Author: chrisbarsanti

A freelancer like those of yore, I write and edit for cold hard cash from the highest bidder in the land -- or just the occasional kind word. You can find links to my scrivenings at http://chrisbarsanti.net/.

Writer’s Desk: How Do Ordinary Humans Sound?

On By chrisbarsantiIn Books, WritingLeave a comment

Dorothy L. Sayers, one of the great crime writers, was once asked by a man how she wrote such realistic dialogue between male characters. Did she have a big family or a lot of male friends?

Her answer was to the point:

I replied that I had coped with this difficult problem by making my men talk, as far as possible, like ordinary human beings. This aspect of the matter seemed to surprise the other speaker; he said no more, but took it away to chew it over. One of these days it may quite likely occur to him that women, as well as men, when left to themselves, talk very much like human beings also…

Sayers is being sarcastic, yet also true. Imagine what ordinary people sound like when you hear them speak. Then use that to inspire the sound and style of your dialogue.

Screening Room: ‘War Game’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Film - New, Film-DocumentaryLeave a comment

I reviewed the new documentary War Game for Slant:

Much of the criticism thrown at Alex Garland’s Civil War centered on it presenting the titular conflict without really explaining its origins. Tony Gerber and Jesse Moss’s documentary War Game goes the other way by showing in very specific ways not how a modern-day American civil war might be fought but how one might start…

Here’s the trailer:

Writer’s Desk: Imagine Your Reader

On By chrisbarsantiIn Books, WritingLeave a comment

When asked by The Paris Review to describe the ideal reader of his works, Anthony Burgess came up with a highly specific characterization:

The ideal reader of my novels is a lapsed Catholic and failed musician, short-sighted, color-blind, auditorily biased, who has read the books that I have read. He should also be about my age…

After taking a moderately more serious approach to the question, Burgess admitted that yes indeed he does like to have a wide audience, but acknowledging that there are limitations:

I like to devise a plot that can have a moderately wide appeal. But take Eliot’s The Waste Land, very erudite, which, probably through its more popular elements and its basic rhetorical appeal, appealed to those who did not at first understand it but made themselves understand it. The poem, a terminus of Eliot’s polymathic travels, became a starting point for other people’s erudition. I think every author wants to make his audience. But it’s in his own image, and his primary audience is a mirror…

Reader’s Corner: ‘American Gothic’

On By chrisbarsantiIn BooksLeave a comment

I wrote about the exhibition and book “American Gothic: Gordon Parks and Ella Watson” for Rain Taxi Review of Books:

Like many great collaborations, the iconic partnership of Gordon Parks and Ella Watson was an accident. In 1942, only a couple of years after the Kansas-born and Minnesota-seasoned Parks had left the Twin Cities, he started a photography fellowship with the Farm Security Administration (FSA) in Washington, D.C. In his autobiography A Choice of Weapons, Parks described talking to FSA head Roy Stryker about the challenges of “using my camera effectively against intolerance.” Stryker, whose agency was tasked with fighting poverty and had already hired the likes of Walter Evans and Dorothea Lange to visualize the devastation wrought by the Great Depression, had some advice for Parks: Pointing to a Black “charwoman” mopping the hallway, Stryker said, “See what she has to say about life and things. You might find her interesting.” Parks spent four months with Watson at her work and home. The result is one of the most visually striking and quietly charged photo series of the twentieth century…

Reader’s Corner: Charles Burns and ‘Final Cut’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Books, Comics-Graphic Novels, WritingLeave a comment

I interviewed cartoonist Charles Burns (Black Hole) about his new graphic novel Final Cut and the creative block that led up to it for Publishers Weekly:

Whenever he tried to start a new project, it fizzled out. “I went for months and years,” Burns, 68, says via phone from Philadelphia. “This is shit,” he remembers saying to himself. “I should know how to do this.” Facing what he calls the worst creative frustration of his career, he found himself thinking, “Maybe this is it. Maybe I don’t have anything at all.”

So, to prove he still had something in the tank, Burns set himself a small goal: finishing a seven-page story. If he couldn’t do that, he told himself, he’d have to start doing something else…

Final Cut comes out in September.

