How to Write Archives - Page 2 of 24 - Trisha Sugarek, Author, Playwright & Poet

Interview with Author, Tracy Sumner

USA Today Bestselling author Tracy Sumner’s storytelling career began when she picked up a historical romance on a college beach trip, and she fondly blames LaVyrle Spencer for her obsession with the genre. When she’s not writing sizzling love stories about feisty heroines and their temperamental-but-entirely-lovable heroes, Tracy enjoys reading, snowboarding, college football (Go Tigers!), yoga, and travel.

Q. Where do you write? Do you have a special room, shed, barn, or special space for your writing? (please provide a photo of you at work in your shed, room, closet, barn, or houseboat….) Or tell us about your ‘dream’ workspace.

TS. I write wherever I can. In Stephen King’s book On Writing, he has thoughts about not setting yourself into a habit where you can only write in one, perfect place. Or when you feel like the muse is sitting on your shoulder. 🙂 That said, I have a writing area in my bedroom. LOL, I live in NYC and we don’t have extra space to give for offices typically. It’s cute, though, and has my writing awards and personal thing, books and swag! My dream would, of course, be to have a room that looked like a Regency library! With shelves and shelves of books!

Q. Do you have any special rituals or quirks when you sit down to write? (a neat workspace, sharpened #2 pencils, legal pad, cup of tea, a glass of brandy, favorite pajamas, etc.)

TS. I like to write with gentle music on, no lyrics. I can’t have television or anything distracting on. I usually read the first two pages (or so) of the previous day’s work to get into the rhythm. I also edit these pages at this time, so in the end, working this way, my manuscripts are fairly clean.

Q. Could you tell us something about yourself that we might not already know?

TS. I’ve lived in Europe and Asia – and my son is adopted from Vietnam! I live in NYC, but I’m a native South Carolinian and still have a place in Beaufort, SC, too that I’ll retire to.

Q. What tools do you begin with? Legal pad, spiral notebook, pencils, fountain pen, or do you go right to your keyboard?

TS. I’m a right to keyboard writer! 😉

Q. Do you have pets? Tell us about them and their names.

TS. Before Covid, I fostered kittens a lot (harder to do in NYC due to space limitations) and I adopted one of my fosters, Banksy. He’s about 8 now and is a love bug! You’ll see he has one eye. He was spray-painted as a kitten by a homeless man and rescued by the police. It damaged his eye, which was removed, and I named him Banksy, after the graffiti artist!

Q. Do you enjoy writing in other forms (playwriting, poetry, short stories, etc.)?
If yes, tell us about it.

Join us next Friday for part 2 of this Interview
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A few BOOKS BY TRISHA SUGAREK

A New 10-Minute Play

Eyes on the Road, Girlie is my latest offering. Just written a few days ago and now, of course, in rewrites.

Truth is funnier (and stranger) than fiction.

My housekeeper relayed this story in passing the other day. Her client is a 90-year-old woman who no longer drives but still loves her outings. So she has hired a caregiver, not to help with her meds, clean her house, help her shower, or fix her meals. No. She has hired Diana to drive her around three days a week. Sometimes they are random drives, sometimes to the nearby ocean beach, or a historic site, or to beautiful downtown Savannah with all of her charming squares. Her choices are never premeditated; always picked spontaneously on the morning of the outing. But! two things are absolute: Breakfast biscuits at McDonald’s and luncheon at Chik-Fil-A.

When I heard this story told in real time, my imagination sprung to life: this would make a charming, perhaps funny, (I never know when my writing will turn up funny) short play. And so, as often is the case, dialogue began running in my head until I was forced to write it down.

Fellow writers: Life and the people around you will supply you with all you need if you but look and listen.
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A few BOOKS BY TRISHA SUGAREK

From ‘no book’ to ‘finished book’? What does it look like?

