On Reviewers, Series, and the Problem of Measuring a Story Mid-Sentence

Lately, I’ve been thinking about reviewers. Not in a defensive way, but in a reflective one. Specifically, about what it means to evaluate a single book that was never meant to be a finished statement on its own.

Most criticism is designed to assess a completed object. A novel is expected to arrive whole, resolve its tensions, close its arcs, and justify itself entirely within its covers. That framework makes sense, until the work in question isn’t a destination, but a passage. Until the book is one movement inside something much larger.

A series isn’t a collection of standalone declarations. It’s a conversation that unfolds over time. It’s closer to an album meant to be played front to back, where some tracks challenge you, some unsettle you, and others only make sense once you’ve heard what comes next. Characters aren’t meant to arrive fully formed or universally likable. Some flirt when they shouldn’t. Some fail. Some don’t rise to the moment until much later. That isn’t a flaw — it’s the work. Growth, like truth, rarely announces itself all at once.

I’ve seen episodic structure described as feeling “like levels in a video game.” I understand the impulse behind that critique, but I think it misunderstands why episodic storytelling exists at all. Episodic doesn’t mean shallow. It means movement. Trial after trial. Place after place. Cold Mountain is episodic. The Odyssey is episodic. Many of the stories that endure the longest are built that way; not because they’re fragmented, but because life itself is.

There’s also a recurring discomfort with characters who remain openly human in dark worlds; who joke, flirt, reach for intimacy, or act foolishly before they’ve earned their wisdom. Those moments sometimes get labeled as cliché or unlikable. But to me, that humanity isn’t decoration. It’s contrast. It’s how people remind themselves they’re still alive when everything around them suggests otherwise. Darkness only has weight if there’s something warm pushing back against it.

I’m not writing this out of resentment. Criticism has its place. Not every book, or series, is meant for every reader, and that’s not a failure on either side. Art doesn’t exist to be universally agreeable. It exists to be honest.

That honesty is what I keep returning to; the danger of prioritizing external validation over inner alignment, and the longer I write, the more true that becomes. A story doesn’t come alive because it satisfies a checklist. It comes alive because the person telling it was willing to listen deeply enough to hear what it wanted to become.

I know why I write. As Orwell said, writing a book is a long, exhausting struggle. Anyone who keeps going does so because something inside them insists on it. That insistence  (quiet, stubborn, and sometimes inconvenient) is where these stories come from for me.

I write primarily for myself. These books exist because I needed to make them. I don’t depend on reviews to justify their existence, and I’m at peace with the idea that some stories aren’t meant to be neatly understood in isolation.

Still, I’m human. Part of me hopes the work connects and  it’s met with curiosity or at least patience and that it’s read as something unfolding rather than something already finished. Wanting that doesn’t contradict writing for oneself. It’s simply part of offering any honest work to the world.

What I’ve come to accept is that not every story should be measured the same way. Some are complete statements. Others are long, winding conversations. A few only reveal their shape after time has passed and enough trust has been given.

And that’s okay.

For certain I've read a few reviews that completely nail the sentiment I was trying to convey and I'm grateful for them. Grateful for thoughtful readers and content to let the work speak in its own time.