready for today's question?
Laurel Snyder: I am so excited for today's question.
Grace Lin: Today's question is from a person named Harmonia and they ask ...
Harmonia: "Do you every get bad review?”
Grace Lin: Do you ever get bad reviews?
Laurel Snyder: Ah.
Grace Lin: What do you do if people don't like your book?
Laurel Snyder: So that's a great, great question. And anybody who has written a book and put it out into the world or a song or a movie or anything else has experienced bad reviews. I think by the time I was five years old I had experienced bad reviews on pictures I had drawn or songs I had sung. Anytime you put anything out in the world, someone's not going to like it. And when I visit schools, when I talk to kids, I really welcome that. I say to them, "It's really important to learn how to use your voice and your brain and sort of be honest and think about the things that you like and don't like in a book." So I will welcome that. I'll ask because I'll say, "If you've read my book and you didn't like it and you want to and you're comfortable with it, put your hand in there. That's okay. Let's talk about it. Why didn't you like it?"
Laurel Snyder: Because any book that does or says anything significant, any book that has any real point of view or focuses on any particular aspect of the world, it's going to be a book that some people really love and some people don't love. I love ballet and my son loves World War One history and those are not the same things, and so the books he wants to read are very different than the books that I want to read. And that's a good thing. That's because we're distinct individual people. So I'm a big fan of bad reviews. And the other thing I'll say about that is I have a really thick skin for it because when I was a kid and then in high school I was in creative writing workshop classes. I was in classes where I shared my work with other kids and they shared their work with me and we sort of learned a skill of figuring out how to talk about and critique each other's work in ways that we did it every day for so many years that we knew that it wasn't a criticism of us as a person.
Laurel Snyder: It was just about the connection between the reader and the work on the page. So, for me, it's not hard. What I do with it when I actually read a bad review, or I wouldn't even call it a bad review, when I read a constructive review, when I read a review that says something about my work that somebody didn't like, what I try really, really hard to do is to stop and take a minute and see if it resonates. There's a little part of me on the inside that kind of when I read something and it bothers me, it agitates me, and I have this emotional response that says, "That's not true," when I have that response it's usually an indication that I need to sit with that review and think about it for a while. Because a lot of negative reviews just roll off me because I said I have a really thick skin. So if somebody says, "I didn't like this book. It was about magic and I don't like magic," that doesn't bother me at all.
Laurel Snyder: That's not a problem. That's just a difference of opinion. But sometimes I'll read a review and somebody will say, "I didn't like this book because I didn't believe that this character would learn that lesson," let's say. I'm making this up, but let's say they said that. That would bother me because what that would mean is that my character didn't feel true to that person. And if that's true then I need to think about that and I need to revisit that book and I need to think about what I can learn from what this reviewer has to teach me. And the thing is, no matter how good a book you write, there's always something you can do better and it can be really, really hard to hear that criticism that agitates you, that makes you feel bad, that you want to push back on but I actually think that those are the best moments for growth. Those are the moments where you're going to learn something you haven't already learned.
Laurel Snyder: Sometimes we learn the same thing a million times over, but sometimes you're ready to learn something you haven't learned before and that can be a really special moment.
Grace Lin: Yeah, I agree. Well, I did not have as thick of a skin as you because when I get a bad review or if I hear people don't like my book it does really bother me a lot and I'll be feeling really, really sad about it. But after I kind of let that sadness hit, I kind of let it wash through me for a while, after a while I can look at that review and I think about it and I think, "Hmm, now what they said, does it make sense?"
Laurel Snyder: Right.
Grace Lin: And then I think, does it make sense? And how can that help me in my next book? I guess what is so painful is that when they don't like certain things in a book and it's too late to change it, right?
Laurel Snyder: Right. Totally. Except, you know what's funny is I will change it when I do a reading. If I receive a critique that really hits home for me about something that's small enough that I can really sort of edit it in my copy, I have a reader copy, I have a copy that I take with me if I go and do readings of every book that I have and I make notes in it. And so if you were to look at a copy of Orphan Island or you were looking at a copy of Bigger Than A Bread Box you would find all these scribbles in it in places where I decided that I could still tighten it or there was a better way to say that. And so I continue revising after a book is published.
Grace Lin: Oh, how interesting. I did not do that. I try to take what I could have improved on and put it into the next book I guess because I kind of want to just "close the book on the book." I just want to kind of keep moving forward. I think that's pretty amazing that you do that because I'm afraid if I do that I might be stuck on the same book forever and ever and ever.