Recently a fellow writer and friend asked me this question: “What does the process of going from “no book” to “finished book” look like? I asked other authors to answer that question in my monthly author interviews. Having also completed 16 novels I’d like to add my two cents:

I sometimes used my play script (by the same name) as my book outline/treatment. As the scenario was so current (because it was a play), I found that flashbacks were a great way to flesh out each woman’s story and it served me well. It took me a year and four months to write and edit it. That equals 72,000 words.

I did not have a deadline and it probably would have really helped. I was my own deadline setter and that didn’t work out so well. On the other hand, I think having a publisher breathing down my neck would have stifled my creative flow. When life got in the way I wouldn’t work on it for weeks but then I would get inspired and work on it for days, weeks, non-stop, sometimes 10-14 hours a day. So I guess it all evened out. Whatever you do, don’t beat yourself up if you don’t write for a few days… although I preach that you should write something every day. But if you hit a dry spell, you’ll make up for it with better, more relaxed creative writing.

Because I inherently ‘rush’, I found that I had to watch-dog myself and be careful not to leave out important roads of the story. I was in early proofing of the final product of my novel and realized (in a countless re-read) that I had never described my female negotiator’s physical appearance. (Yikes!). Again, (if the writer tends to rush) go back and re-read your work to see where you need to flesh out a chapter or a character.

I am not structured at all. I write a new project in my head for days, weeks and then when my brain is about to burst I begin putting it down on paper (computer). I also write out of sequence and I think that’s okay. My novel’s last chapter was completed months before the middle was written.

Some writers have actually written whole books while blogging; they found it less daunting by writing in segments. At the end they had a book and then they published. If you need a deadline the days that you commit to writing a blog would serve. For me this wouldn’t work; I would feel too exposed having my rough draft out there for the world to see as I am a writer who slams it down the first time around and then edit, edit, delete, edit. Did I mention that the lettering is worn off my ‘delete’ key?

Frequently I will begin a story that has inspired me, not knowing much about the subject. It has sometimes stopped me dead in my tracks while I researched (example: hostage negotiations or building a cabin in the 1920’s). I had 8 pages of a new play about Winston Churchill written and had to stop to do research. I find that it can be done while I am writing and that is what I prefer. It’s more fun and keeps me interested. I don’t think I would do well having my research all done before I put my story down. I find that the research itself inspires my story line.

And then there is that unseen, unheard phenomenon where, with any luck, the characters take over and you become the typist. . This has happened to me time and again, and while I resisted at first (being a control-freak) I now embrace and welcome it. In Women Outside the Walls my character Alma, at sixteen, is abandoned by her promiscuous mother. Alma is befriended by the ex-girl friend of the man Alma had a teen crush on. They end up being room mates. I could never have dreamed that one up; but my characters got together and decided that this was what they would to do.

I don’t think that there is a right or wrong way to go through the process. Each writer should be unique in how they work. Instead of thinking of it as a project/deadline ‘thing’; think of it as a work of art, created just for you and by you. Where possible, let the characters lead you. They will never steer you wrong!

well, there you have it…the process such as it is for me and how it works.

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A few BOOKS BY TRISHA SUGAREK

Poetry.com Honors My Poetry

Dear Trisha,

Congratulations, this is just a quick notice to let you know that your poem Twenty-Five is one of the poems being featured on the PoetrySoup home page this week.

Thanks again and congratulations.

Sincerely,
PoetrySoup

Twenty-five by poet, Trisha Sugarek

25 seconds: the time it
takes to fall in love….

25 minutes: into rehearsal
we have our first kiss….

25 hours: I am dreaming of
you….

25 days: I know it is just the
beginning….

25 weeks: we are having
“make up” sex….

25 months: stranded in
Tucson, I’m sling’in hash
and you’re ropin’ steers….

25 years: Best friends, still in
love, comfortable in our
own skins, at ease and
amused by each other’s
quirks.…

….shoring up each other’s
desires, choices, and
judgments, good or bad….

sustaining each other no
matter what…
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A few BOOKS BY TRISHA SUGAREK

Do You Doubt Yourself…your writing?

I ran across a description of one of my enemies….DOUBT! And it got me to thinking. Author, Jacqueline Winspear wrote: “Doubt. Was it an emotion? A sense? Or was it just a short stubby word to describe a response that could diminish a person in a finger snap?”

