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!

Links:

Literary archive

The Sextant Press

Personal home page

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.

Suggest a writer's blog

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)

Friday, January 31, 2003

"Local writer"
I've never liked being called "a local writer." No harm is usually meant by this, at least not consciously, but the subtext is always this: nobody ever heard of you beyond this locality. No one in New York calls Norman Mailer "a local writer." No one here in Portland calls Ursula Le Guin "a local writer."

I'm not called much of anything by anyone these days but in the 1980s, the decade in which I had the most press coverage, I frequently was called "a local playwright." Later, as the press in Seattle began to pay attention to me, I graduated to being called "a regional playwright" or "a Northwest playwright." But to be a playwright, a real playwright, in this country, you have to get produced in New York city. Although I've twice had plays scheduled to be produced there, once very early in my career and again less than a decade ago, neither play actually hit the boards (in the first case, the company decided to declare bankruptcy; in the second, I pulled the play after an irresolvable difference with the director -- and thank the gods I could do this, which is not something that a screenwriter can do). Since the birth of the Internet, I've been produced in Ireland, Chile, Spain, Turkey, Sweden, England ... but not in New York. I'm not "really" a playwright. End of story.

Today most of my readers find me on the Internet, not in libraries. My literary archive, hosted by the University of North Carolina and accessible online, continues to get good traffic (over 200 hits a day on the average, with peaks much greater than this, such as 700+ hits yesterday), though it's hard to know how many are just browsing and how many download or read something. But most of my recent play productions have come directly as a result of having my work accessible on the Internet.

In the 1980s, when I was playwright-in-residence at several theater companies here in Portland, where I developed and premiered my new work as a matter of course, it made sense to call me "a Portland playwright," though this was never what I called myself ("just a playwright, ma'am"), but it certainly doesn't today when I'm seldom produced here. Yet now and again I see myself called "a local playwright" or "local author" in some passing mention or other, often nostalgic (as in, "whatever happened to ..."). My best plays -- both in my judgement and in the number of awards they've won -- have never had "a local" production, but locally my career as a playwright appears to have ended in the 1990s when I stopped premiering my work here. That's how provincial Portland can be.

Even though I abandoned the short story for decades, my national reputation was strongest in the 1970s when three of my stories were considered for publication in the annual anthology Best American Short Stories, finally being selected to the "Roll of Honor," the anthology's "almost" award (the stories are The Sextant, Presenting the Annual Interracial Pig Roast, and The Idaho Jacket). During this decade I was regularly publishing stories in some of the major literary magazines. No one called me "a local writer" in Eugene, where I lived during most of that period.

I've always considered my home the library. This is where I like my work to end up. If your work is in the library, anything can happen at any time. A pretty obscure essay of mine that was published in College English in 1967 inspired a recent book 35 years later (details here). Something like that makes a writer, at least this writer, feel good. I read things that inspire me; it's great to write something that inspires someone else.

One of the nicest gifts I've ever received was from my second wife, to whom I was married when I received my MFA in playwriting. My thesis was a play, which was produced by the University of Oregon, and the library put the script in its collection. The gift was a T-shirt -- with the Library of Congress number of my play on it. The woman knew what matters to a writer.

1/31/2003 05:12:00 AM | 0 comments

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__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