Laurel Snyder: No, I totally get that. I think if you go back and you look at older texts, do you go back and you look at some of the poets who were writing a couple of 100 years ago, you'll find version after version after version of the same poem published in different places and in different ways as the person changed it. And I think it's like the way that libraries will sometimes archive work and what they want is to see all the drafts. They don't want to just see the finished draft, they want to see all the drafts, how you grew, how you got from one place to the next. And I guess I sort of think about it like that. The book is done but I'm not done growing and I kind of don't want to be limited in that way.
Grace Lin: Yeah, I completely understand that. I feel like when I wrote Where The Mountain Meets The Moon one of the criticisms I had was that they felt like the characters were not as deep as they could be. So when I wrote Story Over The Sky I tried to meet the characters much deeper, and then I got criticism for Story Over The Sky that there wasn't enough action, that it was too slow. And so the next book I tried really hard to make it much more action packed. So I kept trying to take the criticism and kind of use that to improve the next book and the next book and the next book.
Laurel Snyder: And I think that we do that forever. It's like a pendulum swinging, right? And you do that with the projects you choose. You'll choose something light and then once you're done with that you're ready to write something heavy again, and you write something heavy and then you're exhausted from it. I feel like we as writers are just always changing and growing and moving in that kind of way.
Grace Lin: Yeah, and that's good that we do, otherwise, it would get boring for our readers as well as us.
Laurel Snyder: Yeah. Yeah.
Grace Lin: Well, thank you so much, Laurel, for your awesome answer and thank you Harmonia for your really good question.
Laurel Snyder: Thank you, Harmonia. That was great. It gave me a chance to think about something that I haven't thought about in a while. So I really appreciate it.
Grace Lin: Thanks. Bye.
Laurel Snyder: Bye-bye. Thanks, Grace.
Today’s Book Review is by Alison Morris. She is reviewing Flor and Miranda Steal the Show by Jennifer Torres.
I love this book, but it's very hard to talk about in a quick fashion. So I'm going to try to give you a super fast flyby. Ready? Okay. So two girls, Flor and Miranda, their families both live and work at a carnival. That means Flor gets to eat carnival food all the time. Miranda has never had carnival food because her dad keeps her family on a pretty tight leash because they're running a band and they have to practice all the time. Flor learns that Miranda's family might get their family slot, which means her dad can no longer operate his petting zoo.
She decides she has to get Miranda sick so that she won't make it to her concert to perform that night. And so she gives her as much carnival food as she can and makes her ride on all of the rides. And what do you think happens? Will she sabotage her success? You're going to have to read this book to find out. It is Flor and Miranda Steal the Show by Jennifer Torres.
Thank you Alison!
Alison Morris is a nationally recognized children's book buyer with an infectious enthusiasm for reading and 20 years' experience matching books to readers. As the Senior Director of Title Selection for nonprofit First Book, she oversees the curation of children’s and young adult books on the First Book Marketplace, hand-selecting a diverse range of titles that speak to and address the needs of kids in underserved communities, with a keen eye to inclusion, authenticity, and kid-appeal. She previously served as Senior Editor at Scholastic Book Clubs, Children's Book Buyer for Wellesley Booksmith and The Dartmouth Bookstore, and was the founding blogger of the ShelfTalker children’s book blog for Publishers Weekly. She'll be joining us from her home near Washington, DC where she spends LOTS of time discussing books with her husband, illustrator and graphic novelist Gareth Hinds.
More about today’s authors:
Laurel Snyder is the author of picture books and novels for children, including National Book Award nominee Orphan Island and the Theodor Seuss Geisel Award winner Charlie & Mouse. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she currently teaches in Hamline University’s MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults program. She lives in Atlanta with her family and can be found online at www.laurelsnyder.com.
Grace Lin, a NY Times bestselling author/ illustrator, won the Newbery Honor for Where the Mountain Meets the Moon and her picture book, A Big Mooncake for Little Star, was awarded the Caldecott Honor. Grace is an occasional commentator for New England Public Radio , a video essayist for PBS NewsHour (here & here), and the speaker of the popular TEDx talk, The Windows and Mirrors of Your Child’s Bookshelf. She is the co-host of the podcast Book Friends Forever, a kidlit podcast about friendship and publishing (geared for adults). Find her facebook, instagram , twitter ( @pacylin) or sign up for her author newsletter HERE.
Special thanks to the High Five Books & Art Always Bookstore, Ms. Carleton’s 2nd grade class at Jackson Street School for their help with our kid questions and reviews.