I wrote earlier about my being in good company. Regardless if we writers are obscure or famous, we all doubt ourselves and our work. What if Henry Charles Bukowski, or Ernest Hemingway, or John Steinbeck had let DOUBT win? Put away their pen, dumped their scribbles into a shoe box and made a trip to the attic, got a day job and never wrote another word? It doesn’t bear thinking about.

J. Michael Straczynski: “When in ‘doubt’, blow something up.”

F.Scott Fitzgerald: “All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.”

Image result for f. scott fitzgerald

E.M. Forster: “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?”

Tapani Bagge: “Everything that doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. And later on you can use it in some story.”

Maya Angelou: “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”

Elinor Lipman: “Critics have been described as people who go into the street after battle and shoot the wounded.”

Leo Rosten: “The only reason for being a professional writer is that you just can’t help it.”

Let’s see …..when were my worst moments? DOUBT clawing at me, whispering in my ear, crawling up my spine. Telling me that I’ll never make it, I’ll never finish a whole novel, that I don’t know the first thing about writing poetry. Writing play scripts was relatively easy for me. After all I had been in theatre reading scripts for over thirty years. And the stories simply fell out of the sky and into my brain when writing a script.

But other genre?

When I could no longer resist the urgency of writing about the women who wait outside prison walls, I researched the length of the average novel; number of pages and words. Yikes! Over 300 pages and 70,000 words. DOUBT was screaming in my ear: ‘you’ll never be able to write that many pages.’ ‘you’re a playwright; not a novelist’, ‘who do you think you’re kidding?’ But I had a true story (several of them, in fact) and all I needed to do was flesh those stories out. Write one page at a time…or even one word.
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A few BOOKS BY TRISHA SUGAREK

Book Review ~ The Physics of Relationships

2 out of 5 stars ~~ Book Review

Even though this narration was supposed to be from the Mom, the author’s masculine voice frequently leaked through. I can’t quite put my finger on the whys or hows but there is a definite masculinity to her/his ‘dry’, analytical tone. And I never discovered her name.

The narrator is the Mom figure in the story. Unfortunately, she is just that. A talking head. Her deeper feelings aren’t explored. The narrator talks at the reader with conclusions rather than a true exploration. Is Chas guilty of ‘man-splaining’?

Early on the family unit fell into being a clique. Two husbands, one divorce, 1 male child, 1 female child, 1 best friend.

Speaking of the BFF. Amy moves in with Mom for awhile. She also is having troubles in her marriage. They end up sharing the same bedroom and bed and eventually Amy makes tentative sexual ovatures to her good friend. (This is an 8 on the ‘ick’ scale.) First of all, middle-aged BFFs would not share a bed. Except at a hotel, on holiday, and there was only one room/1 bed available and they were desperate for lodging. (Guilty!)
Why do most men think that if two women are very close friends, they must have lesbian tendencies just under the surface of the friendship?

This might have been a better book if the author had written in his own voice (as narrator) and told the story from the three men’s point of view. Greg, Lawrence, and Phil.
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A few BOOKS BY TRISHA SUGAREK

News Flash! Writer Goes to Prison

From stage play to novel was an incredible journey for me as a playwright turned novelist. In playwriting, you must tell your story in 100 pages or less, definitely in less than two hours and everything you want to relate to the audience must be conveyed through the dialogue. In the theatre world, there’s a term: “method acting” which means you get as close to your character as you can. If the character you are going to portray is a prostitute, you follow and talk to whores. (been there, done that. Honolulu, 1992 ) If your character is a woman who’s husband has been in prison for the past 13 years, you get inside her head or better yet visit him in prison.

I’m a ‘method’ writer, (every chance I get.)

