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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Finalist, Oregon Book Award

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Love At Ground Zero

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"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.

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

Frustrated Writer
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scribble, scribble, scribble
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William Gibson Blog
Famed author of Neuromancer and Johnny Mnemonic: The Screenplay.

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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
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Bow. James Bow.
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Momoka writes short stories.

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

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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."

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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.

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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."

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Glenn's adventures in screenwriting.

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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
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Writer's Blog.
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Man Bytes Hollywood
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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.

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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)

 
Thursday, January 30, 2003  
Women I have tried to know
Some projects come together quickly, especially shorter ones. A short story's journey from concept to final form can take place in less than a week. If a screenplay takes longer than three months, start to finish, then usually something is fundamentally wrong in its concept. Novels, I am learning, can take forever. A stage play generally took me less than six months, start to finish.

But sometimes an idea rattles around in the brain for a long time, begging for release but finding no form for its embodiment. I've had such a story in my brain for twenty years now, with the working title Women I Have Tried To Know. This was originally conceived of as a stage play for two players: an actor-protagonist and an actress portraying the six or eight women who pass through his life. With its high theatricality, the female role would be one many actresses would die for, always a plus in marketing. Unfortunately, my several false starts never got anywhere because I never could find the spine to this story, what saved it from being an episodic dark comedy, what it all added up to. So the idea still bugs me.

What I do know is that the idea has autobiographical roots. Surely nothing is messier in my past than my relationships with women. The women who pass through the guy's life above no doubt would be "inspired by" women who have passed through my life. To scratch the iceberg, consider these three wives and three live-in girlfriends:

J. was a sweet girl I knew in high school. For a while, a good buddy was dating her and I thought maybe I'd end up best man at her wedding, not the groom. Then he committed suicide.

I ran into J. again when I was in the Army studying Russian at the language school in Monterey. J. was going to college at San Jose State. We started dating, one thing led to another, and we became engaged. Then we got crazy.

At a sorority party, her best girlfriend decided to run off to Reno to marry, and we volunteered to stand up for them. We all poured ourselves into a car and headed out at something like two in the morning. To make a long story short, by the time we got there it had become a double wedding. Shortly thereafter I shipped off to Germany, and we tried to annul the marriage but the Army had rules against that sort of thing, no doubt protecting G.I.'s from getting divorces to marry bar maids. So we stayed married during my three-year hitch.

The next mistake was deciding to make a go of it after I got out of the Army. Some people never learn. By the time I entered graduate school, the marriage was on the rocks and we divorced shortly thereafter.

After this, in graduate school, I met the leading candidate for the love of my life. She was also a grad student, very bright, very beautiful, and very independent. She used to brag that she'd never met a man who could drink her under the table -- until a mutual friend fixed us up, and she found her match. Naturally we fell in love with one another.

Our grad school years together remain the happiest time of my drinking days. We both were very functional drunks, still early in that progressive nightmare, and we were rolling in dough, a very unusual situation for grad students. I had a teaching assistantship, a playwriting fellowship, and the G.I. Bill, plus income as a part-time journalist and part-time folksinger. P. had a full fellowship. We lived like royalty on half our income, saving the rest for summer travel, and still managed to keep most of the graduate English students in beer and barbecue. I remember thinking I was in heaven, this surely was what the writing life was all about.

Before disaster struck from booze, an unexpected crisis appeared when P. decided she was, in truth, a lesbian. I am sorry to say that I didn't react to the news with grace or good manners. This helps explain why she won't talk to me to this day, even though, in my view, I wasn't the one who terminated the relationship.

What I did, among a family of dumb stunts, was have an affair with a student of hers. J. became a live-in girlfriend, moving across the country to join me in Oregon after she graduated. Total disaster. The good news is it lasted only a few months.

The next live-in girlfriend is the other candidate for soul mate, and surely the most unusual relationship with a woman I've had. I knew L. since she was about eight; she was the daughter of a buddy of mine. Back in Oregon after the divorce from P., with the quick tornado of J. come and gone, I was free, as they say, and flew down to San Francisco to spend Thanksgiving with old friends. The host had a hot tub, and one afternoon I was in it alone, having arrived early and waiting for him to get home from work, when who should walk up, disrobe, and get in but his daughter, L., whom I hadn't seen since she was a teenager, about ten years earlier. Something of a homely kid, she'd turned into a gorgeous young woman. She also was a very talented singer and musician.

Another long story short, we scandalized the holiday by spending all our time together, flirting big time. I used to baby sit her! When I returned to Oregon, we corresponded, she visited, then again, and she ended up moving north to move in with me.

This, too, was a great time -- for a while. It was best when I was writing plays with songs in them and letting L. write the songs. She had an incredible talent to write the perfect song for the perfect moment. What eventually came between us, though, was not the considerable age difference but a difference in life styles, summarized by our different drugs of choice. I was a wild man drunk, and she was a laid back pothead. Our energy levels happened on different tracks.

The good news is that we remain very tight friends. She's back in S.F. and just turned ... my God! ... fifty. She's alone, a bit lonely (which I don't understand, given her talent and beauty), but hanging in, and we exchange email several times a week. She's a dear, dear friend. I feel like she's the little sister I never had, the sister I slept with.

Where are we? I'm losing count. Ah, live-in number three. It's as if I was so tired of pothead mellowness that I found the greatest package of energy I could find. P. was a cokehead and a small time dealer and a big time party animal. We lived together for two or three days before I bailed out, tired of all the late night drug deals. But we stayed together for a few years, until she got busted and did time, and I visited her in prison in Arizona. She was great fun to party with but I had met my match and always pooped out before she did, not having learned the chemistry of mixing drugs for constant refueling. I'm glad to say P. is out of jail and straight these days, though I don't see her very often.

Wife number three was an actress who had been in several of my plays and who decided her mission in life was to save me from myself. Ha ha ha! Well, she sold me the package, but it only took her a few months to learn what an idiot she was, and I returned from a bar one afternoon to find my belongings packed and on the front porch.

Now, from this material, how do you shape a story that is cohesive and moves somewhere? That's what I've been struggling with for twenty years.

I should end by saying I am happily married to number four, whom I met after I'd quit drinking, who has no direct experience of this somewhat sordid past I always seem to be writing about. More and more, that person seems like a stranger to me, too, some buffoon I impersonated in a previous life. He can crack me up and piss me off, all at the same time.
1/30/2003 09:40:00 AM | 0 comments

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