#BookBlogWriMo Day 13: #FeistyFriday - How do you approach writing negative reviews?

Day 13: #FeistyFriday - How do you approach writing negative reviews?

I know I am not all caught up, but I thought I would write a few old ones and the one for the day I am on while I am trying to get up to speed. Today's topic? Negative reviews. How do I go about writing them. Oh negative review. In a lot of ways they are so much easier to write than reviews for books I love. Why? Well if you hate something you have a good reason for it. I hated the characters because x, y and z, the writing was horrible, the plot was the worst, whatever. I have something that bugged me, some reason why I didn't like it. For books I love though it is not always easy to articulate why. It is like well I loved it! Why? It was just amazing! It is harder to pinpoint exactly what I love about something so negative reviews are far easier to write. I know why I hate something, but I don't always know why I love something.

So what, if anything, is my process for writing them? Let's see. I will think about writing a review for a book I absolutely hated. A book that made me very angry and pretty much didn't like anything about it. So how would I start? Well immediately after finishing the book I will go online and make up a post for said book. I will just vent everything I am feeling at that time. It is not pretty. It will be full of swear words and just going off about everything. I have one of these sitting in my cue right now. It is not something I would ever publish as it is just me venting. It is me ranting and getting out all of my frustrations about the book. If I don't write it down I won't be able to sleep. For real. It is not good.

Then I let the review sit for a few days while I read some other books. After a while, maybe a week, I will go back and sit down and write the review over again. Starting from scratch. I will try and write a more constructive review. A review that is not just me ranting and raving, but saying what I need in a nicer way. Sometimes a week is not enough time to get some space from the book and it still turns out to be a really angry rant and I will let it sit a bit longer. I try to be constructive in my negative reviews, try to say why exactly I didn't like it, but I know I do get ranty even in my second or third draft that gets published. It is just the way I am. I say what I feel, but what I publish is a much, much toned down version of my thoughts. And that is it. Not much of a process, but it is what I do.