In 1999 I had reason to visit a men’s DOC facility. (prison). I was visiting a confessed murderer as research for one of my earlier scripts. My writing has taken me to some unexpected places to say the least. On a Sunday morning I found myself sitting in the reception area with three dozen other women. Wives, sisters, mothers, daughters of convicted felons. As I waited, I wondered how long they had been coming to visit; how long would a woman wait for her man behind bars; and what a terrible impact this must have on the children, visiting their fathers in this place. Sitting there I was suddenly compelled to write their stories. I tried to interview as many women as I could and this was no easy task.

Their closed society is cloaked in guilt and shame. But they finally let me in and I discovered, for the most part, incredibly brave and strong women. They would tell their friends and neighbors, “my husband travels with his work” to explain the man’s absence. Always appearing cheerful and strong while visiting their men, the women I spoke with, had a pull off down the highway where they would congregate (after leaving the prison) where they could cry, scream, and moan and be comforted. Where they could share, with other women who understood, what their lives were really like outside the walls. Away from the eyes of their men and the prison officials.

For someone who was so comfortable writing in the genre of ‘scripts’ this was a scary prospect. Yikes! I thought, a novel was at the very least 70,000 words and over 300 pages long. What could I possibly have to say? One year and four months later I had a 335 page novel in my hands. Evidently my characters had plenty to say! At times I was surprised and delighted with my women and their stories. At other times appalled. As many writers will tell you, at some point, the characters sort’a….no…they definitely take over and you become simply the typist.

I am hoping that my readers enjoy this journey and find some empathy for those women doing hard time outside the walls.
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A Good Writer is a Good Observer

A good writer is always observing and watching other people and their interpersonal relationships with others. Relationships are complex and rarely resemble yours. And of course…listening. Everyone speaks differently, with a different word choice and a varied cadence to their speech. This can translate to your writing and add another layer of ‘flavor’ to your dialogue.

I also recommend watching movies or series to learn dialogue writing. But, not just the ‘bad’ movies, poorly written, poorly directed, and poorly acted. Watch the good ones too…ones you liked.

I recently was binge-watching an older series, “Six Feet Under“. One which I had loved when it was new and couldn’t wait for each episode to air. I began watching for the simple pleasure of re-watching it. But three or four episodes in, I began to critique it. Especially the character of Ruth; the mother of the Fisher family. She had a hot temper and I am certain that was ‘written’ in for the character. However, the actor, (Frances Conroy) went from 0 to 10 when the script called for temper. There was no layering. At first I blamed the writing…then the director. My final analysis was that the

writing (without seeing the script) was hardly at fault. Or maybe a little bit not having enough blocking written in. Don’t forget, emotion can be written as part of the blocking.

Then I laid some blame at the director’s feet for not noticing that his actor had only two levels; calm and yelling. And the yelling came out of the blue and was all the same. Why didn’t the director catch this? Well, he did have a huge cast to direct and watch over. So mostly the responsibility lay with the lazy actor. An actor who wants to get as much as possible out of a part would look for those layers, subtle though they may be. Ed O’Ross (Nikolai, the fiery Russian florist) was excellent at layering his character’s emotions.

No script or production is perfect. You can watch ANYTHING and learn from it. Same with reading. I’ll give you an example; when I noticed a couple of authors using the same word or phase over and over in their work of fiction, I realized I might suffer from the same curse. My nemeses is the word ‘just‘. My guard dog is the feature (in any word processing platform) ‘find’ or ‘replace’ and I use it to root out the 300 times I used ‘just’. (hahaha)

If you’re a screen writer, visuals are more important than diaglogue. Your blocking can include the silent dialogue. Write in the non-verbal speech of an actor. In ‘Six Feet Under‘, actor, Lauren Ambrose (Claire) and Jeremy Sisto (Billy) were superb with their non-verbal dialogue, using facial and eye expressions and body language. This credit I give to the director and the excellent actors.

When writing stage plays the playwright should keep ‘action’ simple. Write some emotional blocking in but always remember the director is going to have their own thoughts about how the scene should go. Be careful not to do the director’s job for them. It won’t be appreciated.

If you are a screenwriter or writing fiction you probably think you have no interest in theatre. One of your best sourses to learn about writing dialogue is the theatre. Live stage plays are the Mecca of good or bad dialogue. Go there, observe and learn!

