Writer Unboxed - The "Connect Kitty" Approves
AAC can't help but deliver the best bloggish content that will inspire writers to new leaps of imagination. This one is mostly new releases, bestsellers, literary fiction historical fiction, mysteries, popular non-fiction, memoirs and biographies.
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It’s been a while since I’ve shared thoughts here, my dear Unboxers. I took a sabbatical last year for a chance to catch up on a deadline that I was horribly behind on after covid and a major family emergency. Ironically, the time off allowed me to enjoy so many more of your posts. You really are a brilliant bunch of writers. There are as many thought-provoking comments as there are posts. This community is so special and I feel lucky to be among you. But I digress. All is well here now. It’s well…except for January. January. It was all things. And it was one thing, like a solid door. Its cold sealed the city in a gray capsule. January was moments, and January was a …
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Please welcome guest author Emilie-Noelle Provost to Writer Unboxed today! Emilie-Noelle is an accomplished editor and writer, having held editorial positions with four magazines and written hundreds of articles over the years. She has a published book of middle-grade fiction, The Blue Bottle, and her first novel of adult fiction, The River is Everywhere–about a 16-year-old who must overcome doubt after his best friend’s shattering death–will release on March 14th. “Provost’s writing is vivid, and her pace is swift. Readers of all ages will be drawn to this moving coming-of-age tale.” – Paul Marion, editor of Atop an Underwood, the early work of Jack Kerouac “Ernest Be…
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Please welcome bestselling Jamie Beck to Writer Unboxed today! Recently, Jamie asked the opinion of other writers about trigger warnings on novels, and such a robust conversation evolved that it seemed obvious: This would make a great topic to explore on WU. Happily, Jamie agreed to write the piece. From her bio: Jamie Beck is a Wall Street Journal and USA Today bestselling and award-winning author of 18 novels, many of which have been translated into multiple languages and have collectively sold more than three million copies worldwide. Critics at Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, and Booklist have respectively called her work “smart,” “uplifting,” and “entertaining.” In addit…
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Please welcome author and book coach Mary McDonough to Writer Unboxed today! If the name Mary McDonough sounds familiar, it may be because she portrayed Erin on The Waltons for a decade. Mary chronicles her Walton family and life beyond the mountain in Lessons from the Mountain, What I Learned from Erin Walton. Her debut novel, One Year, was published in 2014, followed by a second novel, Christmas on Honeysuckle Lane, which was made into a Hallmark movie. “A warm, heartfelt novel about what it means to belong to a family. You won’t want to put it down.” –Mary Alice Monroe, New York Times bestselling author of A Lowcountry Wedding Perhaps the result of the many years sh…
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Therese here. Today marks Writer Unboxed’s seventeenth year. Wow. I think that means WU is off to college soon. In other news, I just popped a new gray hair. A wee bit of history: Writer Unboxed was founded in 2006 by Kathleen Bolton and me. This was the same year Twitter was founded and Facebook opened its doors to the public. On the one hand, we’ve obviously not experienced the same meteoric rise in success as those social media giants. On the other hand, we’ve never been accused of using our vast influence to try to sway an election or snuff out our competitors, so overall I think we’re doing pretty well for ourselves. (Wink.) We have over 10k feed readers, and over…
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The dreaded synopsis. Let’s be honest, we’ve all complained about writing it. And why not, when compressing a 100k-word novel into three short paragraphs can feel harder than a quantum physics exam? When I wrote my first book, I nearly cried when it came to writing the synopsis. It felt awful, trying to get every ounce of my plot into a snack-sized page–at least until I spoke with another author in passing about synopses. She spoke about them with so much love, and said they were one of her favorite things to write. In fact, she said writing the synopsis was the first thing she did, even before laying down the details of her plot. Her offhanded comment hit me in the gut…
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Trained by reading hundreds of submissions, editors and agents often make their read/not-read decision on the first page. In a customarily formatted book manuscript with chapters starting about 1/3 of the way down the page (double-spaced, 1-inch margins, 12-point type), there are 16 or 17 lines on the first page. Here’s the question: Would you pay good money to read the rest of the chapter? With 50 chapters in a book that costs $15, each chapter would be “worth” 30 cents. So, before you read the excerpt, take 30 cents from your pocket or purse. When you’re done, decide what to do with those three dimes or the quarter and a nickel. It’s not much, but think of paying 30 …
