Writer’s Desk: Focus on the First Line

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A bored reader has lots of other things to do. Hook them right away. Do not waste your time, because if you do they will feel you are wasting theirs.

William Gibson’s Neuromancer kicks off with one of the greats:

The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.

That has nothing to do with the plot. He is just describing the sky. But the invocation of omnipresent, flickering, slightly decayed and malevolent yet mundane technology establishes everything you need to know about the story that follows.

Gibson himself said:

The first line must convince me that it somehow embodies the entire unwritten text…

It’s a challenge. You might have the whole piece done but still feel dissatisfied with the opener. Spend the time to get it right.

(h/t Joe Fassler)

TV Room: ‘Monty Python’s Life of Brian’ is a Very Silly DVD

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My review of the new Criterion 4K edition of Monty Python’s Life of Brian ran at PopMatters:

Fittingly, Life of Brian was conceived on a pub crawl. The standard origin story, as told in one of the documentaries on Criterion’s packed special features disc, is that while they were boozing around Amsterdam during the press tour for Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Eric Idle had an idea for a project called Jesus Christ: Lust for Glory. It stirs the imagination to think of the possibilities that title conjures: a send-up of muscly epics ala Mel Gibson; a glitzy musical packed with song-and-dance numbers; or a down-and-dirty melodrama about an ambitious, slightly schizoid kid from Galilee with a dream…

Speaking of which, the Monty Python FAQ is still available at all your finer book outlets.

Screening Room: ‘Power Ballad’

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(Lionsgate)

I reviewed Power Ballad at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Film Festival for Slant Magazine:

John Carney’s Power Ballad has most of what it needs to succeed, from a charming pair of leads to a fittingly catchy song. But like the fraught relationship between its two musician characters, Rick (Paul Rudd) and Danny (Nick Jonas), the film never finds the right groove…

It opens June 5. Here’s the trailer:

Reader’s Corner: Stephen King’s Real Nightmares

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I reviewed Caroline Bicks’ new book on Stephen King for PopMatters:

An academic by training, Bicks specializes in Shakespeare and has several works on the Bard to her name, e.g., Cognition and Girlhood in Shakespeare’s World (2021). As such, she frames Monsters in the Archives as a literary researcher ready to leverage her training in deep text analysis. Yet her book also has a personal component, given her attachment to King’s work from an early age. You know what she means: that quivery, excited, frightening feeling that comes from reading stories like ‘The Boogeyman’ too young…

Writer’s Desk: Hard is Not Impossible

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One thing writers always want more of is time. We often think that if we only had long stretches of uninterrupted, unencumbered hours stretching out before us like a rapture-worthy landscape, then all of our work could get done. There is some truth to this. It’s hard to knock out a novel while working fourteen-hour days.

But hard is not impossible. Also, as Maggie O’Farrell says, obstacles can actually help:

There is nothing so dangerous to good writing as having too much time, too much liberty. You need the filtration system of being kept from your work. You need to reach the keyboard in a state of hunger, of desperation. You need to sit down at your desk with a desire to unleash all that you have been mulling over, all those solutions and permutations and reframings…

Interruptions are the devil and can break up your flow. But interruptions are also life, which you cannot put on hold just to get more pages done.

Screening Room: ‘Project Hail Mary’

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(Amazon MGM Studios)

I reviewed Project Hail Mary, Amazon’s new film about Ryan Gosling saving the planet, for PopMatters:

Some may walk out of Phil Lord and Christopher Miller’s goofy and pop-operatic adaptation of Andy Weir’s novel Project Hail Mary trying to string together all the shards of hard science fiction-speak that just burst from the screen at them. They may be able to math all the astrophysics which the film’s scientist hero, Ryland (Ryan Gosling), has to wrangle to save Earth from microscopic alien organisms that are rapidly eating the Sun. While that would be an admirable accomplishment—Drew Goddard’s script does not stint on the science—it would also be beside the point…

Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘Fantasy Life’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Film - Festivals, Film - New1 Comment

I reviewed Fantasy Life for Slant Magazine:

Writer-director Matthew Shear’s Fantasy Life is an initially familiar-feeling rom-com about urbane yet nerve-rattled characters that eventually, but just barely, transcends expectations. A law school dropout who appears constantly shell-shocked by the concussions of everyday life, Sam (Shear) is first seen getting fired from his impossibly bleak office job before having a panic attack at a bookstore. With seemingly few prospects, he takes on a job as a manny for the children of a wealthy couple, Dianne (Amanda Peet) and David (Alessandro Nivola). Sam almost immediately falls headlong for Dianne, an ex-actor suffering from different but similarly debilitating and career-stifling mental health issues…

Here is the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘Nova ’78’

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One of the must-see documentaries at MoMA’s Doc Fortnight festival was Nova ’78.

My review ran in The Playlist:

Backstage at the Nova Convention, a three-day gathering in late 1978 ostensibly to celebrate the work of William S. Burroughs, an organizer worries that audience members will be upset by the news that Keith Richards has cancelled, as rock stars do. About to mount the stage, Patti Smith agrees to deliver the bad news, saying with the grinning nonchalance of a bohemian gunslinger (or neo-punk Bob Dylan), “if they’re going to give anybody shit, let them try to give me shit.” It’s a barely buffed-up little diamond of a moment in Aaron Brookner and Rodrigo Areias’ “Nova ’78,” a gratifyingly non-exhaustive documentary filled with them…

Writer’s Desk: Keep Them Coming Back

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The late Martin Amis had a simple and attractive philosophy of reading:

I’m very committed to the pleasure principle. You read literature to have a good time. Or why else would people go on doing it?

It’s very easy to get caught up in what you want to say, how to say it, and your larger themes. But no matter how dire the subject or serious the intent, writing can still give pleasure.

Writer’s Desk: Enjoy It

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In “How ‘Bigger’ Was Born,” Richard Wright laid out how Native Son and its iconic protagonist were constructed. Towards the end, he describes not just the process but the joy of writing:

I don’t know if Native Son is a good book or a bad book. And I don’t know if the book I’m working on now will be a good book or a bad book. And I really don’t care. The mere writing of it will be more fun and deeper satisfaction than any praise or blame from anybody…

Have fun.

Screening Room: ‘Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie’

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(Courtesy of Neon)

I reviewed the new Matt Johnson film Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie for PopMatters:

For those who enjoy or get past Johnson’s clowning, Nirvanna is a deftly intricate mockumentary about friendship, celebrity, and the trap of nostalgia shot like a sci-fi nerd’s YouTube paean to Back to the Future, all wrapped inside a love letter to Toronto. Johnson and co-writer Jay McCarroll play slightly tweaked versions of themselves, much like Rob Brydon and Steve Coogan self-spoofed themselves in The Trip series…

It opens tomorrow. Here’s the trailer:

Writer’s Desk: Pay Attention

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In “The Art of Fiction,” Henry James gave the example of an English novelist who was asked how she was able to depict the lives of French Protestant youth so vividly and true to life. Her response was that it all boiled down to once looking into a room:

Once, in Paris, as she ascended a staircase, [she] passed an open door where, in the household of a pasteur, some of the young Protestants were seated at table round a finished meal. The glimpse made a picture; it lasted only a moment, but that moment was experience. She had got her impression, and she evolved her type. She knew what youth was, and what Protestantism; she also had the advantage of having seen what it was to be French; so that she converted these ideas into a concrete image and produced a reality…

James uses this example to argue that experience is crucial to writing but that experience can be just about anything. Even a glance. In short:

Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!