From his later life writings and his book, “You Get so Alone at Times that it Just Makes Sense” Bukowski wrote about how he felt he had beaten the odds….poetry gushing faster than he could write it down and grateful that he was still alive after the hard life he had lived.
I can relate….although I had been writing since my eighth grade history class (Thank you, Miss O’Connor) I certainly didn’t consider myself a ‘writer‘. Then very late in life, (1994) I began in earnest. Writing my first full length play. The next one came even easier….then the next one…it’s never stopped, the ideas.
Then friends who read my plays insisted that they wanted the ‘rest of the story’. What happened to a particular character? Did Bill ever get out of prison? Did Monty kill Samantha? Did Charlie make good his escape? Did Violet get her kids back? So…now I’ve written seven novels, stage plays and countless poems. Continue reading ““I’ll Take It”….Bukowski and Me”
It’s unofficially Charles Bukowski month because this blogger has declared it so! Who the heck is Bukowski you might be asking. In my opinion he is one of the great writers of our time. Known for his cutting, take no prisoners, urban poetry and musings. It’s no secret. I am in love with the man’s poetry. If you love ‘bad boys’ who are shot with talent, he’s the guy for you. I read his work every day that I write….whatever his commentary is about I am inspired to be a better writer.
Bukowski’s life was horrific by most people’s standards. He was a raging alcoholic, womanizer, gambler and bum. He worked regular jobs only enough to keep himself in cigarettes, booze, rent (occasionally) stamps, typewriter paper and money for the race track . My fantasy is; oh yes I have fantasized about him….to spend a weekend with him at my cabin, deep in the forests of the Blue Ridge Mountains. In the evenings, before a fire, we would drink whiskey neat, talk of people, past and present, swear at each other and tell stories. We would end the nights Continue reading “Blogger Declares August as Charles Bukowski Month!”
There’s a BLOG out there that is dedicated to the art of writing and honing your craft. Yep! I’m talking about mine and this is a shameless promo. You won’t be disappointed.
For three years now I have published my posts twice a week and it’s always something about being a better writer. Once a month I interview best selling authors such as Dean Koontz, Sue Grafton, Jeffery Deaver, Sherryl Woods, Anne Gracie, Raymond Benson, Lee Goldberg, Charles Bukowski and dozens more. My goal is to inspire other writers to write more, tell their stories, try writing a play, or maybe some poetry.
This spirited journal is designed to help women open their hearts and minds to
their own creative possibilities, while honing their writing craft. Whether you are a
beginner or a more experienced writer, the shelter within these pages will empower you to
write more. You will find this journal will quickly become your constant companion.
Much more than a journal for writing down your secrets, your thoughts and dreams, this handbook provides the writer with the ‘how to’s’. Over 275 of blank lined pages for your creative writing that includes tips and insightful quotes from famous authors, playwrights, poets and celebrities.
Actor, director, playwright, author, Trisha Sugarek has created 305 pages of ‘How To’, Tips, Quotes, and 275 blank, lined pages for your writing. ‘I have created this journal for writers of all genres. Taken from my personal experience in the writing process, I hope it kick starts new writers to begin and more experience writers to continue.’
~~This spirited journal is designed to help writers open their hearts and minds. Much more than a journal for your creative writing, this handbook provides the writer with the ‘how to’s’ of writing. Tips, instructions and prompts to help you to hone your writing skill. Each blank, lined page has writing tips and quotes from other famous authors.~~
NOW ON SALE!!! This new, innovative Journal and Handbook.
This spirited journal is designed to help writers open their hearts and minds to their own creative possibilities, while honing their craft. Whether you are a beginner or an experienced writer, you will find this journal will quickly become your constant companion.
Much more than a journal for your creative writing, this handbook provides the writer with the ‘how to’s’ of writing. Over 275 of blank, lined pages for your creative writing that includes more tips and insightful quotes from famous authors.
What’s Inside: “How Do I Begin?”
“How to Develop Exciting Characters”
“How to Write Fiction”
“How to Write a Stage Play”
“How to Write Poetry”
“How to Write Haiku Poetry”
Teachers and Students: Go to Facebook and ‘Like’ this page if you think this is something you would like to own. Future special offers to educators and students.
