The importance of criticism in the development of a writer: sharpen your skills, read and write reviews
An editorial by Elizabeth Stice
When you are running a small online review, one of your biggest challenges is finding reviewers. Every day new books are published, more of them good than many people realize. Yet it is a rare day when a new reviewer can be found, even for very interesting books. And it is not uncommon for a reviewer to appear and disappear again quickly, sometimes after a review copy of a book has been sent to them by a publisher. Reviewing books and engaging in criticism requires time and effort. Many people would rather do many things than engage new books and new authors in this way, including write their own fiction and re-read classics.
Far from being irrelevant to the pursuit of personal ambition, criticism is a proving ground for thinkers and writers. The discipline and effort required for reviewing yield observable results. Writing criticism has been formative for generations of intellectuals.
In Emile Chabal’s new biography of Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Hobsbawm, Chabal emphasizes the role of reviewing in Hobsbawm’s development as a writer and thinker. In the chapter “Culture and Criticism,” Chabal reminds readers that, “It was—and remains—extremely common for apprentice intellectuals to hone their analytical skills by criticizing others” (206). Hobsbawm was writing criticism before he went to university and then continued to do so at Cambridge for Granta. This allowed him to develop his style and his sensibility. Chabal writes of Hobsbawm: “He was a critic before he was a historian, and his experience of the former profoundly shaped the way he wrote and thought about history. Through his writing about jazz, classical music, literature, cinema, and the visual arts, he sharpened his intellectual sword and tested key arguments” (207). Ultimately, Hobsbawm produced more criticism than any other type of writing.
This path to intellectual and stylistic maturity via criticism is not solely for left-wing academics and intellectuals. Roger Scruton sharpened his pen writing criticism and he was the founding editor of a review, The Salisbury Review. Before Hobsbawm or Scruton, we can look back to T.S. Eliot, or earlier still to Samuel Coleridge or Samuel Johnson as notable critics. Coleridge’s friends even clamored for his marginalia, which we might consider informal reviews.
T.S. Eliot took criticism very seriously. In his essay “The Perfect Critic,” he dismisses impressionistic criticism and the mere cataloguing of experiences and provoked emotions. A good critic is able to “see the object as it really is” in a form of purer contemplation that allows us to discern meaning (8). This is a mark of a kind of intelligence. He writes that “perceptions do not, in a really appreciative mind, accumulate as a mass, but form themselves as a structure; and criticism is the statement in language of this structure; it is a development of sensibility” (8-9). Eliot concludes the essay writing that “as sensibility is rare, unpopular, and undesirable, it is to be expected that the critic and the creative artist should frequently be the same person” (9). Creative artists are not too busy for criticism, they are often the same person as the best critics.
Arguably the resistance to practicing criticism is in part a resistance to the discipline required to do it. To engage in serious criticism, you have to put significant time and effort into considering and evaluating the work of others—without waiting for time and other reviewers to determine for you what you should be reading. You must develop your own judgment. It requires being a charitable reader who still keeps score. It requires writing in a somewhat prescribed format, for some review that will no doubt generate less attention from your friends than self-publishing your own fiction. Writing reviews also requires operating at a pace; it is not a leisurely activity. Criticism is the leg day of intellectual work. Your sensibility is better with it than without it, but it is always tempting to skip it.
The link between great criticism and great writing is demonstrable. Writing reviews is one of the best ways to sharpen your own abilities as a thinker and writer. And if you are asking, yes, we are always open to new reviewers at Orange Blossom Ordinary. We would be happy to have you. Send an email.
Quoted in this essay:
The Age of Hobsbawm: The Life of a Revolutionary Historian by Emile Chabal (Belknap, 2026)
The Sacred Wood and Major Early Essays by T.S. Eliot (Dover, 1998)
