A simple and fun handbook that’s perfect for new and aspiring writers.
Adams’ practical handbook guides readers through a seven-step writing method with a focus on concrete daily activities.
The author has spent over a decade teaching her writing method to a variety of audiences, helping to prompt procrastinators or aspiring writers who don’t know how to get started. The steps cover topics including generating ideas; developing characters, settings, and plots; and drafting and revision. Each day’s agenda begins with “warmups,” moves on to a core activity, and concludes with “stretches.” Readers are encouraged to begin with a clean slate, but they can also work on a project already in progress. The most helpful days are the fifth and seventh, when participants are expected to start some actual writing and to learn how to close-read and revise. The final section has suggestions on how to use the method beyond the initial brainstorming and kick-starting phase. The activities are all explained clearly and no doubt will prove easy to execute. The strengths of the workbook are its clarity, simplicity, and flexibility; writers who just need a nudge can use a few of these exercises in the space of an hour, while others may devote a week or more to completing all of the tasks comprehensively. This is a nuts-and-bolts guide to competently beginning a manuscript—there is no focus on the deep contemplation and insight that transform writing into meaningful art. The program is designed to elicit a sense of accomplishment, so there is a danger that the workshop itself can stand in for the creative product; more optimistically, these steps can help writers to embrace the joy of the process along with the end result. Adams is present as a guide and coach, reflecting on her own experiences and journey through the steps (“what’s worked best for me in frustrating times of ‘nothing is coming to me!’ is learning something new that also keeps my hands busy”), but she is never intrusive. This primer is most appropriate for new and amateur fiction writers, but anyone may glean a few helpful tips.
A simple and fun handbook that’s perfect for new and aspiring writers.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2024
ISBN: 9781896711232
Page Count: 212
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 18, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.
In which the veteran humorist enters middle age with fine snark but some trepidation as well.
Mortality is weighing on Sedaris (Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977-2002, 2017, etc.), much of it his own, professional narcissist that he is. Watching an elderly man have a bowel accident on a plane, he dreaded the day when he would be the target of teenagers’ jokes “as they raise their phones to take my picture from behind.” A skin tumor troubled him, but so did the doctor who told him he couldn’t keep it once it was removed. “But it’s my tumor,” he insisted. “I made it.” (Eventually, he found a semitrained doctor to remove and give him the lipoma, which he proceeded to feed to a turtle.) The deaths of others are much on the author’s mind as well: He contemplates the suicide of his sister Tiffany, his alcoholic mother’s death, and his cantankerous father’s erratic behavior. His contemplation of his mother’s drinking—and his family’s denial of it—makes for some of the most poignant writing in the book: The sound of her putting ice in a rocks glass increasingly sounded “like a trigger being cocked.” Despite the gloom, however, frivolity still abides in the Sedaris clan. His summer home on the Carolina coast, which he dubbed the Sea Section, overspills with irreverent bantering between him and his siblings as his long-suffering partner, Hugh, looks on. Sedaris hasn’t lost his capacity for bemused observations of the people he encounters. For example, cashiers who say “have a blessed day” make him feel “like you’ve been sprayed against your will with God cologne.” But bad news has sharpened the author’s humor, and this book is defined by a persistent, engaging bafflement over how seriously or unseriously to take life when it’s increasingly filled with Trump and funerals.
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.Pub Date: May 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-39238-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
PROFILES
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