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)

Thursday, February 20, 2003

Imagination
The "life of the imagination" has never been taken as seriously in this culture as actions based on so-called "facts." We are a practical, "reality-based" culture, or at least that is our myth. Hence stories "based on a true story" do better in the marketplace, in general, than those not so based. And to take the recent extreme example, "reality-based" TV shows have become the rage, in which "real people" are put into "real situations" so we may watch them squirm.

Of course, as anyone who has ever written fact-based or historical drama can tell you, the first thing a writer does to a "factual story" is change it, rearrange it, so it is more interesting dramatically than the highly inefficient actions of "real life." (For more on this, see my essay Writing the History Play: Why Dramatists Lie in the Pursuit of Truth.) Nonetheless, "based on a true story" continues to attract us more than works based solely on the imagination. At least this is the theory embraced by the movers who buy the stories that become films, TV shows, and books.

This is unfortunate. Despite being false (since, in fact, "based on" is more important than "true story" in the delivery of these dramatic stories, which depend on imaginative changes for their very power), the bias only demonstrates a cultural disrespect for the importance of storytellers. I'm not sure why this happened unless it goes all the way back to our roots and the practical skills needed to survive, tame (i.e. defeat the people already here) and develop "a wilderness." We've thought of ourselves as "a chosen people" ("a city on a hill") from the beginning, and our survival depended on hard practical work, not acts of the imagination.

And those acts of the imagination that have advanced the culture are related to feats of engineering, acts with practical consequences. The unfortunate truth about literary art in our culture is that it has little practical value. Make that art in general. It is pushed off into the back alleys of the culture, into museums and literature classes, and even the popular arts, such as film, cater to the lowest common denominator in the forms which reach the greatest numbers.

All cultures are not like this, so it is not an inevitable arrangement of human priorities. Poets in Ireland, for example, get a kind of respect not given them here (they didn't used to have to pay taxes but I heard about a movement to change that, not sure how it turned out). When I was in Germany in the Army in the early 1960s, I remember being amazed at how much respect "a teacher" received. Some of the parents of my friends were teachers and received to such respect in the U.S. In fact, we even had a little jingle about it, "Those who can, do; those who can't, teach."

We also subvert the importance of the arts, of lives of the imagination, by thrusting artists into "the star system," worshipping a few in order to ignore the many. Star artists amount to token artists, the few that the culture is willing to pay attention to, which saves the culture from taking the entire family of artists seriously. If you don't want minorities living next door to you, you single out a few to show that you aren't prejudiced, and then leave the status quo just as it is. It's a very old political/societal technique of usurpation, embracing token elements in order to de-fuse a potentially revolutionary situation. I remember in the 1960s, I knew the counter-culture was dead in the water when bank employees began to wear psychedelic neckties. You stop a revolution by embracing the harmless elements of it, bringing it into the main culture as a barrier protecting the status quo.

The life of the imagination has never received great value in this country. It's one of the realities people in the arts put up with.

2/20/2003 06:14:00 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