Chris Barsanti's Blog, page 3
September 14, 2025
Writer’s Desk: Ignore This Advice
Richard Bausch (editor of multiple Norton anthologies) has spent his time in the trenches of literary academia and seen the number of how-to books on writing proliferate while the number of readers keeps falling. His advice for those aspiring to life of the pen? Put the manuals and the how-to books away. Read the writers themselves, whose …
September 11, 2025
Screening Room: ‘Orwell: 2+2=5’
The new documentary from Raoul Peck (I Am Not Your Negro) just had its premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival. I reviewed the film for The Playlist: Everyone has their own George Orwell and tends to think everyone else gets him wrong. As such, making a sprawling quasi-biographical documentary like “Orwell: 2+2=5” is a brave effort …
September 7, 2025
Writer’s Desk: Procrastinate Well
Finding ways not to write is a skill shared by all in the profession. But what if there was a way to delay your work productively? Miranda July has an idea: It’s best to procrastinate with other things I don’t want to do. The amount of business emails and household chores I’ve gotten done while …
August 31, 2025
Writer’s Desk: Make It Make Sense
Canadian author Miriam Toews (Women Talking, All My Puny Sorrows) lost both her father and her sister Marjorie to suicide. She was not sure the loss was something she could ever write about. “I had no words,” she told Kristen Martin. But then after a couple of years, Toews had a realization: No, I’m a …
August 24, 2025
Writer’s Desk: Only You Can Do It
The author Geoff Dyer, who writes everything from fiction to criticism and essays on tennis, has a ritual he enacts before starting a new book. He pens a note to himself which reads, “Write a book that no one else could write“: I think one of the features of nonfiction today is that, to a …
August 17, 2025
Writer’s Desk: Pure Writing
Per novelist and theorist Alain Robbe-Grillet: The true writer has nothing to say. What counts is the way he says it.
August 15, 2025
Screening Room: ‘Devo’
My review of Chris Smith’s documentary Devo ran at The Playlist: Weaving in spectacular early footage of Devo’s first shows back in Ohio, Smith shows them happily alienating audiences who didn’t know what to make of these robotic weirdoes in the era of denim, sideburns, mellow harmonies, and noodly guitar solos. One show at an …
August 12, 2025
Shameless Self-Promotion: ‘The Writer’s Year 2026’ on Sale Now
According to my publisher, the 2026 edition of The Writer’s Year Page-A-Day calendar will: BANISH WRITER’S BLOCK: This essential calendar provides a steady guide to help you achieve your goals—or at least be productive and have fun trying—with regular writing prompts and monthly check-ins to help you track your progress. Who am I to argue? Get …
Continue reading Shameless Self-Promotion: ‘The Writer’s Year 2026’ on Sale Now
August 10, 2025
Writer’s Desk: Get the Details Right
In the 1920s, before Dashiell Hammett went to Hollywood, he reviewed crime fiction for the Saturday Evening Post. This job caused him much consternation. Having spent some years working as a Pinkerton detective, he had some lived knowledge of the world of criminality (which brought some realism to his novels, especially Red Harvest and The …
August 3, 2025
Writer’s Desk: Talk Yourself to Sleep
Even the most prolific authors hit roadblocks. Val McDermid (40-plus books) is no different. She tackles those problems in an interesting fashion: If in the morning I know I’m going to be writing a scene that’s not quite clear in my head yet, or a difficult confrontation, or a complicated transition, or I’m not quite …
