My round-up of four fascinating new graphic novels just ran in the Minnesota Star-Tribune:
Four new graphic novels cover a gamut of subjects, from a serious-minded study of Charles M. Schulz’s artistic legacy to the quiet, creatively turbulent life of Jane Austen and a pair of memoirs, one about a trauma-haunted love life and the other about growing up in Wisconsin’s ginseng capital…
Junot Diaz spent five years trying to write a novel. Five. But try as he did every single day, nothing worked. It was stuck at the 75-page point and refused to budget.
So he decided to give it another go. He dug out the manuscript and tasked himself with finding something, anything, good in it that he could salvage. What happened?
Spent the whole night reading everything I had written, and guess what? It was still terrible. In fact with the new distance the lameness was even worse than I’d thought…
With nothing else to do except became what he calls “a normal” (no bookstores, no hanging out with writer buddies, definitely no reading the Times Sunday book section), Diaz just went back at it:
There were no sudden miracles. It took two more years of heartbreak, of being utterly, dismayingly lost before the novel I had dreamed about for all those years finally started revealing itself. And another three years after that before I could look up from my desk and say the word I’d wanted to say for more than a decade: done.
Sometimes dedication and time are all you have to throw at the book. But eventually it can work. Dedication will win out, not a burst of inspiration.
Keep going.
Mike Royko, the Chicago columnist who set the template for pugnacious yet thoughtful commentary and deft political satire, wasn’t sure what he wanted to be when growing up. In his March 16, 1990 Chicago Tribune column, “Why Be a Writer? Think of Your Feet” (collected in One More Time: The Best of Mike Royko) he described being a seven-year-old and helping his dad at work:
Watching my father dashing up those steps at 5 a.m., sweat pouring down his face, I learned two things: 1. Being a milkman was hard work. 2: I didn’t want to be a milkman.
Royko learns about other professions like house painting (“Housepainters drank a lot. My grandfather and his cronies said that was because fumes from the paint were hazardous but shots and beers were an effective antidote”) and many other menial jobs (bowling alley, landscaping, machine shop). Rather than declare that this was the true and honest kind of labor, he came to a simple conclusion: “They made my flat feet hurt.”
Then Royko read an article about Ernest Hemingway’s typical day:
He would arise, have a bit of breakfast, and write until about noon. Then he and a pal or two would get in his cabin cruiser and spend the rest of the afternoon sipping tall cool ones and fishing … This impressed me as a sensible way to earn a living, and that was when I began thinking about becoming a writer…
We don’t all get the Hemingway life. But no writer ever said their work was murder on the knees or involved inhaling toxic fumes.
My review of the new film Warfare just ran at PopMatters:
A tight and terrifying docudrama combat procedural, Ray Mendoza and Alex Garland’s Warfare tracks just one engagement in the Iraq War. The firefight was unremarkable enough to have almost certainly been forgotten by anybody not there. For the soldiers and civilians involved, however, it was likely a singular moment of their lives…
Here’s the trailer:
It’s hard for writers to avoid making themselves the subject. They do, after all, spend most of their time with just themselves and the page. Theoretically, they think of the reader. But they’re not around. The writer is. Always.
This can cause you to be just a little too present in the work. Noticeable. Drawing attention. John McPhee had some thoughts on this, which can be guessed from the title of his piece, “Omission“:
When you are deciding what to leave out, begin with the author. If you see yourself prancing around between the subject and reader, get lost…
The reader might like you. They may even have chosen your work because of other things you have written. But fundamentally they are there because they want to know what you have to tell them.
Get to it.
My review of Death of a Unicorn is at PopMatters:
If you find yourself wondering at any point during Alex Scharfman’s Grand-Guignol fantasy satire Death of a Unicorn, “Wait, how come there are unicorns in the Canadian Rockies which nobody has seen before?” then this is not the film for you. However, if some part of you is thinking, “I hope those vile ultra-wealthy despoilers of all that good and pure get what’s coming to them,” then you are in luck. One thing this fitfully fun but often pandering splatter of a film keeps its focus tightly pinned on is the importance of comeuppance for the baddies…
Here’s the trailer:
When Gary Shteyngart met Philip Roth, the unofficial dean of American letters had some advice for him:
He told me not to eat butter…
This may not seem that helpful at first glance. But Shteyngart saw a silver lining:
I’m not sure that counts as “writing” advice, but it’s kept me squarely in the 128-132 pound zone, which has made me super-hungry as a writer…
Listen to what the Roths of the world tell you if you’re lucky enough to be around them when they dispense their advice.
