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

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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
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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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Famed author of Neuromancer and Johnny Mnemonic: The Screenplay.

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

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downWrite creative
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Momoka writes short stories.

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

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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.

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The Writing Life
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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,
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The Writing Life II

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

Wednesday, January 15, 2003

The writer as literary critic
Sometimes a work of fiction has a layer of literary criticism. This is true in at least two things I've written, the hyperdrama I call The Seagull Hyperdrama, my expansion of Chekhov's play into hyperdrama, and a short story, Teddy at the Pool, which tells J.D. Salinger's story "Teddy" from a different point of view in order to disagree with the common interpretation of Salinger's story.

It's been years (decades!) since I've formally studied the scholarship of Salinger's work (what a former professor of mine called "the scholiast") but in the 1960s the common reading of the ending of "Teddy" was that the boy genius gets pushed by his sister into an empty swimming pool, killing him, which is an act he predicts. Some interpretations say he leaps to his death. I never believed either was the ending. For starters, I never believed the swimming pool was empty. We know from the story that it's not the regular pool cleaning day, when they empty the pool, but Teddy imagines they changed the day to today in order to make a point -- in other words, he makes a hypothesis. But it's just his hypothesis! There is absolutely no reason to believe him, that they actually changed the cleaning schedule. So I've always assumed there is, in fact, water in the pool because it is not the cleaning day -- and if there is water in the pool, then Teddy can't fall to his death (unless he drowns, which is not described). If this is so, then what happens at the end of the story?

What really happens in Salinger's story, in my view, is the drama I depict in my story, Teddy at the Pool. In this sense, the short story works as literary criticism while still meaning to be an engrossing story in its own right.

The Seagull Hyperdrama works its literary criticism of Chekhov's play in a different way. Here the task is not to disagree with the common critical reading of the material but rather to ask this question: what are all the characters doing when they are not on stage in Chekhov's play? The Seagull as hyperdrama, in other words, expands the stage to include the entire estate, not just rooms in it (different rooms for each act). What all the characters are up to becomes the focus of the play; here, as in all hyperdrama, everyone is "on stage" at all times (because the entire estate is "the stage") and each character becomes the main character -- that is, each character has a fully developed story that is just as important as any other.

Here the layer of literary criticism becomes the interpretation the writer must do in order to be able to write all these extra scenes. In the hyperdrama, only about 20% of the writing is Chekhov's, the rest mine, because most of the actual action happens off the Chekhov stage.

In his book Love's Body, Norman O. Brown wrote that "the proper response to poetry is not criticism but poetry." Sometimes writers do this explicitly, responding to works of art by creating other works of art. This is what I hoped to do in the two works above.

1/15/2003 04:49:00 AM | 0 comments

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After October 31, 2006, new posts are published at

The Writing Life II

After October 31, 2006,
new posts are published at