Writer’s Desk: Read Somebody Better

On By chrisbarsantiIn Books, WritingLeave a comment

Kathryn Schulz writes in the New Yorker about “all the other options” of coping when stuck on a piece of writing:

…ignoring the problem, staring blankly at the problem, moving the problem around to see if it’s less annoying in some other location, eating all the chocolate in the house…

Then she delivers this crucial piece of advice:

I eventually do what I should have done in the first place and go read some writer who is much better at this business than I am…

Her choice for that honor is Norman Maclean. You might think that turning to a master like Maclean, who somehow packs a short story’s worth of mood and material into one sentence without it feeling overwrought, would be intimidating.

But seeing another writer, whether Maclean or not, solve the problem of making a great sentence is also inspiring.

They did it. You can, too.

Screening Room: ‘Made in England’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Film - New, Film-DocumentaryLeave a comment

My review of the new documentary Made in England: The Films of Powell & Pressburger ran in Slant:

Given the sense of wonder and promotion of emotion over reason that courses through Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s work, it’s appropriate that David Hinton’s Made in England: The Films of Powell & Pressburger starts with a recollection of a defining childhood moment. The film’s narrator and one of its executive producers, Martin Scorsese describes himself as an asthmatic child confined indoors and thunderstruck by these old films he was seeing on television. Giddy with the memory of being a young boy accidentally coming across fantastical mindblowers like The Thief of Baghdad, Scorsese says there was simply “no better initiation” into what he calls “the mysteries of Michael Powell”…

Here’s the trailer:

Writer’s Desk: Grammar, Schrammar

On By chrisbarsantiIn Books, WritingLeave a comment

As a general rule, the last person you should be consulting while writing is a grammarian. Usage guides? Certainly. But grammar? If you haven’t learned it by the time you’re starting your novel, chances are it’s too late. One goes to war with the army one has.

But in case you are still anxious about your usage, a good tonic for the nerves is Geoffrey K. Pullum’s The Truth About English Grammar. Per Steven Poole’s light-handedly scathing take in The Guardian, Pullum is not the kind of linguist who delivers finger-wagging lectures on tense or how the Internet is ruining the King’s English. Instead, his book appears to be a broadside directed at the grammatical snoots who Pullum thinks have no idea how English is used in the real world:

Readers are meanwhile reassured that there’s nothing necessarily wrong with the passive, or the split infinitive, or the dangling participle, or adverbs. Pullum is an engaging and friendly writer, always on the side of the ordinary Joe against the nitpickers. A particular delight is how he shows that many “rules” beloved of self-appointed grammar constables were simply made up quite recently by irritable ink-stained wretches…

Now, off you go. If splitting a few infinitives means you have the time to figure out what your protagonist is going to do next, then split away.

Writer’s Desk: Snoopy Kept Trying

On By chrisbarsantiIn Books, Comics-Graphic Novels, WritingLeave a comment

When we think of Snoopy and writing, we think of that determined beagle hammering away at his sentences, trying to figure out how to follow his opening line, “It was a dark and stormy night.”

Not an easy task.

But he also had to face rejection. One of the great Peanuts strips showed Snoopy writing a response to a publisher’s rejection letter.

I think there might have been a misunderstanding. What I really wanted was for you to publish my story, and send me fifty thousand dollars.

Is your story worth fifty thousand dollars? Maybe yes, maybe no. But acting like it is never hurt.

Reader’s Corner: ‘When the Clock Broke’

On By chrisbarsantiIn BooksLeave a comment

I wrote about the great new John Ganz book, When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s, for The Millions:

Americans are good talkers these days. Prodigious at least. Our screens and links and tabs are filled with it. Talk, talk, talk. Streams of mouthy TikTokers and YouTubers. News channels transformed into neverending panel discussions. Novels dictated by insistent first-person narrators. Besides the economics of an easily replicable product—talk is cheap, we’re always told, usually in prelude to a fight—what accounts for all the blather? Is it because everyone has something to say? Or is it because regardless of the question—gaping income inequality, an increasingly irritable biosphere, or the appeal of a red-faced demagogue promising retribution to red-hatted crowds—nobody seems to have a good answer?…

You can read an excerpt from Ganz’s book here.

