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

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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)

 
Tuesday, April 08, 2003  
What is great literature?
Each generation embraces its version of the "literary classics" but we forget that these lists can change over time. As Rupert Christiansen reminds us, "...even Shakespeare was considered trash for most of the 17th and 18th centuries." (Read entire story). In his brilliant book Hamlet and the Philosophy of Criticism, Morris Weitz shows in detail how critics over time have interpreted Hamlet in just about every way a play can be interpreted.

Nor does popularity settle the issue. On the contrary, it adds to the mix to demonstrate that fame is as fickle as reputation. As an undergraduate at UCLA I took a course called "19th Century Popular Literature" and what I still remember about it is that I had never heard of a single one of these best-selling authors of a century ago. The 19th century American authors I knew in 1965 were not the ones who were most loved by their contemporaries.

Fame and literary reputation change over time. This should be obvious but it isn't. Few people today realize how insignificant Shakespeare's reputation was 450 years ago. To us he seems to have been the Literary God forever.

In the subtitle of a memoir I am writing, I call myself "a marginal writer," and these facts of fickle fame do not excuse this label nor make it more attractive. I haven't chosen to be a writer who exists only in the margins of literary culture, that's simply the way it turned out, or has turned out to date. I expect no great change on the literary map unless I am not around to witness it. I believe most writers without significant reputation wish to improve their literary worth with death.

Even margins are relative. For a time, in the 1980s, I had a viable regional reputation as a playwright, which lingers even today like the memory of a distant marriage. There were good times, weren't there? Before that, in the 1960s, I had enough of a growing reputation as a short story writer to make all but the last cut for Best American Short Stories on three different occasions. I cite these statistics as if they matter but in fact they prove the thesis. Is that all there is?

Perhaps there is a tad more. Since the rise of the Internet, my literary stock has shot up considerably but it's difficult to assess exactly what this increased exposure means. Over 300 people a day enter my literary archive, which must be 300 times more than look for a book of mine in a library each day, but do these visitors just browse or do they actually read something? And if so, do they like anything they read? One seldom knows. Now and again I get an email telling me how much a reader likes this or that, and these surprises are always delightful. But they don't happen often enough not to surprise me when they do happen. Because of my work's availability on the Internet, my plays have been produced in places they wouldn't appear otherwise, such as Chile, Ireland, and Turkey.

So I'm not an invisible writer, just a writer in the margins, on the fringe of literary culture. This is far better than being invisible. With my work available on the Internet and in libraries, there's always the chance of someone finding it who will appreciate it, the way Geoffrey Sirc was inspired by something I wrote in 1967 to write a book in 2002 (reference). After all, it's not fame and literary reputation a writer wants so much as connection -- connection to readers, audiences, and other writers. One wants to belong to the literary family, to be respected by those who live in literary culture.

The critics and other public arbiters of reputation and taste work within the restraints of a "star system" that limits all aspects of popular culture. Since the culture has never really decided on the uses of literature, it decides to make the makers of literature into media stars, a trend that has accelerated during the course of my own career. When I began taking myself seriously as a writer in the 1960s, the notion that a writer should have charisma was laughable. To borrow from the feminists, a writer needs charisma like a fish needs a bicycle. Today how a writer will do on the talk show circuit is a factor that determines the advertising budget.

Lack of fame or reputation has never stopped a writer from writing. We write for other reasons. Nonetheless I long for larger audiences than the small audience I am confident of. I long to climb, like a fish coming out of the sea, out of the margins onto the map of the literary mainland.

4/08/2003 01:07:00 AM | 0 comments

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