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Welcome to a new edition of Desmond’s Drops! This month, enjoy three drops focused on one topic–pacing–each packed with great examples. Pacing Montage Compression Email subscribers, please click directly to writerunboxed.com to view, or visit all of Demond’s Drops on YouTube. Look for more of Desmond’s Drops in March! Have your own bit of wisdom to share? Drop it in comments. [url={url}]View the full article[/url]
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One of the more famous prologues, courtesy of Star Wars. I’m all for retiring outdated storytelling techniques. I don’t miss the puzzle mysteries of the teens and twenties, where the characters were little more than props in complicated, contrived, often implausible mysteries. Second person narration died with Bright Lights, Big City, and that’s fine. And, naturally, a lot fewer people are writing epistolary novels now that a lot fewer people are writing epistles. But it’s too soon to give up on prologues, as a recent client wanted to do. He had a storytelling situation – a bit of critical action that took place well before the main story started – that cried out fo…
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If you’re in a non-writing phase and frustrated, several recent Writer Unboxed posts might speak to your lack of production. They address the seasonal nature of writing careers, the need to respect creative limitations, and how to cope when life gets in the way. This is all well and good. I support this advice one hundred percent. But what if, as per Kelsey Allagood’s recent post, some part of you knows fatigue and overwhelm aren’t your issue? What if somehow, despite a calendar that could be cleared and an express desire to write, your efforts can best be described as lackluster? What if encouragement doesn’t help but only deepens your shame and guilt? Part of you kno…
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In the never-ending quest for snappy repartee in our fiction, we often overlook the ways in which our own personal exchanges with friends and family members provide us with creative language we can use (i.e., steal) for our stories. Using idioms to freshen up dialogue is hardly a revolutionary idea. But many idioms have become so commonly and widely used they amount to clichés: Look what the cat dragged in. Better get cracking. Gotta keep the wolf from the door. [If you’re looking for a source for such expressions, trite and not so trite, check out this idiom dictionary.] The problem with some of our personal sayings is that they are so dependent on a unique context con…
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photo adapted / Horia Varlan A story launches when something happens to a character that lands him in a troubling predicament. Life as he knew it can no longer continue on in the same way. He needs to do something, and his progress toward his goal will be defined by a desire he hopes to achieve. But lurking beneath his hopeful journey is the threat of engaging with circumstances he hopes to avoid. Those circumstances are what we call stakes. Like electrified wires that guard the edges of your protagonist’s path—and which, after he passes, seem to grow closer to each other and strengthen behind him—the stakes for failure drive the protagonist ever forward. Why are such …
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Greetings for the New Year, all! In 2023 I’m presenting a new series for WU, exploring how walking ancient pathways, physical or metaphorical, can strengthen writers in an age when humankind sometimes seems bent on destroying not only itself, but also the precious and beautiful natural world of which we are a part. I’ll build the series around the philosophies that guide me in life and in artistic practice. These owe a significant amount to my membership of a druid order, OBOD. But I am no spiritual leader. I’m an ordinary woman, I’m a writer, and I’m on a journey. The way is sometimes steep and stony, taking a toll on the bravest traveller. And it’s sometimes broad and s…
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Everyone wants their writing to be successful in some way, but what is a successful novel? That starts with your definition of success. If you measure success by the amount of books you finally sell, then you’re probably setting yourself up for some disappointment. Exact figures are hard to come by and are complicated by whether you count ebooks and audiobooks along with print books. It’s estimated that 15% of new books published by the top 10 publishers in the US will sell fewer than 12 copies in a year; only 0.04% will sell more than 100,000. It’s generally considered that a book needs to sell 5,000 copies to break even; 85% of books don’t achieve that.* Reports sugg…
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Happy New Year, WU Community, and prepare yourselves for another journey through the metaphors for writing I find through living my life. During the early days of COVID quarantine, it seems we all picked up at least one Weird Hobby. Weird Hobbies could include, but were not limited to: sourdough breadmaking, flower pressing, making origami cranes, needlepoint, cross stitching, basket weaving, making dollhouse miniatures, paper quilling, historical sewing, bookbinding, playing the keytar, becoming extremely good at niche board games, kombucha brewing, and so on. While I did find my perfect no-knead bread recipe, I also started watching Alexis Nikole Nelson, known as The …
