Category: Books

Writer’s Desk: Talk Yourself to Sleep

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Even the most prolific authors hit roadblocks. Val McDermid (40-plus books) is no different.

She tackles those problems in an interesting fashion:

If in the morning I know I’m going to be writing a scene that’s not quite clear in my head yet, or a difficult confrontation, or a complicated transition, or I’m not quite sure why somebody’s doing something at all, then I’ll set myself a problem when I’m going to sleep and I’ll talk myself to sleep almost through it, and then nine times out of ten when I get in the shower in the morning, the answer’s there…

Reader’s Corner: ‘The Martians’

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My review of David Baron’s new history book The Martians is at PopMatters:

[In 1907] the country was several years into a bona-fide mania for Martians. The aliens were the basis of hit theater shows, a constant source of wildly illustrated speculations in newspapers, and the subject of fervent speculation. Starting in the early 1890s, discussion on the subject tended not towards whether there were intelligent beings on Mars but what kind of intelligent beings they were…

Writer’s Desk: Self-Doubt is Okay

On By chrisbarsantiIn Books, Writing1 Comment
W. B. Yeats (1914)

In those moments when nothing seems to be working, some writers might imagine that for more successful (or at least productive) others who have spent years lashed to the desk, things came easily. They must have known they were great, yes?

One of W. B. Yeats’ last poems, “The Circus Animals’ Desertion,” shows what a fallacy this is. He starts the piece in a vein of specific misery any writer will recognize (“I sought a theme and sought for it in vain / I sought it daily for six weeks or so”) and then drops a line which is like a sigh of giving up (“What can I but enumerate old themes”).

The trick is not to gnash one’s teeth about having nothing to write about and being unable to write it well even if an idea did come. A little wallowing is okay. But see it as all part of the process. If you have zipped through a piece and feel inordinately proud of the results, something might be missing. Self-doubt throws sand in the gears, but in the process those grains can get ground into diamonds.

Remember Charles Bukowski:

Bad writers tend to have self-confidence, while the good ones tend to have self-doubt…

Writer’s Desk: Trust Your Characters

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Tana French (Dublin Murder Squad series) writes novels about flawed people. Very flawed people. But her advice to writers about how to approach those characters is simple, clear, and for some likely very difficult to follow:

Your character is always right. No real person thinks they’re being stupid or misguided or bigoted or evil or just plain wrong – so your characters can’t, either. If you’re writing a scene for a character with whom you disagree in every way, you still need to show how that character is absolutely justified in his or her own mind, or the scene will come across as being about the author’s views rather than about the character’s. You can’t make the judgement that your character is wrong; let the readers do that for themselves…

Trusting the character, right or wrong, is another way of trusting the reader.

Writer’s Desk: It Ain’t Easy, Kids

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One of the great pulp writers Florida, and actually America, ever produced, John D. MacDonald (best known for The Executioners, filmed twice as Cape Fear) knew about determination, productivity, rejection, and making a living somehow on what strangers thought about the words he typed on a page.

As such, his advice to young writers deserves a listen:

Most beginners think that writing is a quick ticket to some kind of celebrity status, to broads and talk shows. Those with that shallow motivation can forget it. Here’s how it goes. Take a person 25 years old. If that person has not read a minimum of three books a week since he or she was ten years old, or 2,340 books—comic books not counted—and if he or she is not still reading at that pace or preferably, at a greater pace, then forget it. If he or she is not willing to commit one million words to paper—ten medium-long novels—without much hope of ever selling one word, in the process of learning this trade, then forget it. And if he or she can be discouraged by anyone in this world from continuing to write, write, write—then forget it…

h/t CrimeReads

Writer’s Desk: Copy from the Masters

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Michael Moorcock is among the most prolific and influential British science fiction and fantasy writers of all time. He doesn’t seem to ever get stuck for inspiration.

But when Moorcock needs ideas or advice on how to tell a story, he goes to the greats:

Find an author you admire (mine was Conrad) and copy their plots and characters in order to tell your own story, just as people learn to draw and paint by copying the masters…

No shame.

Writer’s Desk: No Shame in Writing Fast

On By chrisbarsantiIn Books, Writing1 Comment

In his enthralling new biography on William F. Buckley, Sam Tanenhaus says the following about his subject’s approach to his work:

Like so many writers he loathed the act of writing, but like very few he did it with speed and efficiency…

Buckley spent a career making use of that efficiency. For many years, he wrote multiple columns a week while editing the National Review, hosting Firing Line, and publishing dozens of books (sure, some were padded collections of columns and letters, but still), not to mention swanning around high society affairs, going yachting, and generally engaging in the life of a gentleman. He accomplished this through efficiency. Not messing around. Knowing what he wanted to say before firing up the word processor.

In 1986, Buckley took to the pages of the New York Times to make an argument for fast writing. A scold over at Newsweek had snarked that Buckley sometimes spent a mere 20 minutes on his newspaper columns, which was apparently too little time for serious writing. Buckley responded in indignation:

It is axiomatic, in cognitive science, that there is no necessary correlation between profundity of thought and length of time spent on thought … I am, I fully grant, a phenomenon, but not because of any speed in composition. I asked myself the other day, Who else, on so many issues, has been so right so much of the time? I couldn’t think of anyone. And I devoted to the exercise 20 minutes…

See what you can get done in that much time. Hold yourself to 20 minutes. Then do it again the next day. And the next.

You might be surprised.

Writer’s Desk: Sondheim on Quantity

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Stephen Sondheim at work

Some people work and work even if nobody else can understand why. Interviewed not long before he passed away in 2021 at the age of 91, Stephen Sondheim talked about productivity:

George Bernard Shaw kept writing plays until he was ninety-four. Of course, the last fifteen years they were terrible plays, but he did write them…

One could always just watch TV, of course. But in the end even writing a terrible play (or novel or poem or agitated essay about the state of modern literature) will make you feel better than most other things.

Writer’s Desk: Write What You Love

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Salman Rushdie (Elena Ternovaja)

We’ve all had the problem. You read something and it hits you on some level. Still, there is something missing. It has some elements that work but it never quite gets there. You may even think, If I was writing this…

Follow that instinct. Listen to the voice of your inner reader. This is what Salman Rushdie tries to do:

I write books I’d enjoy reading, I’m the reader standing behind my shoulder…

Writer’s Desk: Attention is Good

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If a writer publishes and nobody notices, did it actually happen? To the writer, absolutely. That’s weeks, months, or years of gnashed-teeth labor in those pages. But to the rest of the world, not so much.

Ron Chernow’s mammoth new biography of Mark Twain shows how the great American humorist, sentimentalist, lecturer, anti-imperialist scold, and failed entrepreneur got people to read what he wrote. First, he lived a hell of a life:

Mark Twain discarded the image of the writer as a contemplative being, living a cloistered existence, and thrust himself into the hurly-burly of American culture, capturing the wild, uproarious energy throbbing in the heartland…

Brimming with material, Twain then grabbed the nation by its lapels:

A protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick, he courted controversy and relished the limelight. A ferocious bargainer and shameless self-promoter, he sought fame and fortune without hesitation and established the image of the author as celebrity…

There are limits to this approach, of course, as any writer whose publisher has anxiously inquired about their social media reach knows.

But what Twain knew is that people are busy. They have a lot of things they would rather do than read what you wrote. Harlan Ellison wrote stories in bookstore windows.

Do what you have to do.

Reader’s Corner: Spring 2025 Graphic Novels

On By chrisbarsantiIn Books, Comics-Graphic NovelsLeave a comment

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…