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/.

Reader’s Corner: The Didion Box Set

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The new Joan Didion Collection from the Library of America is a monster, but in a good way. It packs together an incredible seventeen works, ranging from her best-known collections of essays and reportage (The White Album, Slouching Towards Bethlehem), novels (Run River, Salvador), and later works (The Year of Magical Thinking). It’s pretty much all here, really only missing her and John Gregory Dunne’s screenplay work (which is fine) and her early film criticism for National Review (not fine, somebody needs to collect those).

I wrote about the collection for the Spring 2025 print edition of Rain Taxi Review of Books:

If there is any disagreement that we are at Peak Didion, the November 2024 publication of the Library of America’s three-volume Joan Didion Collection should settle it. This is the kind of hefty doorstop that announces An Important Writer You Should Have Read, but unlike some such LOA sets, this one presents one classic after another with virtually no padding, giving the full sweep of Didion’s career as it evolved across decades of American ferment, imperial overextension, and social entropy…

Writer’s Desk: It’s Your Book, Find It

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Booker-winning novelist Ali Smith believes you don’t have to worry about the reader in the end:

All a writer can do is work with language to get the story right.  Full stop.  & I’ve always believed that what readers feel is readers’ own business…

This is liberating. But it is also a challenge; a gauntlet thrown. Because it means that there is nothing else for the writer to worry about.

Nobody else can or will write the book that you can write…

It’s up to you.

Writer’s Desk: Stay Flexible

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There’s nothing wrong with planning out your writing. Some people need it. Organizing things can keep you from introducing things in your first chapter that can kill plot possibilities for the conclusion if you’re not looking ahead.

Also, knocking out a detailed outline is a fantastic way to procrastinate getting any real writing done.

But avoid limiting yourself.

Roddy Doyle explains:

Change your mind. Good ideas are often killed by better ones…

Writers sometimes worry they have a limited amount of material and shouldn’t waste it. This isn’t true. If you’re meant to be a writer, the ideas will come. If you think of a better one, go with it.

Writer’s Desk: Go Out on a Limb

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(Elaine May, 1959)

The legendary improv comedian, screenwriter, and underestimated director (yes, standing up for Ishtar) Elaine May had a motto which has been repeated in different iterations for decades:

The only safe thing is to take a chance.

According to her long-time comedy partner Mike Nichols, this wasn’t as contradictory as it sounds:

If you stay safe, and don’t take a chance—don’t do something that’s different from the last thing, something that makes you nervous and holds dangers—if you keep trying to do the thing that worked last time, the encrustations of mannerisms begin to take you over. And pretty soon you’re no good at all—and therefore not safe at all…

Avoid those encrustations of mannerisms at all cost.

Writer’s Desk: Challenge Yourself

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(Orson Welles, 1964, by Nicolas Tikhomiroff)

Orson Welles spent most of his career scrapping for money, fighting with producers, and generally trying to balance fifteen spinning plates while doing a magic card trick at the same time. It was an exhausting way to make art.

Still, when indie filmmaker Henry Jaglom was complaining to him one time about not having the time or money to finish a movie the way he wanted, Welles had a tart response:

The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.

This doesn’t mean you should intentionally impoverish yourself to invent challenges. But Welles has a point in that a piece of work can benefit from the creator having something to push against. Set yourself some difficult parameters (it must be this long, I must finish it by this date, if I don’t sell it by this point then I will move on to something else, etc.). The discipline required in overcoming even minor obstacles can give you practice in overcoming the challenges presented by your writing.

Don’t get too comfortable, in other words. Push yourself.

Writer’s Desk: Listen to Everything

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(Bikram Bezbaruah)

Part of a writer’s job is capturing the world around them. This includes paying attention to physical things from landscape and weather to clothing and food.

But it also means listening to people. All of them.

  • Daniel Handler (aka Lemony Snicket): “Eavesdrop and write down what people say. You think you’ll remember everything you hear, but you won’t. So write it down.”
  • Josh Sippie: “There is nothing that you overhear someone saying that can then become “unrealistic” dialogue, or an unrealistic way to speak. It’s as real as it gets.”
  • Christopher Isherwood: “I am a camera, my shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.”

Go ahead and eavesdrop. It’s research.

Writer’s Desk: Tell the Truth

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Mary Karr’s breakthrough memoir The Liar’s Club was not just a brilliantly written book, pulsing with dark wit and cutting insight, it was also pretty unsparing about herself. Years later, she wrote in The Art of the Memoir about how she started The Liar’s Club on the assumption she’d be telling the story of her father leaving her. But when she really looked at what happened, the opposite was true:

I’d spent decades discussing his abandonment in therapy, and it was true he’d drunk himself off a barstool when I was just twenty-five. But the view that he’d ever left me was tacit hogwash – a convenient lie I’d told myself to salve my own guilt about leaving him…

In an interview with The Writer, Karr talked about the necessity of confronting the truth, even if doing so might not cast you in the best light:

The reader will forgive you anything except lying.