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Therese here to introduce you to our new monthly columnist, Densie Webb! Densie had been working as a vital part of WU’s Twitter team for quite some time, gathering links to share there on the business of fiction. She’ll now bring that valuable knowledge to WU-blog — sharing some of the best, most pertinent links on the business here every month in Getting Down to Business. Please join me in welcoming her to this important beat for us all. Welcome, Densie, and thank you! While we all want to stay on top of what’s current about craft, be alerted to the latest conferences, and connect with fellow writers on social media, staying informed about the business side of writing…
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Therese here to introduce you to today’s guest, Terah Shelton Harris. I met Terah on Twitter, where I learned that she is a librarian and freelance writer–with works appearing in Catapult, Women’s Health, Every Day with Rachel Ray, and more–and that she had tackled a very difficult topic for her debut novel, One Summer in Savannah. I’m so pleased that she accepted the invitation to write for WU to share her experience–why she traveled the road she did, how it stretched her as a writer, and how her topic asked her to consider her readers. “Terah Shelton Harris’s daring debut is nothing short of astonishing. To write a novel that has the capacity to uplift you while it tea…
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In August 2021, my husband and I hugged our son goodbye and left him at a small college in Ohio, 2033 miles away from our home in Seattle. Minutes before the drop-off, my husband realized he had never shown our late blooming son how to shave with a good, old fashioned razor. And as we flew back to Seattle, I panic-realized that I had never taught him how to manage a high fever. How to wrap a scarf to prevent frostbite. How to buy used textbooks. How to shop for groceries. How to get the best price on groceries. How to cook the groceries in a dorm-size microwave. How to date. How to weather a broken heart. I had dropped my boy in the middle of Ohio with nary a survival…
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Some fiction manuscripts read as if they follow something that in mathematics is called a linear equation. A linear equation describes a situation that is ordered and predictable. Cause leads to effect. One thing follows another. One or more elements in a linear equation (X or Y) may be unknown but they are discoverable. Just follow the steps. In a linear equation, the outcome is pleasing but not a surprise. The answer sought was embedded in the equation all along. Once you’re locked into a linear equation, there’s only one way in which things can go. Getting through the problem is a mechanical exercise. You know that your effort will be rewarded. In the end, yo…
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Please welcome debut author Allyson Rice to Writer Unboxed today! After many years as a working actress (Connor Walsh on As the World Turns), Allyson turned her attention to other pursuits– running, yoga, meditation, running retreats for women, writing/directing/producing/performing in an award-winning comedic rap video, creating a line of coloring books for women, producing a handmade jewelry line, and writing a novel. Her debut, The Key to Circus-Mom Highway, releases today! “In this rollicking family dramedy, debut author Rice sends three lovable siblings on a zany yet touching road trip. […] Rice’s sharp observations of society’s absurdity verge on the satirical an…
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How did you start off the New Year? Did you commit yourself to getting off on the right foot with a healthy, productive regimen of physical and mental activity? Or did you sleep in, savoring the holiday weekend? A little of both, maybe? Chances are, at some point on the first day of the year, you did one of two things: followed an existing habit or tried to build a new one. We humans are creatures of habit. This isn’t a bad thing, or a good one; it just is. Habits keep us from having to invent ourselves from scratch every single day. Habit makes our days flow. Habit keeps things running. 2022 was a year of major change for me. I moved a family of four twice, once to tem…
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Writer Unboxed will be on our annual holiday break through the 2nd of the year. We hope that you and yours enjoy the season, and that you’ll join us again in 2023! Until then, write on! [url={url}]View the full article[/url]
