The Writing Life: reflections by a working writer.

The Writing Life: reflections by a working writer. The Writing Life

Reflections of a working writer, a university screenwriting professor, and the editor of Oregon Literary Review.

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Charles Deemer

Editor,
Oregon Literary Review

MFA, Playwriting, University of Oregon

Writing faculty, Portland State University (part-time)

Retired playwright and screenwriter.
Active novelist, librettist and teacher.

Email: cdeemer(at)yahoo(dot)com

The eagle flies!

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Literary archive

The Sextant Press

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Electronic screenwriting tutorial

References

Bookstore
Highlights:

Finalist, Oregon Book Award

Practical Screenwriting

Love At Ground Zero

More books.

Blogs by (mostly) creative writers:

"Can We Talk About Me For A Change?"
Playwright Debra Neff Nathans

Inkygirl
Debbie Ridpath Ohi, a weblog for writers (resources)

Silliman's Blog
Ron Silliman, contemporary poetry and poetics

Maud Newton
literary links, amusements, politics, rants

Darren Barefoot
Technical and creative writing, theatre, Dublin

Rob's Writing Pains
Journey of a struggling writer.

Mad, Mad World
Cara Swann, fiction writer, journalist, "reflections on humanity, random news & my life."

Writeright
Random musings on a writer's life and times.

Flaskaland
Barbara Flaska's compilation of the best online articles about music and culture.

Write Of Way
Samantha Blackmon's written musings on writing (composition and rhetoric).

Alexander b. Craghead: blog
Writing, photography, and watercolors.

Rodney's Painted Pen
Rodney Bohen's daily commentary "on the wondrous two legged beast we fondly refer to as mankind." His pen runneth over.

Frustrated Writer
This one named Nicole.

scribble, scribble, scribble
Journalist Dale Keiger teaches nonfiction scribbling to undergraduate and graduate students at Johns Hopkins University.

The Unofficial Dave Barry Blog
The very one.

The Hive
The official blog of science fiction / horror author Terence West.

William Gibson Blog
Famed author of Neuromancer and Johnny Mnemonic: The Screenplay.

The Word Foundry
Joe Clifford Faust's "blog of a working writer: tracking writing projects, musings on the creative process, occasional side trips into music, media, politics, religion, etc."

A Writer's Diary
By Cynthia Harrison, who has the good sense to quote Virginia Woolf: "The truth is that writing is the profound pleasure and being read the superficial."

Bow. James Bow.
The journal of James Bow and his writing.

Ravenlike
Michael Montoure's weblog about writing, primarily horror and speculative fiction.

Globemix
By David Henry, "a poet's weblog from Aberdeen, Scotland."

Modem Noise
By Adrian Bedford, a "fledgling Pro SF Writer, living in Perth, Australia."

boynton
"A wry writerly blog named in honour of a minor character in a minor Shirley Temple film."

Real Writers Bounce
Holly Lisle's blog, "a novelist's roadmap through the art and ordeal of finding the damned words."

2020 Hindsight
By Susan.

downWrite creative
Phil Houtz's notes on the writing life.

Vivid: pieces from a writer's notebook
Blog of Canadian poet Erin Noteboom.

The Literary Saloon
The literary weblog at the complete review.

Rabbit Blog
The rabbit writes on popular culture.

This Girl's Calendar
Momoka writes short stories.

Twists & Turns
Musings by writer Michael Gates.

Plays and Musicals -- A Writer's Introspective
A blog by John D. Nugent - Composer, Playwright, and Artistic Director of the Johnson City Independent Theatre Company

The American Sentimentalist
"Never has any people endured its own tragedy with so little sense of the tragic." Essays by Mark W. Anderson.

Screenwriting By Blog
David C. Daniel writes a screenplay online. "I've decided to publish the process as a way to push myself through it. From concept to completion, it'll be here."

SeanAlonzo.com
Official site of occult fiction author Sean-Alonzo, exploring symbolism, alternative history, philosophy, secret societies and other areas of the esoteric tradition.

Crafty Screenwriting
Maunderings of Alex Epstein, tv scribe, about life, politics, and the tv show I'm co-creating.

Letters From The Home Front
The life of a writer, 21, home schooled, rural living.

Venal Scene
The blog of bite-sized plays inspired by the news (by Dan Trujillo).

'Plaint of the Playwright
Rob Matsushita, a playwright from Wisconsin, "whines a lot."

I Pity Da Fool!
Glenn's adventures in screenwriting.

Time In Tel-Aviv
Hebrew modern literature at its best, by Corinna Hasofferett.

Big Window
Robin Reagler's poetry blog.

