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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The Sextant Press

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Electronic screenwriting tutorial

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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
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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)

 
Friday, July 04, 2003  
Why I Write
[from a memoir in progress, which began on 4/13/03]
The Catch-22 in my life is that I write for myself but still wish I had a larger audience than I do. It’s hard for me to be a closet writer, an invisible writer. Yet I appear to be just this.

But I don’t write to please an audience. I write to please myself. I wish there were a better way for my potential audience, those who would find my work interesting and moving, to find me. Maybe the Internet has done this already. I frankly don’t know. I do know that my archives average over 250 visits a day but I have no way of knowing if people actually end up reading or downloading anything or if they are just browsing.

I know I am not a commercial writer. But I also know there are people, readers, who share my interests and who would respond well to my work if they knew about it. I run into them from time to time, in the audience at one of my plays, or in an email sent to me about something I’ve written that the reader found on the Internet. The world is a very large place. Where there are several, there are many. But how do I reach them?

I don’t mean to give the impression that I spend a lot of time worrying about this or that I lose any sleep over it. I don’t. I’m too focused on the work at hand, too obsessed with whatever story, in whatever form, I have put on the front burner of my daily work routine. I live and breathe my work. This makes me a reasonably dull person to be around, I think.

Not that I want to talk about my work because I don’t. I refuse to talk about work-in-progress, ever, under any circumstances. I learned by observing Crooks that talking decimates the same energy used for writing. However, I will talk about past work if the discussion is with a student writer or someone familiar with my work or if the context makes such discussion appropriate, as at a reading.

I don’t give many readings, which means I enjoy the ones I do give. I especially enjoy reading out of Portland, in small towns in eastern and central Oregon, or on the coast, where people support such events in great numbers. By temperament, I’m much more suited to living in a small town than in a city. But I expect to die in Portland, or close by, because Harriet’s grandchildren are here. I’ve never been able to convince her to move.

I write almost daily. I think about writing all the time. My best time for working on new writing is early in the morning. I can rewrite anywhere, under any conditions.

I write because it is the way I exist in the world. To me, writing has become an existential act. I write, therefore I am. It is the way I digest, reflect upon, and make sense of my experience in the world. Since this process takes time, I often don’t respond to requests to discuss immediate experience. I haven’t figured out what to say about it yet. My oral skills are less developed than my written skills – or rather, I trust them less. I’ve learned that language is complex, that using it to communicate emotion is especially complex, and this makes me very resistant to enter oral discussion of experience that is fodder for later written expression, typically fictionalized and dramatized in a story, whether the story becomes structured as a stage play, screenplay, short story, or novel.

In other words, I write a hell of a lot more than I talk, especially about things that matter. This has become especially true since I stopped drinking. I found it easier to be social and to express myself orally while drinking. Today I sometimes have more intimate relationships with pen pals than with friends who live close by. I believe Crooks and I remained so close after the Army because I was able to write him a lot of letters, although we both also ran up very large phone bills with drunken calls.

The words I put into the mouth of Moliere – “Everybody knows me – I reveal myself to the world! … All it takes is the price of a ticket to know me.” – reflect my own attitude. I spend so much time being intimate in my writing that when I am not writing I prefer to be distracted by less engaging matters, such as watching sports or a movie, or barbecuing on the patio, or taking a walk, or simply staring into space. My least favorite activity in the world is to sit around talking about deep meanings of anything – the state of the world, the meaning of a movie, the health of a relationship, the behavior of a friend. I have opinions about all these things but what I have to say ends up in my writing, not in my conversations.

I am aware that this is not a very social way to be in the world. It does not make me easy to live with, at least not by someone who will not take the trouble to find my intimate self where it actually exists, in my work.

Since I find nothing wrong with being this way in the world, I am not interested in making compromises that may affect how I work. All writers have their superstitions and my major one is that talking out material compromises the writing energy that will develop this same material more carefully and deliberately in a process that takes time. This is probably why some people find me secretive. In the end, I will share far more dirty laundry, so to speak, than they will. Indeed, some people who know me are shocked by how much I reveal in my writing, in cold and permanent print, and low little I reveal in person. These people, who are in the majority of my acquaintances, do not understand the process of writing.

I write, therefore I am. And I expect to write for as long as I am.

7/04/2003 06:17:00 AM | 0 comments

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