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As my favorite Christmas episode of Doctor Who begins, “In the deepest part of winter, at the exact midpoint, everyone stops and turns and hugs and says well done, well-done everyone, we’re halfway out of the dark.” We are regularly pulled in many directions, especially during the holidays when there are family obligations and parties on top of the regular everyday stress not bound to the month of December. What if during this midpoint in the year when the nights are long, what if, now bear with me, we take a break? As writers, we give so much of ourselves to the point where we are giving a part of our souls to the world through our words. Recently while sitting down wi…
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Image – Getty iStockphoto; Joshua James Girl Power and Boys’ Struggles As we approach the new year – today on the winter solstice – 2022 seems incalculably long and complicated. Can this be the same year in which Putin opened his savage land grab in Ukraine? The news industry in which I work is calibrated to promote myriad headlines at once. So many narratives have competed for our attention this year, among them midterm elections; the Supreme Court’s overturn of abortion rights; book bannings; intensifying climate conditions; royal ascent and dissent; inflation and rate hikes; select committee hearings and subpoenas; World Cup controversies; the still-ongoing pandemic;…
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Yes. We’re going to talk about those circular muscles that open and close passages in the body. It’s going to get silly. What’s the deal with sphincters? There are over 50 different kinds of sphincters in your body (50!), all busily doing their job without any glory. We’ve all heard of the biggies—esophageal, anal, and urethral—because we ingest food and eliminate waste every day, and their successes and failures are a big part of our quality of life. But there’s also the pyloric sphincter, which keeps our food in our stomachs until it’s thoroughly mixed with digestive juices. Sphincters cause our irises to contract and dilate in response to changes in light. Pre-capill…
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ALGONKIAN SUCCESS STORIES
WTF is Wrong With Stephen King?
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The Usherette (Historical Fiction). Meeting Orson Welles
Scene: Chapter Four. Jo returns to New York from visiting Madeleine in Florida after receiving a telegram from Orson Welles asking to meet. He wants to premiere "Citizen Kane" at the Palace Theater and needs someone to show him around. The scene captures Jo's passions and core decency - and why the movies matter to her. He wanted to meet at midnight.docx -
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Demystifying the Blog Tour: A Powerful Marketing Tool for Your Book Launch and Beyond
A blog tour is a marketing campaign that involves coordinating a series of blog posts and online promotions to create buzz and generate exposure for your book. It typically involves collaborating with bloggers and influencers who have an audience that aligns with your target readership. These bloggers will read your book, write reviews, host author interviews, and feature guest posts or excerpts from your book on their blogs. The goal is to reach a wider audience and generate interest in your book within their established community. The Blog Tour Framework Here's a breakdown of the framework for a typical blog tour: Identify and contact bloggers: Research and compile a list of relevant bloggers who cater to your book's genre or niche. Reach out to them via email or through their website's contact form, expressing interest in collaborating on a blog tour. Provide review copies: Offer a digital or physical copy of your book to the interested bloggers, allowing them time to read and review it before the tour begins. Create tour schedule: Coordinate with the participating bloggers to create a schedule for the tour. Each blogger will have a designated day to feature your book on their blog and share their review, interview, guest post, or any other agreed-upon content. Create content: Prepare author interviews, guest posts, or excerpts that you can provide to the bloggers to publish on their respective blogs. These pieces of content should be engaging and relevant to your book, enticing readers to learn more about it. Promote: As the blog tour progresses, actively promote each blog post across your own social media channels and any other platforms you use. This will help generate more visibility and encourage your existing followers to visit the blogs hosting your content. Engage with readers: Throughout the blog tour, make an effort to engage with readers who leave comments on the blog posts. Responding to their comments and answering their questions will help build a connection and potentially lead to more interest in your book. Blog Tour Benefits The benefits of a blog tour can be significant for your book launch or generating interest long after your book has been released. Some potential advantages include: Increased exposure: By leveraging the established audiences of bloggers and influencers, you can reach a wider audience that may not have been aware of your book otherwise. Social proof: Positive reviews and endorsements from bloggers can lend credibility to your book, encouraging readers to take a chance on it. Networking opportunities: Collaborating with bloggers and influencers can expand your network within the literary community, opening doors to potential future partnerships or