Another link on the subject of over-usage of words.
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A few BOOKS BY TRISHA SUGAREK

Trisha’s poetry gets a Rave from BookReview.com

Title: Butterflies & Bullets
Author: Trisha Sugarek
Rating: Must Read!
Publisher: Trisha Sugarek
Reviewed by: Eric Jones, Book Review

I knew Sugarek’s work in the past from her collection of short children’s plays, Ten Minutes to Curtain, which involve the complicated dynamics of growing up. Flannery O’Conner said that if you live through childhood then you have enough material to write forever, and Sugarek has been there and then some. Her short work for the stage has put her in the perfect position to transition from play to poetry with her new book, Butterflies and Bullets.

Even the title denotes the strange duality between innocence and loss, and that theme is prevalent throughout the work. Mostly in free form, Sugarek keeps everything in a minimalist range, lending focus to intimate moments like a man playing his Mandolin beside a fire or the quiet landscape of the Serengeti just before rainfall. These truncated pieces of life feel like literary snapshots. These are Sugarek’s butterfly collection. Then, of course, there are the bullets.

The bullets are also set in free form, however they deal with much more happenings and are more narratively set. My favorite poem is one of these. “Hair Cut… Two Bits” chronicles the return of a barber from war-torn Europe in 1934 via a freighter into the Mississippi from the Gulf. The story, though scarcely a few pages, manages to convey the loss, struggle, and triumph of war given a single, near microscopic, experience. Not to mention that it’s all the more topical today, given the current mess in off the shore of New Orleans.

There are many that are like these, managing to say a lot with only a little and Butterflies and Bullets comes off splendidly. The collection feels complete and utterly whole, no piece of the pie excluded. Such close ups reveal that every place is connected. The ocean, if you look closely enough, looks just like rain on the blistering asphalt of your driveway. Shanty Irish curtains, at a certain scale, are indistinguishable from the sculpted wood of a Native American totem pole. This is the nature of Sugarek’s poetry, that when you pull back you see how different everything is, but when you put it under the microscope, a butterfly is really just a bullet with wings.
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Monday Motivation for Writers! #30

Pride Yourself on Your Great Dialogue!

Definition: the conversational element of literary or dramatic composition

I’ve often wondered if authors whom I’ve read, like Edna Ferber, wrote pages and pages of narrative/description because they never mastered the art of dialogue. Hmmm.

I got lucky because I began my writing career by writing stage plays. And they are nothing but dialogue. So early on I learned from, not only writing plays but, reading plays…thousands of them over the years.

To be good at it, I think one of the tricks is to write more and more dialogue and then write some more. You have to be able to get in that character’s head. What do they ‘sound’ like? Is their grammar messy? The character who hails from the Bronx, for example, is going to cut off words such as: walkin’, talkin’, eatin’, and so forth. There will be more idioms (such as ‘grill’, ‘to front’, ‘rachet’, ‘na’mean, and ‘spaz’) than a person who was raised in a household where grammar and diction were more valued. You have to be able to switch characters and write ‘flavor’ into their speech. How would an eastern Indian, whose
first language is not English, ‘sound’? Now write it that way. How would a southern ‘sound’? Be careful, people from Charleston, S.C. sound totally different from people in New Orleans, Louisiana.

Now, go back over your story and focus on how each character sounds. Is one character’s grammatical habits spilling over into another? Once in awhile I will read over my dialogue and suddenly one of my characters ‘sounds’ like me but they’re not anything like me. I let my own idioms slide right into my character’s mouth. It’s disconcerting because it’s so easy to do. When you’re out and about listen to other people’s speech patterns, idioms and speech habits.

“Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” E.L.Doctorow

“People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.” Logan Pearsall Smith
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To receive my weekly posts, sign up On the home page. Enter your email address. Watch for more interviews with authors. April: Author, H.W. ‘Buzz’ Bernard. May: Victoria Costello. June: Laila Ibrahim, August: Donna Everhart

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