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.

Posts from past seven days. For others, see archives (below).

Video welcome (AVI, 9.8M)

Home.

Site Feed.

Looking for permalinks? Click on time after each post.

Search this blog:

Find any book

Project Gutenberg
Online Free Book Catalog (classics, world lit, etc.)

AA Independent Press Guide
A free online guide to 2000+ lit mags and publishers.

Everyone Who's Anyone in Adult Trade Publishing and Tinseltown Too
Extraordinary free info useful to writers when marketing.

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

Free screenwriting software
Cinergy, a script editor, free from Mindstar Productions. Easily write your screenplay in correct format.

Recommended screenwriting books
Some important reading for serious students.

Spec Script Writing: An Annotated Example
Short guide to correct screenwriting format and writing style.

Today in Literature

The New Yorker

The New York Review of Books

NY Times Sunday Book Review

Make a post

Looking for permalinks? Click on time after each post.

Technorati Profile

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, June 07, 2003

Hyperdrama
[from a memoir in progress, which began on 4/13/03]
Eventually this new kind of theater would be called “hyperdrama.” In the mid-1980s, the few writers working in the form were all calling it something different. I was calling it “simultaneous-action theater.”

In my essay “What is Hypertext?,” I relate how difficult it was for me to begin writing my first hyperdrama. If many scenes are happening at once, how do you even number the pages?

The foundation of my confusion was this: the action of the play was not going to be linear, one scene happening after another, but simultaneous, with many scenes occurring throughout the mansion at the same time. This was what made the commission so unusual, the dramatic form was modeled after a strange new kind of play that was selling out in Los Angeles, a play called Tamara.
If many scenes occur at once, I was asking myself, what does it mean to have a "page whatever"? And how was my director going to read the script – how was I? – if two or three or – the number, at one point, would turn out to be eight! – many scenes were happening at once? How is a non-linear script read within the confining format of textual pages arranged in numerical order?
Without knowing it (I had never heard the term before), I was having my first experience with "hypertext."

Steve Smith had secured an extraordinary space for the performance, the Pittock Mansion, a tourist attraction that overlooks the Portland skyline. The performance space would include over a dozen rooms spread out on four floors. The actors would move through the mansion following their individual story threads with the audience in pursuit. Many scenes would happen at once at every level of the huge building.

Hyperdrama was like real life. Imagine a crowded Thanksgiving dinner. Imagine everyone milling about the house before getting seated. Imagine that each person there is an actor, and that what they say has been written by a playwright. This is hyperdrama. Now drop the audience into the middle of the activity as invisible voyeurs. This is hyperdrama.

Today I know that a script for hyperdrama is most conveniently written in hypertext, the “branching” (“linking”) language in which Internet web pages are written. In 1985 I’d never heard the word hypertext before, and there was no popular Internet yet. Consequently I fumbled forward as best I could, finally writing a different script for each room I used in the mansion, with time codes in the margin to synchronize each page to the rest of the action going on.

Chateau de Mort was a theatrical event unlike anything Portland had seen before. Opening night sold out immediately at one hundred dollars a ticket. The entire run, at fifty dollars, sold out just as quickly. Praise was lavished on me, the director, the actors, the producer – this was a city happening. A performance newsletter in Seattle called the event the second most important theatrical event in the Pacific Northwest in 1986, second only to a dance performance by Barishnikov. I was commissioned to write a sequel, and this became Bateau de Mort, a black comedy set on a sternwheeler in the river.

For all the hoopla and praise, I was disappointed that no one seemed to be taking this new theatrical form as seriously as I was. This was much more than entertainment. This was a genuine new dramaturgy that, it seemed to me, gave playwrights a way to tell stories that was consistent with the new model of reality being developed by quantum physics. Traditional theater was Newtonian in the way it sat the audience down in the dark to be spoon-fed its stories. Here the audience was on its feet, each member having constantly to decide which actor to follow, and therefore which story to see, creating the play s/he would see by this very sequence of decisions.

Of course, no one was much interested in hearing something that sounded so highfalutin. But I made a pledge to myself to bring respect to hyperdrama, a pledge I wouldn’t keep until the summer of 2002. In the meantime, focusing on this new form of theater would lead me into still more unexpected experiences.

6/07/2003 01:33:00 PM | 0 comments

Comments: Post a Comment

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