Even when it makes no sense.
My review of the new film Gazer is at Slant Magazine:
Located somewhere near the intersection of The Conversation and Memento, Sloan’s feature-length directorial debut marries the former’s obsession with watching to the latter’s meditations on the nature of perception. Like both films, it jolts the wandering, obsessive nature of its main characters with an interruption of violence and sews confusion throughout…
The trailer is here:
According to screenwriter writer David Koepp, who has knocked out screenplays for everything from blockbusters like Jurassic Park to nifty little ghost stories like Presence, momentum is key to getting anything done and done well:
You want to just execute it and have it done, so you can then go back and read it to see what’s lacking. Some days you’ll write seven or eight pages that you just cut the next day because you’re finding the story. It’s part of the process…
Just get it on the page. Write now. Cut later.
Some books turn out exactly as the writer imagined. Not many, though.
Shelby Foote understood how crucial it is to never ignore something good, even if it doesn’t fit with your plan:
I can’t begin to tell you the things I discovered while I was looking for something else…
Follow that digression. See where it takes you.
The new Joan Didion Collection from the Library of America is a monster, but in a good way. It packs together an incredible seventeen works, ranging from her best-known collections of essays and reportage (The White Album, Slouching Towards Bethlehem), novels (Run River, Salvador), and later works (The Year of Magical Thinking). It’s pretty much all here, really only missing her and John Gregory Dunne’s screenplay work (which is fine) and her early film criticism for National Review (not fine, somebody needs to collect those).
I wrote about the collection for the Spring 2025 print edition of Rain Taxi Review of Books:
If there is any disagreement that we are at Peak Didion, the November 2024 publication of the Library of America’s three-volume Joan Didion Collection should settle it. This is the kind of hefty doorstop that announces An Important Writer You Should Have Read, but unlike some such LOA sets, this one presents one classic after another with virtually no padding, giving the full sweep of Didion’s career as it evolved across decades of American ferment, imperial overextension, and social entropy…
Booker-winning novelist Ali Smith believes you don’t have to worry about the reader in the end:
All a writer can do is work with language to get the story right. Full stop. & I’ve always believed that what readers feel is readers’ own business…
This is liberating. But it is also a challenge; a gauntlet thrown. Because it means that there is nothing else for the writer to worry about.
Nobody else can or will write the book that you can write…
It’s up to you.
There’s nothing wrong with planning out your writing. Some people need it. Organizing things can keep you from introducing things in your first chapter that can kill plot possibilities for the conclusion if you’re not looking ahead.
Also, knocking out a detailed outline is a fantastic way to procrastinate getting any real writing done.
But avoid limiting yourself.
Roddy Doyle explains:
Change your mind. Good ideas are often killed by better ones…
Writers sometimes worry they have a limited amount of material and shouldn’t waste it. This isn’t true. If you’re meant to be a writer, the ideas will come. If you think of a better one, go with it.
From William S. Burroughs’ “A Thanksgiving Prayer”:
Thanks for the last and greatest betrayal
of the last and greatest of human dreams.
A film of his reading the full piece, from Gus Van Sant:
The legendary improv comedian, screenwriter, and underestimated director (yes, standing up for Ishtar) Elaine May had a motto which has been repeated in different iterations for decades:
The only safe thing is to take a chance.
According to her long-time comedy partner Mike Nichols, this wasn’t as contradictory as it sounds:
If you stay safe, and don’t take a chance—don’t do something that’s different from the last thing, something that makes you nervous and holds dangers—if you keep trying to do the thing that worked last time, the encrustations of mannerisms begin to take you over. And pretty soon you’re no good at all—and therefore not safe at all…
Avoid those encrustations of mannerisms at all cost.
Chris Barsanti 
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