An illuminating writing manual with an evolutionary focus.
A guide offers writing advice with a cognitive science twist.
There are plenty of books on writing, many of which recycle ideas about art and storytelling that are, in some cases, thousands of years old. “Meanwhile,” argues Gelfan in his introduction, “over only the past few decades, cognitive science has discovered much about how the human mind sees and orders the world and extracts meaning from it. It’s high time we mix some brain science into our thinking about reading and writing.” The author challenges would-be writers to get inside the minds of their very human audiences and ask themselves: Why do people read? In Gelfan’s view, it’s the result of an evolutionary imperative. The human mind is always on the quest for experience, and a book is perhaps the greatest approximation of a first-person adventure that readers can enjoy at their leisure. From applying “theory of mind” to character development to thinking of realism as a kind of “vegetarian meat,” the author tackles the fundamentals of fiction in perhaps the most basic way anyone has dealt with them before. The book is slim—only about 100 pages—which contributes to the sense that it is just covering the essentials. Gelfan’s prose is concise and elegant, as here where he offers some thoughts about dialogue: “Whatever a character says, the dialogue will better serve you and the reader if it adds a new slant, a surprise, a glimpse of how the speaker’s mind works, reveals a hidden element, raises a question, or at least makes us laugh.” The volume is not overly scientific—the author is a writer and editor, not an anthropologist—but it nevertheless manages to eke out its own philosophical bent. Even fairly conventional pieces of advice, like the counsel concerning dialogue, feel fresh when introduced in the context of lighting up different corners of readers’ primitive brains. In a crowded genre, this craft guide makes a lasting impression.
An illuminating writing manual with an evolutionary focus.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2022
ISBN: 979-8-9863451-0-9
Page Count: 118
Publisher: Sargasso Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2022
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
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.
Avuncular observations on matters historical from the late popularizer of the past.
McCullough made a fine career of storytelling his way through past events and the great men (and occasional woman) of long-ago American history. In that regard, to say nothing of his eschewing modern technology in favor of the typewriter (“I love the way the bell rings every time I swing the carriage lever”), he might be thought of as belonging to a past age himself. In this set of occasional pieces, including various speeches and genial essays on what to read and how to write, he strikes a strong tone as an old-fashioned moralist: “Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude,” he thunders. “It’s a form of ingratitude.” There are some charming reminiscences in here. One concerns cajoling his way into a meeting with Arthur Schlesinger in order to pitch a speech to presidential candidate John F. Kennedy: Where Richard Nixon “has no character and no convictions,” he opined, Kennedy “is appealing to our best instincts.” McCullough allows that it wasn’t the strongest of ideas, but Schlesinger told him to write up a speech anyway, and when it got to Kennedy, “he gave a speech in which there was one paragraph that had once sentence written by me.” Some of McCullough’s appreciations here are of writers who are not much read these days, such as Herman Wouk and Paul Horgan; a long piece concerns a president who’s been largely lost in the shuffle too, Harry Truman, whose decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan McCullough defends. At his best here, McCullough uses history as a way to orient thinking about the present, and with luck to good ends: “I am a short-range pessimist and a long-range optimist. I sincerely believe that we may be on the way to a very different and far better time.”
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781668098998
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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