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.

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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)

 
Monday, June 30, 2003  
My death
[from a memoir in progress, which began on 4/13/03]
Like most writers, I’ve written a bit about death. Two of my protagonists, in the play Famililly and in the novel Emmett’s Gift, are older men dying of cancer who decide to take their own lives. Here is Emmett, hanging himself in the barn behind the farmhouse in which he rents a room:

He stood very still on the ladder with the rope around his neck. An observer might have assumed he was having second thoughts but he wasn’t. Emmett was reflecting on his good fortune, his good life. He had enjoyed both of his careers and had been able to share them with a good woman, a wife who had been his best friend. When all seemed lost and his life was slipping away, Shandy had appeared, giving him not only intense pleasure, the memory of which still energized him, but renewed courage as well, courage to take control of his life again and to die with dignity, just as he was momentarily prepared to do. Emmett felt lucky for his life. He had experienced Eros, Fidelia and Agape. He had no regrets. Well, one. But in a way he was settling the score now, making up for his failure to put a bullet in Mary’s brain.

A horse whinnied. High in the barn an owl hooted. Somewhere far in the distance a truck shifted down its gears.

Emmett kicked away the ladder, feeling like the happiest man under the stars.

In Famililly, George’s death is more weary than Emmett’s, in response to changes in the world that he does not understand:

GEORGE: You get to be my age, you look back for what went wrong. What happened to the traditional American values? You used to go out and work hard for what you wanted. You used to get married for life.

Well, I fault ourselves. I fault the kind of parents we became. We tried to save our kids from going through all the hardships we went through, and that was a mistake. We had the experience of standing in soup lines during the Great Depression, of being bombed by the Japanese at Pearl Harbor — you don't forget experiences like that. They become rooted in the fabric of your being. Because those experiences are clear, they are without ambiguity.

When a foreign country makes a surprise attack and sinks your navy, you don't get lost in rhetoric about whether war is right or wrong — you roll up your sleeves and get to work. You do what has to be done to defend your country. Everybody pitches in and works together as one big American family.

Maybe you have to suffer to learn these things, and when parents of my generation started protecting their children from going through the hard times that we went through, we ended up doing them a disservice. We spoiled them, is what it amounts to. We gave them the idea you could get what you wanted without working for it, that the world was some kind of play thing for their personal and selfish amusement. Our children never learned how to pitch in and work together, all they looked out for is number one.

When's the last time you heard of a marriage staying together for the sake of the children? Something like that is unthinkable today. Community and family values have gone down the drain.

(A pause.)

GEORGE: Well, there's nothing I can do about it. It's not my world any more. The thing is — and this is sad in a way — it makes it a hell of a lot easier for me to think about throwing in the towel. Because I just don't understand America any more.

Since outliving all my close male friends of my own generation, I’ve found myself thinking about my own death. I, too, want to be cremated, despite my belief that cemeteries are useful institutions for the living. If Harriet chooses to, she can get a plaque from the military and set it wherever she wants. I assume, of course, that she will outlive me. She should. She’s lived a healthy life, and I abused my body in a major ways for over half my years. Yet the gods are always full of surprises, and maybe the last surprise they’ll give me is to outlive my wife.

I want my ashes put at least two places: with Dad in the Shakespeare Garden and with Dick at the top of the White Bird grade.

The worst thing that could happen to me is to lose the ability to write but to remain alive. I can’t imagine such a life. Indeed, I think I would make every effort to terminate such a life. Writing is so much a part of my being that I can’t imagine existence without it. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I’ll be able to write mentally even though I can’t literally write anything down.

I’m not sure I want to drop dead as my parents did. At the top of my literary archive in the University of North Carolina’s Ibiblio Collection is the title: Charles Deemer, 1939 - ? Perhaps the most fortunate alternative of all would be to be able to write in the closing date myself. To know I was going to die and so to take care of business, consciously and deliberately. To experience death as experience, not as an accident.

I wonder how many years of writing I have left. If the gods give me ten more years, perhaps I can finish everything that currently is on my plate. By then, of course, new ideas will have occurred to me. But I’d be happy to finish the books I already have in mind.

In any case, I don’t need new experiences. If I lived to write past 100, I wouldn’t be finished writing about the experiences I’ve already had. In this regard, Harriet is much more open to new experiences than I am, always eager to travel and discover new things. I am the opposite. What I want, what I require, is peace and quiet and stability, so I can focus and write and make sense of the experiences I’ve already had. The end of my life is like one long meditation, eventually shaping words into forms that finally give meaning to everything that has happened to me. I can’t think of a swan song that better suits my character.

6/30/2003 05:58:00 AM | 0 comments

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