Ideas have come to me in the visiting area of a state prison, a haunted lighthouse, my days in Hollywood, or listening to stories of my mother, growing up with 13 siblings ….. the ideas come to me in a little kernel of truth and I am inspired to write.
I am frequently asked ‘how can you be so prolific?’, and ‘how do you write so many plays?’ ‘where do you get your ideas?’
So I thought what a perfect time to give my readers nine tips about writing their first stage play. After all, 45 play scripts ago and seventeen years earlier I began writing my first play script. And that led me to create the Creative Writers’ Journals and Handbooks which include ‘how to write a play’ and ‘how to create exciting characters.’ I went on to create a book of writing tips.
NINE TIPS TO GET YOU STARTED … and more
all journals & plays available at amazon.com
1. Format is very important. If you submit your new play to anyone they will not read it if it is not in the proper format. There is software out there that offers auto-format but I found them lacking. The character’s name is centered. Blocking (action) is indented and placed in parentheses. Setting (indent once), Rise
(indent once) the Dialogue is far left. Double space between the character’s name and the first line of dialogue. Blocking (action): is placed below the character’s name in parentheses. (indent x 3). A ‘beat’ is a dramatic pause to enhance the pace of the speech and is placed in the dialogue where you wish the actor to pause for a beat or two. Or you might want to buy a play script from a publisher. Concord Theatricals used to be Samuel French and is still the best. It seems little has changed except the name.
2. Each page represents approximately one minute of time on stage. So if you have a play that is 200 pages long, that won’t work. Audiences aren’t going to sit for more than one and a half hours unless you are providing a circus, a fire drill, sex, and an earthquake. Audiences are even reluctant to sit through “The Iceman for Cometh” a classic by Eugene O’Neill. full-length to 3 hours. You should keep your full-length script to about 100 pages which equals 1.6 hours of stage time. For a one-act divide that by 2. For a ten minute play your script should be from 10-15 pages. These times and figures are debated by others but this has been my experience as an actor/director/writer.
3. Leave lots of white space on the page. One day when your play is being produced, actors will need a place to make notes in the script during rehearsal. This is a sample of an actor’s (mine) working script. The actor usually ‘highlights’ their lines and writes the director’s blocking in the margins. (in pencil, as blocking frequently changes)
4. The blocking is indented, in parentheses, and directly below the character’s name. This is where the playwright gives the characters instructions onwhen and where to move. But, keep it short and sweet. Remember there will be a director who has their ideas of where he/she wants the actors to be. Be aware of costume changes in your writing. An actor can’t exit stage left and enter stage right, seconds later, if you haven’t written in the time it will take for them to accomplish a costume change.
5. Your script has to work on a stage. If your story takes place in more than one locale, you have to be aware of the logistics of set changes. So keep it simple to start. If you are ambitious in your setting buy a book on set design to research if your set is feasible. Some wonderful ‘envelope’ set designs unfold when you need to change the scene. But you have to consider the budget; would a theatre have the money to build it? Always a worry.
6. Dialogue:Now here’s the sometimes hard part: everything you want the audience to know about the story and the characters, is conveyed in the dialogue. Unlike a short story or a novel, where you can write as much description as you’d like, a play script has none of that. No description. Here is a Sample.Dialogue.Sugarek of dialogue demonstrating how to move the story forward.
7. The ‘Arc’ of your story: The Oxford English Dictionary defines a story arc as ‘(in a novel, play, or movie) the development or resolution of the narrative or principal theme’. Story arcs are the overall shape of rising and falling tension or emotion in a story. This rise and fall are created via plot and character development.
Simpler Examples: In Parkland Requiem the ‘arc’ of my story is when the teacher leaves the safety of his classroom to reconnoiter the position of the shooter.
In My Planet, Your Planet, Our Planet the ‘arc’ is when the activist students march in a worldwide March defying all the rules of the school.
