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!

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)

Monday, April 21, 2003

The Sextant
[from a memoir in progress]
My introduction to the sextant began with a challenge from Dad. His favorite columnist in the morning paper, F.G. Runyon as I recall, had gone to a lecture by a World War II general – I’m pretty sure it was Omar Bradley – and in the lecture the General said the distance from Moscow to some place or other was longer than from Moscow to this other city. Runyon called the local library to see if this was correct – and was told it wasn’t. So Runyon lambasted the General in his column for not knowing his geography.

Dad, however, thought that Gen. Bradley was correct, not the local library via Runyon. He told me there was a way to figure out the distances from the map coordinates of all the cities involved, using principles of trigonometry and a book of tables by someone called Driesenstok (over half a century later, I can still remember the name!). He asked if I’d like to learn how to do this, to see if Bradley or Runyon (the library) was correct. I jumped at the chance.

I was nine years old – and was learning trigonometry! Dad taught me how to figure out the distance between two cities from their longitudes and latitudes, and I was off to the races. I spent most of an afternoon figuring out the distances involved. Dad’s instincts proved to be right – Gen. Bradley, not Runyon, knew his geography accurately.

I can’t remember who suggested that I write a letter to Runyon correcting him. I have a suspicion my dad put me up to it. At any rate, I wrote a letter to the columnist, with a copy to the general, informing him he was wrong – and pointing out why.

A few days later I was featured in the column. I became quite the celebrity for a day. I no longer have a copy of the column, I’m sad to say, but I remember clearly what fun Runyon had at my expense. First he quoted excerpts from my letter. Next he wondered why I was spending a sunny afternoon over math. tables instead of being outside playing baseball. He asked rhetorically how I could trust a book of tables written by a guy whose name sounds like he’s a communist. He scolded me for squealing to the general by sending him a copy of my letter. Finally he said that he still trusted the local library more than a commie book of tables.

It was a great column written in good spirits, and for years I used to carry it in my billfold. Dad was very proud to see my name in the paper, which made me twice as proud. I began to understand that you could get favorable attention from using your brains. You didn’t have to be a sports hero.

The exercise with Dreisenstok’s tables was the tip of the iceberg. Dad brought out his sextant, the very one he had used through the Navy, and taught me how to use it. He told me how at sea, in the middle of the ocean without land visible anywhere, he could figure out the ship’s exact location using the sextant to “shoot the stars” and applying the results to the book of Dreisenstok’s tables. This seemed incredible to me. The sextant seemed as powerful as a magic wand. I wanted to know what else it could do.

Dad said with the sextant, using the principles of trigonometry he had taught me, you could determine the height of a tree, or anything else, without measuring it. I didn’t understand how you could learn the height of a tree without measuring it. This sounded like a contradiction in terms. You don’t measure it, Dad said, you calculate it.

Dad fetched paper and pencil to show me more. He drew a rough sketch of a tree. He drew a horizontal line at its base, at the end of which he drew a stick figure. Imagine, he explained, that you step off a known distance from the base of the tree, then you use the sextant to measure the angle from the bottom of the tree to the top – he wrote in some numbers by way of example. Notice if you change the angle, the tree height would have to change. In other words, for every distance along the base, there is one and only one angle of elevation appropriate to a particular tree height. By using a book of tangents in a trigonometry book, and a simple algebraic equation, you can calculate the height of a tree from the base distance and the angle of elevation.

Algebra! I was on a roll now. I had the method down in no time, and it was my idea to use this powerful knowledge to advantage. I became a nine-year-old entrepreneur, the Bobby Deemer (I grew up called by my middle name) Tree Height Calculation Company. I went door-to-door through my neighborhood, offering to calculate the height of the sycamore trees in front of each house for twenty-five cents a crack. Not only could you get favorable attention by using your brain, you could make some money as well. In my formative years, the primary lesson was that brains and knowledge matter.

One of my early published short stories is called The Sextant, which appeared in the summer, 1970, issue of Northwest Review and was selected to the Roll of Honor in Best American Short Stories 1971. It’s a father-son story, needless to say, and more explicitly autobiographical than much of my work, in which I use personal experience more obliquely.

I still have the sextant. It stands in a wooden mount made by a friend of my dad’s and is right behind me in my home basement office as I write. I haven’t shot the stars with it, or measured the height of a tree, in many, many years, but the sextant is exactly where it belongs, so close I can reach for it whenever I have to calculate where I am.

4/21/2003 08:42:00 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