John Baker's Blog
Author of the Sam Turner and Stone Lewis novels.

The Writing Life With Dorothy Thompson
What goes on during a writer's busy day?

The Rebel Housewife
Not just a housewife!

Barry's Personal Blog
A running commentary on writing and the writing life.

Bonnie Blog
Maintained by Bonnie Burton of grrl.com.

Writer's Blog.
By easywriter. "From the walls of caves to cyberspace."

Flogging the Quill
Pursuing the art and craft of compelling storytelling, by an editor, Ray Rhamey.

Man Bytes Hollywood
Sharing tools, strategies and resources for the screenwriter's journey.

Mad for the smell of paper
A writing journal.

The Writing Life
A blog by Katey Schultz.

It Beats Working 9-5
A screenwriting blog by a young Canadian screenwriter.

Stealing Heaven From The Lips Of God
Writer & Artist, Dee Rimbaud reflects upon politics, religion, art, poetry, the meaning of life, the nature of God and why toast always lands butter side down on carpets.

Robert Peake
Heart and Mind, Fully Engage ... a poet's website.

Sidestepping Real
By Ren Powell, poet, children’s writer, essayist and editor.

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The Writing Life...

"An artist's only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms, not anyone else's."
J.D. Salinger

"All my best friends are writers and are dead."
A friend over beer, Berkeley, winter, 1959

"And it came to pass that all the stars in the firmament had ceased to shine. But how was anyone to know?"
The Half-Life Conspiracy

After October 31, 2006,
new posts are published at

The Writing Life II

(Posts archived here are from 01/10/03 - 10/31/06)

Tuesday, January 21, 2003

Audiences and critics
I can't get The Hours out of my mind. What a fine achievement! David Hare, the English playwright, wrote the screenplay. I haven't been this excited about a screenplay since another English playwright, Harold Pinter, adapted another novel, The French Lt.'s Woman (and lost the Oscar to On Golden Pond). There's a wonderful notion in Catcher in the Rye when Holden wants to call up the author right away after reading a good book.

The way I am feeling about The Hours now is the way all writers probably want their audience, or a member in it, to feel about their work.

I've had my highs and lows with audiences and critics. I've written a play, Christmas at the Juniper Tavern, called "a Northwest classic" by one critic. At the end of a production of Country Northwestern, a guy in the audience yelled out before the curtain call, "There's a play with balls!" I was in the audience and loved it. A reader of my story The Idaho Jacket cornered me to say he thought this was the best thing ever written about the Pacific Northwest (it hardly matches Kesey's Sometimes a Great Notion but then there's no accounting for taste). Someone who saw my play Who Forgives? in Ireland, where it was a hit, called it one of his favorite 20th century plays (not mine!) and a local critic, where it bombed, called it a melodramatic, pretentious mess.

Critics have called me a genius and an idiot, a playwright with a bright future and a has-been.

In the late 1980s, a theater in my home base of Portland, Oregon, produced a retrospective of my work, dedicating a season to a revival of some of my plays -- and I received a grant to write a new play to conclude the retrospective (this became Varmints). The problem with this honor was that I wasn't dead yet. I didn't write another play for the traditional stage for a decade after that, as if I were dead. I wasn't even old.

Critics are a necessary evil. Having written dramatic criticism myself (I was drama critic for a newspaper for a year), I know how personal it necessarily is and the temptation to use reviews to "show off" is great. At the same time, critics can be a positive influence ... I rescued several dying, decent productions with good words about them.

In the 1980s, during a brief period when I was the darling of the local media, I let my press clippings go to my head, and as a result I did less rewriting on some projects than I should have done. This is the way good reviews can hurt you. Bad reviews don't feel good. I could go into depression for weeks after being called something derogatory in a review. It takes a while to get the thick skin you need in the writing biz.

But you learn to trust audiences more than critics. Critics usually have their own agenda. Audiences are there to get their money's worth, and when they don't they let you know. They often let you know when they do as well, and this can be one of the highlights of being a writer, knowing that your efforts are being appreciated.

In the world of commerce, this is more important than in the world of art. In the world of art, where I mostly am today, I imagine my audience as a room filled with my clones, with my values and my tastes. I have to work hard to make this audience tough-minded, not letting me get reckless, not letting me get away with offering something that still needs another rewrite. But when I satisfy myself, I feel as good as when I satisfy a room full of strangers. And this is as it should be.

1/21/2003 03:50:00 AM | 0 comments

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Sketch says, "Happiness is sunshine and a bone."

__The Writing Life

After October 31, 2006, new posts are published at

The Writing Life II

After October 31, 2006,
new posts are published at