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.

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)

Saturday, January 18, 2003

The unnatural writer
"I want to be a writer. What should I do?"

Students ask me this several times a year. I always reply, in the short answer, "Take your time!"

I came to writing slowly and after many detours. Through high school I was a math/science guy, not quite a nerd because I played a lot of sandlot sports. I was one of the only teenagers in the country who was a member of Harvard Observatory's AAVSO (American Association of Variable Star Observers), and I was assigned three variable stars to keep my eye on whenever they were visible (even if it meant getting up at 4a.m. to observe them before sunrise). I did this religiously for about five years. With the help of my dad, I'd built a powerful reflecting telescope that was six inches in diameter and at 6-3 longer than anyone in the family. I was a dedicated amateur astronomer.

This interest and good grades and test scores got me into the California Institute of Technology, where, ironically enough, I discovered the humanities. In my sophomore year, with a B average, I transferred to Cal at Berkeley. This was in 1958 before Berkeley got politicized, and the streetlife was so wild and energetic then that I stopped going to classes to join it. Although I'd transferred to Berkeley as a philosophy major, I really had no idea what I wanted to be now that I'd decided I didn't want to be an astronomer, a mathematician, or a physicist. At Cal Tech I'd met some true geniuses and realized that I wasn't one of them. My future in science seemed related to engineering rather than creative work. I wanted to do creative work -- in some field or other.

The draft was active then, and I decided to join the Army in order to get it out of the way while I remained undecided about my future. I was dabbling in writing by this time, writing science-fiction stories but not sending them anywhere. It was a family scandal that I joined the Army (which is another story: I was a Navy brat), following closely on the "tragedy" of my leaving Cal Tech. But the Army put down the groundwork for the future that would follow, including my first interest in becoming a writer.

A recruiter put me in the Army Security Agency because he needed to fill a quota. I didn't care what I did in the Army; I just wanted to get it over with. I was sent to the Army Language School in Monterey, where I learned Russian and became a Russian Linguist serving in Germany. A spy! We translated military communications of the Russian army in East Germany.

My outfit was filled with Ph.D. candidates in the humanities who could not get a deferment. They joined before getting drafted in order to avoid carrying guns. These "big brothers" kept giving me books to read in literature, philosophy, history, psychology. Several of them were trying to become writers, and I would read their work. I got the bug to write myself.

After the Army, I worked briefly (in engineering!) and decided to return to school at UCLA. Because UCLA was on the semester system and my transfer units from Cal Tech on the quarter system, I was a fraction of a unit short on many required classes, and UCLA demanded I repeat them. This sucked, so I decided to save money by taking them again at Pasadena Community College. This accident turned me into a writer.

Several of my teachers at PCC told me I had writing talent and encouraged me to explore it in new ways. One in particular, Bob Trevor (now deceased), became a mentor and later a fan club. I began dabbling in poetry, not very good at it, but eventually discovered I had a talent for the literary short story. By the time I entered graduate school, I was a published short story writer.

If someone had told me in high school that I would become a writer, I would have laughed at them. I was 26 when I wrote what would become my first published short stories in Northwest Review, The Colorado Quarterly and The Literary Review. Prior to that, the only thing I had published was a number theory article in a mathematical journal, which I wrote and published my freshman year at Cal Tech, and some creative pieces for PCC's literary magazine.

What does one do to become a writer? You take your time to find out where your interests are going to lead you and what doors fate is going to open for you. In retrospect, I think I became a writer because I wanted to do creative work in something for most of my life and because I work better independently than for someone. Today the most attractive thing about writing to me remains that I am my own boss, if I fail I fail on my own terms. This is one of the reasons I've returned to less collaborative writing forms than scriptwriting, to be my own boss in the fullest sense.

I recently read the obituary of an English novelist, popular and well reviewed, who wrote and published her first novel when she was in her 80s. Here in Oregon, we have a writer, Clyde Rice, who published his first novel in his 80s. It's never too late to become a writer. Some of us just take longer to get there.

1/18/2003 10:16:00 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