Chris Barsanti's Blog, page 7

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

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

Writer’s Desk: Stay Flexible

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 …

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Nota Bene: A Prayer

From William S. Burroughs’ “A Thanksgiving Prayer”: Thanks for the last and greatest betrayal of the last and greatest of human dreams. A film of his reading the full piece, from Gus Van Sant:

Writer’s Desk: Go Out on a Limb

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, …

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Writer’s Desk: Challenge Yourself

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 …

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Writer’s Desk: Listen to Everything

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. Go ahead and eavesdrop. It’s research.

Writer’s Desk: Tell the Truth

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 …

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Screening Room: ‘A Complete Unknown’

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 …

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Reader’s Corner: ‘A Century of Tomorrows’

Glenn Adamson’s absorbing survey of futurology, 'A Century of Tomorrows,' reveals that how societies predict the future says more about the era they’re living in.

Screening Room: 2025 Sundance Film Festival

While the Sundance Film Festival still uplifts under-the-radar films in an increasingly challenging market, its future may be in doubt.