Screening Room: ‘The Accountant 2’ Anybody?

On By chrisbarsantiIn Film - Upcoming, streamingLeave a comment

After 2016’s extremely baffling action flick The Accountant found new life on Netflix and has a sequel on the way, I took a look back at the original.

An updated version of my first review is at Eyes Wide Open:

Back in April, the most popular film on Netflix was The Accountant. Subscribers were not clicking on new work like Zack Snyder’s damn-the-budget Star Wars fanfic Rebel Moon or Adam Sandler’s Spaceman. Instead, they wanted a 2016 thriller best remembered for all the popcorn it unintentionally caused audience members to spit out in baffled laughter…

Writer’s Desk: Get Out of the Way

On By chrisbarsantiIn Books, WritingLeave a comment

Prolific British playwright and screenwriter David Hare (Skylight, The Hours, Straight Line Crazy) sits right at the intersection of acclaimed and popular. (Which, let’s be honest, is where most of us wouldn’t mind being in our careers.) He is both thoughtful and economical, meaning there is a lot he has to teach.

Hare’s ten rules for writers include a number of gems, from “Never take advice from anyone with no investment in the outcome” to “The two most depressing words in the English language are ‘literary fiction’”.

But the line of advice that really jumps out and explains so much of his propulsive style is this:

Style is the art of getting yourself out of the way, not putting yourself in it.

Once your style is noticed, it can be an impediment. Focus on your story and your characters. Everything else is a distant third.

Writer’s Desk: Get It Wrong to Be Right

On By chrisbarsantiIn Books, WritingLeave a comment

Last year, playwright and novelist Ayad Akhtar—Disgraced, the brilliant Homeland Elegies, the upcoming Robert Downey Jr. AI play McNeal—gave the Whiting Awards keynote address on the theme of what is expected from artists.

He talked specifically about one of his mentors, theater director Andre Gregory, and the challenges that success presented. Yes, boo-hoo, every struggling creative out there says. To have such a problem. But Gregory realized, per Akhtar, that once an artist knows what people want from them, that can be a trap:

‘It’s hard,’ Andre said, ‘when you realize that they like you. It’s hard because you don’t want to lose that…’

Every writer faces this, even if they have not yet hit any of their milestones of success. Because it is difficult not to think of approval as the gateway to success. Seeking approval (of agents, editors, critics, audiences) can lead to caution. It’s inevitable, says Akhtar:

In some cases you will not intend to be in opposition; you will have simply followed your own sense of things, more or less blindly, hoping that, by doing what you want to do, need to do, it will result in something they will want and need, too. Sometimes you’ll be right. Sometimes you won’t…

The hard thing is to maintain that spark of confidence, which Akhtar calls “the insistent inclination of your affinity,” that lights your way forward, whether you end up being right or wrong. No matter what.

Writer’s Desk: Create Characters Who Are Nothing Like You

On By chrisbarsantiIn Books, WritingLeave a comment

Ayelet Waldman is not the first to note that it doesn’t make sense to only write what you know. But she does put it particularly well here:

When writers only write what they know, we end up with lots of short stories and novels about young people falling in love for the first time, often in Iowa (the site of the nation’s preeminent writing program). All well and good, but at some point even the most beautifully crafted sentences begin to grow tiresome if they describe people we’ve read about a hundred times before…

Not that there is anything wrong with a book about young people falling in love at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop.

Writer’s Desk: Have the Courage to Be Terrible

On By chrisbarsantiIn Books, WritingLeave a comment

People like Anne Lamott are asked for advice on how to write all the time. It’s what happens when you inspire people.

That’s why it was so refreshing when she asked about what was the worst writing advice she had ever heard:

To know what you’re doing in the very beginning of having started something new. No one knows what they’re doing…

She is identifying the difference between confidence and certainty. The former gives you what you need to plow through and find something great. The latter leaves no room for the magic that happens when you are blundering around in the dark.

Lamott’s preferred method is something that takes a little more courage than many new writers appreciate:

You find out what you’re doing by doing it, by writing a really, really terrible first draft…

Start out that way, and afterwards it’s all smooth seas.