opportunities. Enhanced online presence: The blog tour generates online content related to your book, increasing your online presence and searchability, which can have long-term benefits for your author platform. When to Plan a Blog Tour Determining the best time to have a blog tour for your book largely depends on your specific goals, timeline, and the nature of your book. However, there are a few general considerations to keep in mind when planning the timing of your blog tour: Book launch date: Ideally, you'll want to schedule your blog tour around your book's launch date. This ensures that the tour generates maximum buzz and attention during the critical period when your book becomes available to the public; however, a book tour can also help reignite interest in your book long after it’s been published.. Pre-launch promotion: Consider starting your blog tour a few weeks before your book's official launch. This gives bloggers and influencers ample time to read and review your book, and it allows you to generate buzz and anticipation leading up to the release. Pre-launch promotion can help build excitement and generate pre-orders or early sales. Availability of review copies: Ensure that you have review copies of your book available and ready to send out to bloggers well in advance of the blog tour start date. This allows sufficient time for bloggers to read the book and prepare their content for the tour. Consider providing digital copies for ease and quick distribution. Audience availability: Take into account the preferences and availability of your target audience. If your book caters to a specific season, genre, or holiday, it might be beneficial to align your blog tour with that theme or timeframe. For example, a romance novel might benefit from a blog tour around Valentine's Day. Other marketing efforts: Consider coordinating your blog tour with other marketing initiatives you have planned. This could include social media campaigns, advertising, or other promotional activities. A coordinated approach can amplify your book's visibility and impact. Blogger availability: Reach out to bloggers and influencers well in advance to secure their participation and confirm their availability for the tour. Keep in mind that popular bloggers may have busy schedules, so it's beneficial to plan ahead and be flexible with scheduling to accommodate their availability. Ultimately, the best time for a blog tour is when you have everything in place, including review copies, promotional materials, and a solid plan for engaging with bloggers and readers throughout the tour. Take the time to strategically plan and execute your blog tour to maximize its impact on your book launch or relaunch. Did you know WOW! Women on Writing offers blog tours as part of our marketing services? If you're interested in exploring professional assistance for your blog tour and other book marketing endeavors, check out WOW! Women on Writing's book marketing packages. We offer comprehensive and tailored solutions to help authors like you navigate the world of book promotion. Our team of experts can guide you through the process, provide valuable insights, and connect you with influential bloggers and reviewers in your genre. By leveraging the expertise and network of WOW! Women on Writing, you can enhance the effectiveness of your blog tour and ensure your book receives the attention it deserves. Learn more here or contact blogtour@wow-womenonwriting.com with questions. (C) Copyright wow-womenonwriting.com Visit WOW! Women On Writing for lively interviews and how-tos. Check out WOW!'s Classroom and learn something new. Enter the Quarterly Writing Contests. Open Now![url={url}]View the full article[/url] -
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Whatcha Reading? May 2023, Part Two
It’s time to wrap up May with our second Whatcha Reading! It’s also Memorial Day weekend in the States, which seems like a perfect excuse to get even more reading done before the month is over. Sneezy: I’m reading Right Wing Women by Andrea Dworkin. She takes no prisoners. Sarah: What’s that? The library has the next Veronica Speedwell audiobook? Don’t mind if I do! Currently listening to A Murderous Relation ( A | BN | K | AB ) and having a splendid time. The audiobook performance by Angele Masters is terrific. A | BN | KShana: I just finished a YA romcom that gave me the biggest book hangover, Highly Suspicious and Unfairly Cute by Talia Hibbert. So much banter and sweetness! I’m now reading The Mimicking of Known Successes by Malka Older, and liking it so far. Elyse: I just finished The Daydreams. ( A | BN | K ) Some of it was how awful tabloids were to young female stars in the aughts (Lindsay, Britney etc), but each of the main characters does something really shitty to another so it’s hard to really like any of leads. It was meh. Lara: Elyse recommended Loreth Anne White’s The Maid’s Diary ( A | BN ) and I’m hooked. No romance, but the suspense is phenomenal so far. Whatcha reading? Let us know in the comments! View the full article -
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Book Lovers: Know Your Tribe
Another fundamental that makes a whole lot of sense, esp marketing wise. -
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Writing Hot Sex Scenes - Saints Preserve Us!
