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

Personal home page

Electronic screenwriting tutorial

References

Bookstore
Highlights:

Finalist, Oregon Book Award

Practical Screenwriting

Love At Ground Zero

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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.

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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, April 24, 2003  
The Journals
[from a memoir in progress]
I kept the records of my variable star observations in an accounting ledger book. I no longer have it. However, my senior year of high school I began a journal (also in a ledger book) of different content, in which I posed to myself and reflected on and tried to solve various mathematical problems and puzzles, many of them in the mathematical area called “number theory.” Number theory studies the properties of numbers, and I became fascinated with the subject after reading a book, the title of which I still recall: Number, the Language of Science by Tobias Dantzig. For Christmas around this time, I received a thick four-volume set of books called The World of Mathematics. If astronomy was my first intellectual obsession, numbers became my second. The amateur astronomer was becoming an amateur mathematician.

I went through five accounting ledgers before I abandoned making entries into them. I still have all of them. Today they look like notes by someone else, a person I can’t remember being, and my math. is so rusty I often can’t understand what I am doing in row after row of mathematical equations. The journal entries are most interesting in their prose, which in the early volumes occurs much less often than the pages of equations. But eventually the journals stop being mathematics journals and become the journals of, first, someone struggling to find his way and, later, of a struggling writer. Taken together, the five volumes of journals present documentation of a major change in the direction of my life.

The first journal entry is made on February 2, 1957, and the first line reads, “21 Card Trick: Proof.” Following is a mathematical proof of why the 21-card truck works the way it does. And so it goes, a budding mathematician in Socratic dialogue with himself, with snippets of prose stuck between pages of mathematical equations:

Feb. 4, 1957 … An interesting discussion is given on page 1134 of Newman’s World of Mathematics. I note here the main part.

Feb. 24, 1957 … I have been trying to determine if a parabola is asymptotic.

Feb. 26, 1957 … My proof is wrong. A Cal. Tech. student got hold of it and left me the following note … I can sleep again.

March 23, 1957 … A real stinker than I’ve yet to solve.

March 25, 1957 … At last, I’ve found a worthwhile solid geometry problem (had it on homework tonight).

April 2, 1957 … A solid geometry problem listed only because of the beauty of its solution.

April 9, 1957 … My own generalization and proof of the “Polygon Puzzle” by Cletus Oakley (Oct. 1956, Jack & Jill).

April 12, 1957 … From a recent “chat” with Mr. William H. Glenn, Assistant Coordinator of Mathematics at the Pasadena Board of Education …

May 6, 1957 … I thought of an interesting problem late last night.

June 1, 1957 … Have been concerned with problem of completing the cube. Investigations have led me to [the] work below.

June 16, 1957 … I have generalized an example on pg. 27 of Courant’s Differential and Integral Calculus, Volume I” [note: I had just graduated from high school and already was studying calculus on my own].

The first journal ends on June 26, 1957, 151 pages later. All entries are made with an ink pen using black India ink. Presumably I had worked out all these mathematical equations in pencil beforehand!

On the inside of the cover of volume two of the journals, in capital letters, is written: “DO NOT STEAL! CONTENTS HAVE NO PRACTICAL VALUE!!” I was learning the ways of the artist, the mathematician as artist. Indeed, when I imagine all the solitary time I spent writing in my mathematics journals as a teenager, and compare it to the solitary time I use to write today, I see more in common than different in the two activities. Then I was interested in solving mathematical problems and puzzles in clear, elegant ways. Today I am interested in solving storytelling problems in elegant, dramatic ways.

Volume two continues in the same vein as volume one to June 15, 1958, the end of my freshman year at Cal. Tech. On Dec. 21, 1957, a journal entry notes: “I am taking Freshman Honors Work at Tech. in Number Theory, using LeVeque’s book. I’ll solve the books [ibid.] problems here.”

Everything changes in volume three of the journals. My life changes. At the end of the first term of my sophomore year at Cal. Tech., I leave home and transfer to Berkeley. I’ll have more to say about this later. Here I want to focus on how my journals change.

Through the summer of 1958, there is no hint of the major change to come. On July 24 I am able to write, “So far a lot of beautiful conjecture but not one bit of proof.” In the Sept.-Oct. 1958 issue of Mathematics Magazine, I am published for the first time, taping a reprint into the journal. My article, under the byline Bob Deemer, is entitled “A Recurrence Formula Solution to dy2 + 1 = x2.” But it’s as if publication marks the end of a mathematical career, not the beginning of one.

Suddenly the journals contain more prose and fewer equations. As I enter my second year at Cal. Tech., there are hints of the personal turmoil to come.

Sept. 27, 1958 … As of late I have been in a very depressed state of mind. The result – a poem:
The Dipper swings its counter-clockwise course,
The “Heart of Charles” lingers close beside,
And I look up in saddened, cold remorse,
And seek into the dark of night to hide. …

Oct. 2, 1958 … Is there a God? … I maintain that perhaps it is unimportant – even undesirable – for man to try to answer the question …

Nov. 6, 1958 … I am convinced that the problems of the modern world will not be solved by scientists …

Nov. 15, 1958 … Just read 3 plays by Upton Sinclair in Plays of Protest.

Nov. 29, 1958 … [a poem begins with the line] It’s good to be lonely.

Then, suddenly, all entries stop in November and don’t pick up again until March 31, 1959, a silence of almost four months. “Many months since I’ve written here. I am now at Berkeley – still a math. major. My love for the subject could not let me change into a different major.”

But this attempt at continuity would be short-lived. 1959 would prove to be a year of radical change in my life, of which the end of mathematical entries in my journal was a foreshadowing. Berkeley is such an important transition in my life that it deserves its own section, which will come later, and the next time I quote from my journals – for there are still two more volumes after the third, in which so much changes – the context will be far different from anything we’ve seen.

When I look back at the first twenty years of my life, 1939-1959, I see a solid foundation for the literary life to come, even though there is no hint that I am interested in becoming a writer. I express little interest in literature in the journals. Up to this point, references to books that are not mathematical are to books of social and political criticism. When I write poems, they are the rhymed doggerel of an adolescent. I only have to compare them to poems my brother wrote as a teenager to see how a real poet gets born. The solid foundation I see has to do with solitude and self-reliance. From the time my mother taught me the arithmetic tables in order to keep me busy in a doctor’s office, to an obsession with astronomy that had me out in the back yard with my telescope at three in the morning, alone and deliriously happy, to the private mathematical scribbling in my journal, posing obscure problems to myself to solve – I was learning a life of solitude, reflection, and self-reliance. This is the stuff from which writers are made.
4/24/2003 06:48:00 AM | 0 comments

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