My review of Verity is at Slant Magazine:
Michael Showalter’s adaptation of Colleen Hoover’s Verity is a drudge of a film that repeatedly sets the stage for juicy reveals or escalating drama only to fritter them away. It’s also longer than it has any right to be, leaving plenty of time for the average viewer to ponder why adaptations of Hoover’s works keep getting such shoddy treatment…
Verity opens this Friday, for better or worse. Here’s the trailer:
All this year, Rain Taxi Review of Books has been running a series of articles on the last 250 years of American literature. For their fall 2026 issue, I contributed a (very incomplete) history of the U.S. comic book industry:
When the United States was founded, bound books with text (and occasionally some illustrations) were already a cornerstone of Western civilization. But the comics trade—based largely on brief, serialized, staple-bound booklets targeting youthful audiences with fully illustrated adventure or comedy stories—was largely an American invention. The thin profit margins and constant need for new material created a business marked by frantic pacing, soap-operatic storylines, and the elusive quest to set trends. As the medium developed artistically, it offered instances of rote uniformity and daring experimentation in equal measure, another way comics held the mirror up to the young country’s social and political life—especially in the tumultuous twentieth century…
You can get the print issue here.
I reviewed the new Barbara Kingsolver novel Partita for PopMatters:
Every time an author sets out to write a book, they are in some ways wishing disaster on themselves. A thousand obstacles await, from a tardy Muse failing to spark inspiration to the many interruptions of the real world to the often dissatisfied or disinterested reading public. Then there are those writers who, after somehow coming out the other side of that vale of tears, not only whole but triumphant, have decided: Yes, I’ll do that again; willingly. This is the challenge that awaits Barbara Kingsolver with her new novel, Partita…
I wrote about Colson Whitehead’s Harlem Trilogy for PopMatters:
Colson Whitehead’s relationship with the crime fiction genre is complicated. Like Jonathan Lethem, another New York-centric writer who came out of less salubrious districts of literature before being accepted into the pantheon, Whitehead has long been one of America’s top-ranked practitioners of critically approved fiction (awards, good speaking gigs, New Yorker appearances). This is what makes his just-concluded “Harlem Trilogy” such a treat and surprise…
Read the book, not the summary.
Write the piece, not the prompt.
Suffer like the artist you are. It ain’t easy, but if it were easy, it wouldn’t be worth doing.
Colson Whitehead, ladies and gentlemen.
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…
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.
According to Oscar Wilde, the formula is very simple:
A writer is someone who has taught his mind to misbehave.
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:
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.
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.
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!
In Walt Hunter’s inspiring new essay “Stop Meeting Students Where They Are,” he describes the value of pushing his students in an American literature class to write without the safety net of what they know. He references a line from W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz:
Once a fluent and successful writer, Austerlitz suddenly falls into a crisis of faith about the sentence, which becomes “at best a makeshift expedient, a kind of unhealthy growth issuing from our ignorance, something which we use, in the same way as many sea plants and animals use their tentacles, to grope blindly through the darkness enveloping us.”
Running with that concept of “writing into the darkness,” Hunter challenges his students to knock out a quick essay about their difficulties reading, providing them with prompts:
One was: “Write about a moment in an Emily Dickinson poem that you don’t understand.” Another was: “Write about your morning routine, but in the style of Faulkner.” I didn’t want to create 32 new Faulkners. I wanted the students to experience the moment when their own style broke through the imitation, when the attempt to write like Faulkner failed and revealed, as a kind of photonegative, their own emergent voices. John Keats called this state of being “negative capability,” a condition in which the writer leans to live in a perpetual state of uncertainty. If it was really true that the students couldn’t read, then it was up to me to put the books in their way and make them deal with them…
Try this approach yourself. Think of something that makes no sense to you, that you have failed to understand. Describe that feeling. Write through it.
See what you find.
What’s going on in this picture? You could use an image search to figure it out. That’s one way to solve the question. Or you could write a story about it, trying one of the following approaches:
What you write can but does not have to resolve, feature an inciting incident, or contain any great shock or surprise.
But it does need to be a story.
Nobody likes New Year’s resolutions, least of all writers. Setting out a list of things you need to do in the next twelve months can just feel like a list of things you will forget to do. We should never forget the unique joy that comes with not doing, per the great Douglas Adams:
I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.
Nevertheless, January is not a bad time for new thinking. The holidays are past. Work is back. The nights are long. There are too many new streaming shows to commit to. Maybe you’re dissatisfied with what you wrote last year. It’s worth thinking about trying something different.
To wit:
Try none or all of these. The point is to do something that is unfamiliar. I spent the last many months in multiple nonfiction book projects. Once done with those, I will be trying to give fiction another shot. Most likely, it will never see the light of day. But then most of what we make never does.
The trying is the point. Keep trying.
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