I've been trained. It works! -
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Crucial Self-Editing Techniques - Don't be Hostage to a Line Editor
If you knew how many writers this has positively impacted, you'd say, it's no wonder. Fundamentals like this are too often neglected. -
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Podcast 564, Your Transcript has Bunny Ears
The transcript for Podcast 564. Bunny Aliens in Space: Cover Design with JL Logosz has been posted! This podcast transcript was handcrafted with meticulous skill by Garlic Knitter. Many thanks. ❤ Click here to subscribe to The Podcast → View the full article -
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Paul Schrader’s Master Gardener Doesn’t See the Forest for the Trees
Master Gardener is the third in Paul Schrader’s “God’s Lonely Men” trilogy, in each film of which a weary middle-aged man who has previously experienced alienation from mainstream society contends with his haunted past and hazy future, reflecting on these things, and his rote daily existence, via diary-keeping—a technique that suffices until his world is challenged by knowledge of something greater, and tested by a newfound bond with a distressed young person. Via these characters, the films in this trilogy tend to pair and interrogate the relationship between two normally unrelated topics: religion and climate change (First Reformed, 2017), gambling and the War on Terror (The Card Counter, 2021), and horticulture and racism (Master Gardener, 2022). Schrader is an accomplished, highly literary storyteller and his interests (particularly the the masculine-coded concepts of destruction and violence) have produced some of film’s most fascinating inquiries into the ills of modern society, from Taxi Driver to Affliction to American Gigolo, to First Reformed and The Card Counter. First a film critic and then a screenwriter (responsible for classics like Raging Bull and Obsession and famous for his collaborations with Martin Scorsese and Brian De Palma), Schrader’s later work as a director is epitomized by the triad of films about “God’s Lonely Men,” three anti-social anti-heroes in crisis: a self-loathing pastor, a troubled gambler, and a secretive gardener, all reckoning with the sudden collision of themes, lives, selves once kept at a distance. Many of his protagonists, but especially these three, can be read as homages to Alain Delon’s Jef Costello in Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1967 film Le Samouraï: cool, reserved, highly-competent professionals whose whose adherence to rituals and observances leaves them unprepared to confront unforeseen cataclysms. It’s almost never useful to compare films in a director’s oeuvre to one another; despite similarities, each is its own discreet contribution. But Schrader’s films are designed to reference each other—or, really, The Card Counter and Master Gardener are designed to reference First Reformed—so please forgive me while I place them all side-by-side for a moment. In First Reformed, Ethan Hawke plays Ernst Toller (no, not that Ernst Toller), a cheerless reverend at a small antique church upstate who keeps a diary of his own stark life the year he happens to encounter a distraught climate activist who opens his eyes to the ravishment of God’s green earth by greedy corporations, as well as the ways God’s own church is influenced by corporatization to the point of disregarding the stewardship of the planet. That film, a simmering hagiography of a soul in turmoil, provides the blueprint for Schrader’s subsequent two films, not only thematically, but also stylistically, in the terms I mentioned in the opening paragraph. The films are dark, lonely meditations into their protagonists’ natures, told via their floridly-written, allusion-rich journal entries, as they finally confront aspects of their lives and their worlds they have kept at bay for so long. The Card Counter inherits the framework of First Reformed, but reworks it enough for it to feel distinct; Oscar Isaac plays William Tell (no, not that William Tell), a former military interrogator and now card-counter, who carpetbags from casino to casino, living out of austere motels, until he meets a young man who informs him that he knows his true identity, as a soldier who served jailtime for his role in the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, and asks for his help committing an act of revenge against one of Tell’s military superiors. This film slowly explores the human capacity for both empathy and cruelty, teasing out the relationship between “keeping one’s cool” and “losing it.” I don’t have as conclusive a reading of the forces at work Master Gardener, arguably the film in this trilogy with the toughest conceit. Joel