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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A guide to publishers and publishing services for serious writers, including info on scam agents.

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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)

Saturday, February 01, 2003

Scattered thoughts
Attitude is almost everything: in writing, in life, we define our world by our attitude. We make our own realities. Even the holocaust can be survived if one has the right attitude (i.e. the memoir Man's Search for Meaning).

One of the symptoms of alcoholism is to become obsessive, and in my drinking days I often obsessed about all the wrong-doing surrounding me, both in my immediate world and in the world at large. If I were drinking today, I'd be obsessing about my friend dying of cancer, about the war against terrorism which, it seems to me, we are losing. I'd be stressed out, a wreck, reason enough to pour another drink. That's how the drinking cycle can work.

But I'm not drinking, though my friend is still dying, the world as I know it and value it is still crumbling. How do I cope? With a different attitude, which I would call a very dark sense of humor. We are a very imperfect species, always have been and by all evidence always will be. What I find amusing is our earnest belief that we are somehow greater than our nature, that we can transcend Nature. Natural disasters (from hurricanes to wars, which I consider a natural disaster, inherent in the human condition) periodically remind us how this is not true but we always rebuild, get comfortable again, get cocky again, and once again believe we are immune to these natural laws, that we are God's gift to existence -- or Allah's.

A serious writer is like a reporter assigned to the beat of Existence, the Human Condition. We try to tell the stories that will make some sense out of the contradictions of our behavior, within the particular context of our time and place. We learn craft so that these stories will hold interest, so that "what happens next?" will drive the narrative, but the serious writer always has a deeper motive than entertainment, which is the package, and this motive, this content, is based on a great wish, which may well be a delusion: we can learn from the past, both personal and historical. That the stories we tell can change the way people live their lives.

Now there is no doubt that individuals can learn and change from experience. And in moments of time, societies appear to change as well. But there is another level at which nothing seems to change. Reading Homer, reading Aeschylus, reading Aristophanes, is like reading a modern author writing of our own times. And if this is true, what has changed over these many centuries since they were writing? Why are the human concerns they write about still with us?

A forgotten and under-rated writer today, John O'Hara, has an epitaph that says, to paraphrase, that he was a writer who always told the truth and he told it about his time better than anyone. I would amend this to an epitaph any serious writer should be proud to own: s/he was a writer who told the truth and told it as well as s/he could.

Writers are reporters of Life, and they are like double-agents, participating in the very events they are reporting about. Individual writers bring individual attitudes to this endeavor, which shape their work accordingly, and each strives to tell his or her truth in an individual way. At a given time and place, some of this writing will resonate with an audience more than others. Fifty years later what was unread may become read, what was popular may become forgotten.

In the first two decades of its publication, Moby Dick sold less than 500 copies. Today it is a classic. Melville was a popular author when he wrote it and was bitter about its failure. But he did his job: he told a story that dramatized the truth of life as he understood it. A writer can do nothing more important than this.

2/01/2003 07:35:00 AM | 0 comments

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Sketch says, "Happiness is sunshine and a bone."

__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