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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References

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Finalist, Oregon Book Award

Practical Screenwriting

Love At Ground Zero

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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,
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The Writing Life II

(Posts archived here are from 01/10/03 - 10/31/06)

Monday, June 02, 2003

Theatre Workshop
[from a memoir in progress, which began on 4/13/03]
The first person to support my dramatic work in Portland was the artistic director of Theatre Workshop, Steve Smith. I first met Steve while interviewing him for a story for Northwest Magazine. Learning I was a playwright as well as a journalist, he invited me to send him a script. As soon as I finished the play I’d started in Maryland, I gave Steve first shot at it.

The Pardon was a breakthrough play for me, incorporating theatrical ideas I’d been taught by Leland Starnes. It differs from my earlier dramatic work in style. My previous plays had been naturalistic, the audience regarded as invisible voyeurs watching the action from beyond an invisible “fourth wall.” The Pardon uses a more theatrical and presentational style, the same style Wilder uses in Our Town. As in Wilder’s play, a central narrator tells my story, a young man named Frank, who fled to Canada during the Vietnam War. He opens the play by speaking directly to the audience:

There was a war. Perhaps you remember. There was a war but there were no heroes.
I assumed I'd never return. Who could have foreseen a Presidential pardon? So I'd learned to live with it. At least, after ten years, a few things were going my way again. I found a job in my profession, which is radio. And I met someone. You'll meet Jocelyn later. I really don't know where I'd be without her. Not that a sense of debt is the best foundation, if you know what I mean.

There is no attempt at naturalism in The Pardon. All actors sit in chairs around the periphery of the stage, visible to the audience. There’s no realistic set and few props. When it’s time to perform, an actor comes forward and simply begins, giving a kind of “show and tell” rhythm to the story. None of these techniques were original but they were all new to me. For the first time, I was writing a “pure” stage play, told in such a way that the play would not make a better film. By then I’d come to believe, and I still believe today, that most American plays would make better films. As a result of working with and learning from Leland Starnes, my goal as a playwright became this: to write plays that would not make better movies. Indeed, I came to decide that a great play couldn’t become an effective film at all.

Thus in Sad Laughter (which was originally produced in a longer form with the title, The Comedian In Spite Of Himself), I use a comic theatrical device to represent the gossip of the Parisian salons:

(LIGHTS UP on a "caricature prop," a flat on which are painted two aristocratic women with fans. In the "head holes" appear the faces of the actresses playing Madeleine and Armande. Each has an arm through an "arm hole," holding a fan.)

ARMANDE: He married his own daughter?
MADELEINE: His own daughter.
ARMANDE: But that's so — unthinkable.
MADELEINE: Why, he even flaunts the sin on stage, portraying the very crime he commits. Surely Satan owns his soul. There can't be a more evil man in France.
ARMANDE: More evil than the King?
MADELEINE: Yes, more evil than the King.

These moments work in a theatrical, non-realistic way that cannot be duplicated on film.

In another play, Famililly, I create a counterpoint between a tense realistic scene (family members confronting the patriarch, who is dying of cancer) and a fanciful rewriting of the “Declaration of Independence” as a declaration of the rights of children against the tyranny of traditional family values:

EMILY: Do it [commit suicide] bravely, not cruelly.
GEORGE: Who's being cruel here? Is it too much to ask for the support of my family?

(Vincent steps out to address the audience, continuing his one-man show. [note: Vincent wears 18th C. costume])

VINCENT (to audience): "The history of the present Family in the United States is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of absolute Disregard for the well-being and security of children. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world."
GEORGE: I wanted family support and didn't get it. You turned on me yourself.
EMILY: I apologize for that. Seeing what was in the bag made it seem more real to me than before. I panicked for a minute.
VINCENT (to audience): "Over half the marriages in the United States end in divorce; almost one in three divorced adults cite abuse as the reason for termination;"
EMILY: This isn't easy for any of us, Dad.
VINCENT (to audience): "one-quarter of the violent crimes in the U.S. is wife assault;"
GEORGE: Please don't cry, mother. I need you to be strong now.
MARTHA: I don't think I have any strength left.

(George moves to Martha.)

VINCENT (to audience): "A woman is physically abused in this country every nine seconds;"
GEORGE: Give me your hand.

(Martha does. George helps her to her feet.)

VINCENT (to audience): "Two-thirds of the attacks are by someone she knows, often a husband or boyfriend;"
GEORGE: I'm asking you to come upstairs with me.
MARTHA: Are you sure this is the only way?
GEORGE: Positive.
VINCENT (to audience): "Sixty percent of battered women are beaten while they are pregnant;"
MARTHA: Don't you want to wait and see if June changes her mind?
GEORGE: I wish I could wait for a lot of things. But I can't.
VINCENT (to audience): "Forty-two percent of murdered women are killed by their intimate male partners;"

This is a layered moment, one actor playing against the others, that cannot be duplicated on the flat, two-dimensional movie screen. Scenes like this lose all their power when put to film. But these are the very scenes that make live theater a unique form of narrative, as it should be, rather than a dress rehearsal for a future movie, as “realistic” theater so often is. Starnes taught me this difference, and The Pardon was my first play to take advantage of what I’d learned.

Steve Smith produced and directed the premier production of The Pardon in 1979. Better, he wanted to see my next play, which became Country Northwestern, produced at Theatre Workhshop in 1981. This seemed to be my new theatrical home.

But I wasn’t able to live on play royalties alone. What helped make ends meet was that I learned how to play the grants game. The Oregon Arts Commission grant had let me leave the magazine, and I stretched out the money for as long as I could, living without frills – but still with a considerable bar bill, always the high cost item on my budget. Then, shortly after The Pardon, and partially as a result of its success, I was commissioned to write a play based on labor troubles on the Portland docks in 1934 as a longshoreman’s union struggled to be born.

This play became 1934: Blood and Roses, which was toured widely by the Portland Labor Players. The play’s subject matter was considered controversial to conservative elements in the business community, and initially a scheduled performance at the Oregon State Fair was cancelled. The play, in effect, had been banned, and local editorials rallied behind it. The controversy made the national wire services and National Public Radio, giving myself and the Portland Labor Players considerable publicity. The State Fair backed down and reversed their cancellation.

I was surviving as a playwright – but barely. I also was lonely. No one after Faye had taken my fancy.

I was invited to San Francisco for Thanksgiving, where Tom Anderson lived now, and the Crawfords and others were coming up from Los Angeles. It looked like a grand reunion of the old Ash Grove crowd, and I was excited to renew old friendships.

6/02/2003 07:38:00 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