Edgerton plays Narval Roth, a taciturn head gardener of Gracewood Gardens, a privately-owned estate with gardens that are open to the public. Narval manages a team of polo-clad young people, overseeing their work but also instructing them in the history, philosophy, and science of horticulture. He answers to no one, except Norma Haverhill (Sigourney Weaver), the wealthy owner of the estate, who throws his carefully cultivated world out of order when she demands he take on an apprentice, her grand-niece Maya (Quintessa Swindell). Maya is biracial, the daughter of the “wayward” daughter of Norma’s sister, who left the family and “fell in with a bad crowd,” as Norma purrs. Maya seems to be her only relative left, so she is eager to draw her into the family—but not enough that she doesn’t insist that she work on the family’s land, first. Maya is a curious, intelligent twenty-something, surprisingly accepting of the fact that she’s a minimum wage worker on her great aunt’s estate. Norma wants Narval to educate her, teach her about the maintenance and culture and theories of horticulture, so that she might be able to pursue a career in the field in the future. Maya takes kindly to this earthy finishing school, especially because she appreciates the softspoken and passionate manner of Narval, her teacher. The movie appears to take place in the South (it was filmed in Louisiana), and the house looks like a plantation estate, so it seems like there might be some interesting explorations into contemporary white supremacy, the way Norma insists that Maya be fashioned into a more refined version of herself in order to be welcomed into her family tree, and simultaneously wants this self-improvement to take place as a farm-worker beneath her, and literally in the dirt. But the film wobbles from here on out, mostly because we learn about the haunted, Narval’s past as a soldier of a Neo-Nazi army, before turning state’s evidence against them and going into witness protection. Under his clothes, he is covered in White Pride and Hitler-fandom tattoos, which he looks at disparagingly in the mirror. He likes his current life as a peaceful caretaker of the Gracewood Gardens, is glad to have distanced himself from the silo of racism, misogyny, antisemitism, and violence in which (he explains) he was raised. That Maya and Narval form a bond, while he also has flashbacks to things that his proud boy/hillbilly cult leader told him about how his job is to “pull out the weeds,” suggests that Master Gardener will become a thriller about the insidiousness of white supremacy, juxtaposing it with a reading of gardening as a kind of fascism (or at least, a way to disguise it). In other words, perhaps Narval’s solitary salvation in gardening for a racist white lady becomes an outlet for the very impulses that allowed him to thrive in a fascist cult in the first place. Master Gardener doesn’t till this ground, though, which is fine, but it also doesn’t do anything else productive with all of these rich, ripe, and (productively) thorny thematic concerns. What begins as an incredibly fruitful plot soon wilts and shrivels into a wandering love story; and the kind of discipline and restraint that Narvals brings to his gardening becomes, exactly, the element missing from the story itself. Master Gardener quickly forgets its powerful portrayals about white supremacy and racism when it becomes interested in whether or not its protagonist can be redeemed, can be saved, and, in giving him some way to carry this out, represents Maya as needing to be saved by someone, too. If this narrative shoot were to blossom into a meaningful development (unlikely as it is), we would need a clearer understanding of Narval’s life or background, a focused explaining of how he has come to be changed in the first place. But more importantly, this whole angle not only misses out on saying anything thoughtful about race in America, but also robs Maya of the opportunity to be more than a plot device, perhaps (especially in light of Swindell’s elegant performance), the greatest sin of all. What results is a confusing film, overgrown in some areas and under-seeded in others. Instead of becoming as thoughtful and risky an exploration as The Card Counter, Master Gardener becomes like a game of 52-card pickup. It’s as if Schrader has a deck of cards and instead of laying them out strategically, throws them all in the air and lets them come down where they will. Instead of become the focused sermon of First Reformed, Master Gardener becomes one of those themed themed refrigerator poem packs. It has a lot of terms on the table, but shuffles them around until they say almost absolutely nothing. View the full article
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