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!

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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

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)

Friday, June 13, 2003

Ruby's Tune
[from a memoir in progress, which began on 4/13/03]
I’ll call her “Helen.” She was a professor of theater close to an early retirement. But she wasn’t interested in retiring, only in changing careers. She wanted to produce movies, and she had her eyes open for projects.

Helen loved my play Waitresses. This mother-daughter story, about a closet country songwriter trying to keep her daughter from making the same mistakes she did – and with the same man, touched her in a special place. This was going to be the project that broke her into the film industry.

When she made me an offer to option the film rights to my play, she had in mind hiring a screenwriter in Hollywood to make the adaptation. But I wouldn’t sell unless I got to write the screenplay. I told her I’d done some work for local producer Tom Shaw. This seemed to count for nothing.

Since I’d never written a “Hollywood” screenplay before, Helen tried to talk me out of being the writer by increasing the offer. We played this game for a while until she realized I was dead serious. She told me the project became more risky with myself as the screenwriter. The option offer would be less than before. I signed a contract.

The nine or ten months I spent writing draft after draft of a screenplay based on Waitresses was on-the-job training as important to my future screenwriting as working with Leland Starnes had been to my future playwriting. Helen had a deep understanding of film story structure, about which I knew nothing at the time. Patiently she gave me a crash course in the incredibly efficient and modular storytelling strategy that goes into screenwriting.

Waitresses is a four-character play set entirely in a kitchen. In making the story work as film, I not only had to get outside but add characters and subplots that had never occurred to me while writing the play. Suddenly Ruby, the protagonist, had not one love interest – but two (she’d had none in the play). We left the kitchen to go to bars and laundromats and shopping malls, to rodeos and fly-fishing streams and fireworks displays. If I had sold the rights straight out, and a Hollywood screenwriter had added the same additions to the script that I ended up adding, I would have been horrified – because I still would have been ignorant about the huge differences between the stage play script and the screenplay.

It took almost a year but under Helen’s patient tutelage I learned how to write a screenplay. I also was bitten by the screenwriting bug, loving getting free from the practical constraints of live theater. Being a minimalist in my prose anyway, I took immediately to the “less is more” mantra of screenwriting. This form of writing was as much fun as any kind of writing I’d ever done before.

Ruby’s Tune, the movie based on Waitresses, never got funded despite Helen’s optioning the script on four different occasions. More than once she thought she’d put her funding together. One night Helen called me from Las Vegas to say she was signing the final papers in the morning, and a fat check would be in the mail to me by ten a.m. I was so excited I emailed Harriet, who was on a tour in China, that Ruby’s Tune was finally getting made. We were going to get a lot of money.

It took Helen several days to recover enough to tell me that the deal had fallen through at the last minute. Back to the drawing boards.

On another occasion, she thought she had a deal together – until an investor learned that Jennifer O’Neill was packaged to play Ruby, the lead. O’Neill was looking for a comeback after several bad television movies, and Ruby’s Tune struck her as the perfect vehicle. Unfortunately, her reputation for failed TV movies caused one investor to withdraw, which is all it took to stop another “done deal.” And so it went.

Observing Helen through all this, I was glad I wasn’t a movie producer. I don’t know how many tens of thousands of dollars Helen spent trying to get Ruby’s Tune into production. She always paid me writer’s guild minimums or more, and all her checks were good. I think I became more heart-broken for her than for myself, so badly she wanted this movie to happen and so long and hard she worked to fund it.

This was my first experience with screenwriting. Over the next fifteen years, I’d option five more screenplays and go through a similar dance of close calls and almost “done deals,” but nothing ever got fully funded and nothing ever got filmed.

However, I did get hired to write the screenplay on a couple of projects, though neither of these made it to film either. For a while an assistant to Robert Wise was a big fan, pushing several of my scripts, but eventually to no avail.

But here’s the kicker. As a playwright, I’ve had dozens of plays produced, several of them winning awards. Yet I made more money as a screenwriter, optioning six scripts that never went anywhere, than from all my royalties as a playwright (I’m not counting the film and television rights sales). There is something very wrong, perhaps even immoral, about this.

Screenwriters are always crying that they don’t get any respect. They get a ton of money instead. Their union sold their souls to the devil, exchanging artistic control and integrity for cash, and now they live with the consequences, crying all the way to the bank.

6/13/2003 06:32:00 AM | 0 comments

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__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