8. How To Know When to Change Scenes. When there is a date/time or character/scene change is a good guide. But be careful, if the time/day changes and there is a costume change needed, always remember the audience isn’t a patient creature and they will not sit and wait for very long. A director can and will set up an area backstage for those quick changes and often the costume mistress will be there to help with shoes, zippers, etc. To save time, you should write the actor entering from the same side as they exited (when possible) to save the time it would take for them to hurry to the other side of the stage.
9. Your play should have a conflict. Your main character should have a conflict that he or she must solve quickly. No conflict = no play. Say you want to write your first play about you and your siblings growing up. That’s easy; have them argue about something. Be certain there is a resolution before your play ends. Imagine you want to write a love story between two people. There must be a conflict somewhere in the love story.
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Instruction on: How To Begin How to Write a Play
Formatting your Play on the Page
How to write Dialogue
How to Create Rich, Exciting Characters Stage Terminology
‘How To’ Journals and Handbooks for all of your Creative Writing, including how to write a stage Play! 275 blank, lined pages for your writing.Tips and famous quotes from authors, playwrights, directors, actors, writers, and poets to help inspire you. Look Inside
WANT TO LEARN MORE?? … These new Journals/Handbooks offer a total of 14 points of ‘how to’.
Available on Amazon.com B&N, and all fine book stores.
This new, exciting, instructional book is a sharing of over twenty+ years of experience. This writer has honed her craft of creative writing and ‘is still learning.’
Thirty-five writing tips that include:
That first, all-important, sentence
How to develop rich characters
Writer’s Block
Procrastination
Writing process
What Not to Do (when receiving a critique)
DON’T MISS my with weekly posts. Also featuringINTERVIEWS with other best-selling AUTHORS! with me once a month. We shall sneak into these writers’ special places, be a fly on the wall and watch them create!
Do other writers find themselves at 4 in the afternoon, still in their pajamas, lost in their writing ? Hopefully it only happens at home and not at the corner coffee shop…
My readers are enjoying hearing about other authors‘ writing processes. I created a Question & Answer-type Interview and then began contacting some of my favorite authors to ask them to participate. It turns out that not only do these other writers want to share their writing life with us, but they are equally interested in the stories from other authors.
In this three-part post, my interview is with Susan Elia MacNeal. I am especially honored as Susan and her publicist have asked me to review her next book, “His Majesty’s Hope”, to be released in May of this year. Please sit back and enjoy a chat with Susan……..
Q. Where do you write? Do you have a special room, shed, barn, special space for your writing?
A. I work in my beautiful library, with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, overstuffed velvet sofas, a fireplace, two cats, and a handsome young manservant to fetch me tea and coffee. Okay, that’s not true. But I do have two cats. I live in New York, and space is definitely at a premium. Before our son was born, my husband and I used our guest bedroom as an office. After it became a kid’s room, I started working at the kitchen table, or sometimes cross-legged on the living room sofa.
I joined the New York Writers Room in the West Village for a while and had many happy days there with a view of the Empire State building, but I’m not currently working there. (My son has asthma, and I like being closer to his school in case of emergencies.) I also love a little café near us—best coffee in the world, plus big tables full of other writers. I also like to work at our local public library, which is one of the old Carnegie libraries.
I’ve also written at a lot of friends’ homes, while they’ve been on vacation – some of them famous. So, parts of my books have been written at actor/writer John Hodgman’s apartment (I also looked after their cat), composer Kristin Andersen Lopez and Robert Lopez’s apartment (yes, of course I picked up his Tony award for Avenue Q and pretended to make an acceptance speech), and Ron Lieber and Jodi Kantor’s apartment. (They’re both journalists for the New York Times, and Jodi’s the author of The Obamas.)
I’ve also written with Josh Axelrad, the author of Repeat Until Rich, which was fun, because we’d break for bourbon at six p.m. But he was always saying, “I’m afraid you’re listening to me not typing and thinking I’m lazy!” I tried to tell him I have too many of my own issues to even thinking about listening to his typing or not typing!