Screening Room: ‘A Complete Unknown’

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I wrote about James Mangold’s Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown as a folk anti-Western for PopMatters:

Bob Dylan (Timothée Chalamet) arrives in New York at the start of A Complete Unknown in the back of a station wagon rather than on a horse. He might as well be a gunslinger showing up in a frontier town that needs his help. With just his bindle, guitar, and a cunning up-for-anything look, Dylan scans the Greenwich Village coffeehouse folk scene not like some rube from the sticks but rather a cool operator who knows virgin territory when he sees it…

Here’s the trailer:

Reader’s Corner: ‘A Century of Tomorrows’

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I reviewed Glenn Adamson’s lively book on futurism, A Century of Tomorrows, for PopMatters:

It seems clear that many who argue that authors like H.G. Wells and Jules Verne should be read because of their supposed power of premonition don’t care for science fiction yet feel the urge to find a rationale. The joys of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea come from Captain Nemo’s achingly tragic quest for justice, not Verne’s prediction of electric submarines. Wells understood a lot about how the world’s mechanistic turn would overthrow many societal assumptions. However, his utopian enthusiasms also carried him away; see his 1936 sci-fi film Things to Come for both characteristics…

Screening Room: 2025 Sundance Film Festival

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This year’s Sundance Film Festival just concluded. Your fearless correspondent delivered a roundup of the tensions roiling the festival at the moment, not to mention the films worth seeking out and the ones best avoided. That is available for your reading pleasure at PopMatters:

There seemed to be two questions on everyone’s mind at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. The first was the same as ever at this festival or any other: “What have you seen?” This question is often academic because there aren’t many available tickets left to get by the time it’s asked – usually by a stranger in line for another film…

I also contributed some full-length reviews to Slant Magazine:

Writer’s Desk: Make Readers Believe

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J.R.R. Tolkien (undated)

Every writer is a fantasist. Whether they’re writing a kitchen-sink domestic drama, romance, YA series about talking dragons, or a mystery novel about a blind accountant who solves crimes, the challenge is the same each time: Make readers believe the world you are creating and the people who inhabit it.

J.R.R. Tolkien explained the importance of this in his essay “On Fairy-Stories“:

The story-maker proves a successful ‘sub-creator’. He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is ‘true’: it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside. The moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken; the magic, or rather art, has failed…

Leave nothing to chance. Visualize every aspect of your fictional world. Keep the illusion going. Make readers believe.

Screening Room: ‘Anora’ Wins Best Picture from OFCS

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A good bit of film-related news here: one of my writers’ associations, the Online Film Critics Society, just named Anora the best film of the year. They also paid good attention to Dune: Part Two in technical areas, at least Challengers a couple nods, largely ignored Emilia Perez, and recognized All We Imagine as Light for best film not in the English language (a strong choice and preferable to the more predictable but less impressive I’m Still Here).

Here’s the rest of the awards:

  • Best Picture: Anora
  • Best Animated Feature: Flow
  • Best Director: Coralie Fargeat – The Substance
  • Best Actor: Ralph Fiennes – Conclave
  • Best Actress: Mikey Madison – Anora
  • Best Supporting Actor: Kieran Culkin – A Real Pain
  • Best Supporting Actress: Margaret Qualley – The Substance
  • Best Original Screenplay: Anora
  • Best Adapted Screenplay: Conclave
  • Best Editing: Challengers
  • Best Cinematography: Dune: Part Two
  • Best Original Score: Challengers
  • Best Production Design: Dune: Part Two
  • Best Costume Design: Dune: Part Two
  • Best Visual Effects: Dune: Part Two
  • Best Debut Feature: Vera Drew – The People’s Joker
  • Best Film Not in the English Language: All We Imagine as Light
  • Best Documentary Feature: Dahomey

Screening Room: This Year’s Weird Oscar Nominations

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I wrote about the 2025 Oscar nominations and what happened as a result of their overloading the list with too many nods to a pair of highly mediocre films (Emilia Perez, Wicked).

The article is at Eyes Wide Open:

The Oscars can be weird. We all know this. Some of us, despite remembering that strange mid-2000s stretch when Million Dollar Baby and Crash were snagging best picture statues, can even think we understand why the awards are so weird. The concept of looking at hundreds of feature films released theatrically each year to determine this one or that one is the “best” is fundamentally absurd…

Writer’s Desk: Avoid Interruptions

On By chrisbarsantiIn Books, Film - Repertory, WritingLeave a comment

It seems so obvious and yet turns out to be so difficult in practice. Finding a good writing space is one thing. Carving out the time on a regular basis is another. Ensuring an uninterrupted run of minutes and hours is always harder than you think. But without those blocks of time, creating something new is next to impossible.

Again, let’s go to David Lynch:

Every interruption just is like a knife stab in the middle of a thought. And you gotta start again. You start again. It’s horrible. These days, there’s interruptions around every corner, almost every second. You have to be somewhat selfish…

And if anybody asks why you are acting so withdrawn, just say that Lynch told you so.