Review "Fascinating, literary criticism as never practised before, over the shoulder as the writer writes - properly compelling reading for anybody who likes Lee Child novels, which is to say anybody who enjoys thrillers, which is to say anybody who values being told a story....revelatory...[Child says] "I don't begin with the writer: I begin with the reader." He does - and that's why he is the most commanding brand in fiction now." (David Sexton Evening Standard)"I found it very entertaining. Until Child can be persuaded to publish his own version of Stephen King's On Writing, I think it will be a wise investment for anybody who wants to write popular fiction." (Jake Kerridge Daily Telegraph)"It is as if Jack Reacher wrote literary criticism instead of beating bad guys to death with his elbows...because of Child's eloquent fascination with his craft, this book happens to be a better manural of writing than any manual of writing. It's also a entertaining buddy-suspense movie." (Financial Times)"It's fascinating to watch the process of writing unfolding in real time...it shouldn't work - after all writing is a predominantly mental activity - and yet it does in a way that makes you wonder why no one's thought of doing this before....Andy Martin has created something new here: a fusion of literary criticism, biography and fly-on-the-wall meta-novel which serves as a remarkable insight into the creative process." (Spectator)"Love Jack Reacher? You'll have to enjoy this....revels in the minutiae you didn't realise you wanted to know." (Shortlist) Book Description A book about the writing of a book - watch Lee Child write one of his bestselling Jack Reacher thrillers. See all Product description
R**N
Partial success
Initially quite interesting but the digressions grew more frequent as the book went on, occasionally verging on silly when simple concepts were mapped to philosophical and linguistical constructs. Doing an analysis deconstructing particular sentences and then ascribing deeper meanings Child was probably not aware of seems more an exercise of displaying the knowledge of this book's author. This goes on more and more as the book progresses. The first part of the book is fun, entertaining, and enlightening. As Child progresses in his work. "Reacher Said Nothing" loses much of its tight focus and is almost a random collection of academic assertions. Do these really apply? Should they really apply? I suppose it is up to the reader.The book certainly has much to offer, but the reading of it is somewhat hit or miss. Reading it will give you a sense of Child's writing process, but not too much of it. You'll get his opinions on small facets of the book and what it takes for him to write one. I couldn't help but feel as though I was getting the outside of the puzzle and while the frame might grow more and more complete, the middle never comes clearly into focus.The book is probably better if you are a complete Reacher-holic and think the books can do no wrong. As a general detailing of the creative process going into a contemporary bestseller, it is probably the best thing we have, probably by a lot. But it still lags a bit with some of the more obscure academia references, too many invocations of Beckett, and it was a bit annoying digging out the symbolism that didn't seem to be put in on purpose.One can take piece already written and deconstruct it far past the point of anything that had been in the author's mind.All in all, a fine book whose earlier promise gets lost in the academic musings of the author. Though they always return us to Child, Reacher and the book that his is writing, a good many of them break the spell over and over. If you have an interest, by all means read the book. It's not for a casual trip into the mind and process of Lee Child, but it may be the best we ever get. If you can get past the author's self-indulgences, it's not a bad thing at all.
W**.
Good book for writers to read.
The author can be really annoying at times. What's worst is that he's at his most annoying right at the beginning. I was so annoyed it took me months to go back and read on. First of all, I find the Lee Child Jack Reacher books to be wonderfully clever and witty. Reacher doesn't need to beat people up for me to appreciate his view of the world. And there are those Lee Child bits, like 'mattress on a waterbed,' 'grain silo as big as an apartment house,' to me they just clunk and annoy, but I don't forget them. There's clearly something more than big guy beats up the bad guys. (I also laughed several times a day lugging around my 35 pound back pack while trying not to stink for two months in Japan. 'Reacher and his folding toothbrush,' crack me up every time.) What I found was almost all the best Lee Child writer stories are in this book, there are some very valuable Lee Child writer tips, questions, theories here. Pages 136-139. Just great--worth the cost of the book and putting up with Martin (gosh, what am I doing that's like this??? We are only annoyed by what we are doing wrong that we see in other people, and those stuck in the same space with us for long periods of time, (train, car, bus, marriage... ), all others we don't care for we ignore.)
M**L
Good insights into Lee Child's unusual writing methods
Very readable, but there are a few passages where you think: what has this got to do with the book about Lee Child writing his own book, Make Me? Sometimes the answer is, Not much. There are passages where Martin just riffs off on his own little thoughts and stories and Child goes into the background.I enjoy Child's Reacher series, and remember reading Make Me and finding it gripping. So while it was interesting to see what a huge enthusiasm there is for Reacher in all strata of society, it was what Martin said about Lee Child's method of writing that I enjoyed more.Child writes, surprisingly, with a real 'seat of the pants' approach. In other words, he starts writing with an idea in his head, and stops when he doesn't know what to do next. He never writes a second draft. The first draft is it. With Make Me he wrote 500 words and stopped for several days. But the thing was, within those first 500 words were the seeds of the rest of the book, only he didn't know at the beginning how all those seeds would come to fruition. He didn't even understand what his characters were actually doing, or who the person was that had just been killed.There are plenty of seat of the pants writers around; most of them write a quick first draft and then go back and revise and revise, often producing several more drafts, usually with substantial changes in them. I've never heard of any other writers who work to Child's method - unless of course you count 19th writers like Dickens and Trollope, who seemed to start at the beginning and write until they were finished. (Trollope supposedly wrote 'The End' to one book, and then started straight on into the next.) But Child's refusal to rewrite anything is more unusual for modern writers, I suspect.The other difference in his approach is his refusal to hurry. If he doesn't know what happens next, he waits, waits until he can see how things will develop. So in a sense a lot of his writing obviously goes on inside his head while he's doing other things - and this book gives the impression that he does quite a lot of other things.I enjoyed the conversations Martin has with Child about writing, and some of the occasions when Child talks about his worldview. But there seemed to be rather a lot of filler here. And curiously, even though Martin says he's going to be looking over Child's shoulder while he writes - and he does for some of the time - we discover at the beginning of one chapter that 16 of the Make Me chapters have been written and we've been party to none of this.Child has plenty to say about writing, thankfully, and is quite happy to dismiss the so-called writing rules of some other well-known writers, including Stephen King (who insists on writing two thousand words at a time, come what may) and Elmore Leonard's famous list of writing rules, which Child surmises he probably wrote to a deadline and just 'shoved [them] down without enthusiasm and without thinking about it.' And then goes on to say that Leonard broke every one of these 'rules' himself.
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