The most amazing place I’ve ever written was just recently at Arisaig House, which is a former manor house, now a bed and breakfast, on the west coast of Scotland. It was also used as an SOE spy training camp during World War II. I was talking to a lot of people alive and living in the area during that period of time, and doing research, but I also wrote in a beautiful room with oriental rugs, a crackling fire, a view of the grounds and shoreline, and three big napping golden labs. Heaven!
But I’ve also written on trains planes and waiting rooms. Basically, I’ve learned to write anywhere and everywhere.
Join us to read part two of this wonderful interview(March 7th.) with best-seller author Susan Elia MacNeal .
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Start your month off right!! DON’T MISS UPCOMING BLOGS. A NEW SERIES, “The Writer’s Corner” INTERVIEWS with other best-selling AUTHORS!
I have had a wonderful response from other authors and plan on featuring an interview once a month . I have invited such luminaries as: Anne Purser, Dean Koontz, Sheryl Woods, Jo-Ann Mapson, Robert McCammon, Susan Elia MacNeal, Mark Childress, Sue Grafton, Jeffrey Deaver, Rhys Bowen, Elizabeth Gilbert, Amber Winckler, Walter Mosley, Nora Roberts, and many others.
So come along with me; we shall sneak into these writers’ special places, be a fly on the wall and watch them create!
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A few weeks ago I published four short plays addressing cyber-bullying and verbal bullying in our schools. My hope was that if teens and their teachers read these plays (and performed them in their classroom) it would maybe open a dialogue about this deadly practice.
In “You’re Fat, You’re Ugly…” Aanya is a beautiful, talented student, much like Amanda Todd, who is driven to attempted suicide by her peers’ relentless bullying. In “Cyber-Hate” Cathy is the victim of bullying that leads to violence. “The Bullies” is about boys who bully.
I wrote these plays depicting different variations of bullying…..Fiction based on dry statistics.
And now in today’s headlines we read about Amanda Todd, (age 15) a beautiful young girl who just couldn’t take anymore. She felt her only option to escape this form of terrorism (bullying) was to take her own life. It saddened me and my love and prayers go out to her family and friends. This pointless loss of a young woman’s life also outraged me. Amanda’s cry for help (I assume) was a previous attempt at suicide by drinking bleach. Her stalker-bully wrote a message to her, “Try harder.” What kind of monster does this??
‘Amanda Todd, a Vancouver-area teenager who posted a story to YouTube last month about being cyber-bullied, was found dead Wednesday night in Coquitlam, Canada. Authorities believe she committed suicide. Amanda’s video tells a heart-wrenching story of the bullying she was subjected to — both online and off. “In 7th grade,” she begins, sharing her message on cue cards, “I would go with friends on webcam [to] meet and talk to new people.” At one point, a stranger flattered her into flashing the camera…..
One year later, a man contacted her on Facebook, threatening to send around the picture of her topless “if [she] don’t put on a show.” Terrifyingly, the stranger knew everything about her: her address, school, friends, relatives, and the names of her family members. Soon, her naked photo had been forwarded “to everyone.”Amanda developed anxiety, depression, and anxiety disorders, she says in the video, followed by a path into drugs and alcohol.’ ~~ Huffington Post
We, as the adults, MUST take control of this deadly game that teens are playing. Maybe the bullies need to see their parents go to jail for their actions. After all, these bullies are just children, and the parents are ultimately responsible for their child’s behavior. The buck stops at the parents’ door step.
STOP THE BULLYING!
SAVE LIVES!
More resources re: Bullying, Cyber-bullying ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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he had beaten the odds….poetry gushing faster than he could write it down and grateful that he was still alive after the hard life he had lived.
Raymond Benson, Lee Goldberg, Charles Bukowski and dozens more. My goal is to inspire other writers to write more, tell their stories, try writing a play, or maybe some poetry.
Ideas have come to me in the visiting area of a state prison, a haunted lighthouse, my days in Hollywood, or listening to stories of my mother, growing up with 13 siblings ….. the ideas come to me in a little kernel of truth and I am inspired to write.
![His_Majesty's[1]](https://i0.wp.com/www.writeratplay.com/wp-content/uploads/His_Majestys1.jpg?resize=120%2C185&ssl=1)
