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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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 justa 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.”
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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After many years of writing, my characters just show up in my head, but it’s my job to ‘flesh them out, and’ breathe life into them. Many times I will meet or see a character in
real life, and they inspire a character in my storytelling. If you’re a new writer, take the time to write it down. It’s not the same as a few random thoughts about your character. Some intangible thing happens when I put pen to paper and get to know who my character is.
Read through your story and write down EVERYTHING the other characters say about the character you are creating. These exercises do not have to show up in your book. They are merely ways to research and explore who your characters are. When I am editing and rewriting, I look for additional ways to bring my characters to life.
I keep asking myself about the character’s motivations, goals, and needs.
“One of the things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time.
Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. Something more will arise for later, something better.”
— Annie Dillard
“A director becomes a diplomatist, a financier, a pedagogue, a top sergeant, a wet nurse, and a martyr, the kind of martyr who used to be torn into pieces by wild horses galloping in all directions at once.” ~Margaret Webster, Stage Director (This quote SO applies to writers, I thought I would include it.)
(Watercolor portraits by Trisha Sugarek)
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Watch for more interviews with authors. December: Marc Cameron, writing for TOM CLANCY
March-Apr: Joshua Hood, author of ROBERT LUDLUM’S THE TREADSTONE RENDITION
Writers! Jump-start your day with more Monday Motivations!
Oh, so you think you will write all day, and beautiful things will happen? Think again, grasshopper. If you’re a one-person band like myself and most other indie authors, you will have to wear an editor, publicist, marketing, and publishing hat, to name a few.
It takes hard work and then some more hard work. But here’s the payoff: After eight years…yep..you heard me right…of consistent weekly blogging with relevant content, supporting other writers, and interviewing authors so much more famous than I am (well, I’m not famous at all) my posts are on page ONE of Google search, and my books are selling. This year a traditional publisher picked up my true crime series of books. Don’t misunderstand; when you get a publisher, DO NOT stop publishing your indie books. And most important of all: KEEP WRITING!
“If only life could be a little more tender and art a little more robust.” Alan Rickman, actor
“Tomorrow is the most important thing in life. Comes into us at midnight very clean. It’s perfect when it arrives and puts itself in our hands. It hopes we’ve learned something from yesterday.” John Wayne
“Writing isn’t a calling; it’s a doing.” T. Sugarek
‘As a writer, I marinate, speculate, and hibernate.’ Trisha Sugarek
Sign up for my and receive your ‘MondayMotivations‘ each week! Simply type your email address in the box on my Home page (top/right). Click on ‘subscribe’.
Want to see all of these (45) in one book? Click here.
Congratulations, this is just a quick notice to let you know that your poem The Farm is one of the poems being featured on the PoetrySoup.com home page this week. Poems are rotated each day in groups of 14-16 to give each poem an equal opportunity to be displayed.
Thanks again and congratulations.
Sincerely, PoetrySoup
Fields of mustard seed
as far and beyond the eye
the farm dogs return
dusted in yellow
The clapboard grey of the old
farm house stands in testimony of
generations of pea farmers,
hunters, fishermen, and cooks
Heady fragrance of a farm dinner
immerses the senses as the screen
door slaps open
The matriarchal voice sings out
‘tea party!’ A call to supper
the city folk sit around a battered
and scared wooden table laden with
baked chicken, fried steak, mashed potatoes,
green beans and corn that hung from the
vine just minutes ago
Her biscuits and corn bread are the stuff that
dreams are made of
Later they all sit on the warped porch steps
and listen as the geese honk their way in to
the fields and their nightly time of respite
Bats fly across the moon, frogs call out their
secrets, a loon wails its loneliness
For more poetry: Click here
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TS. Culley Holderfield is a writer from Durham, NC. He is a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he completed the undergraduate creative writing program. He primarily writes fiction but has been known to dabble in poetry and essays. His work has appeared in a variety of publications, including Dime Show Review, Amarillo Bay, Yellow Mama, Scarlet Leaf, Kakalak 2016, Kakalak 2020, and Floyd County Moonshine. Hemlock Hollow, his debut novel, is forthcoming from Regal House Publishing in December 2022 in their Sour Mash Southern literature series.
Q. Where do you write? Do you have a special room, shed, barn, or special space for your writing? Or tell us about your ‘dream’ workspace.
CH. I have a really nice desk that my in-laws gave me that I often use, but I sometimes I write in my easy chair with my feet up. I’d love to have a writing shack or hut. A few years back, I visited George Bernard Shaw’s home in Hertfordshire, England. He had a writing hut in his garden where he produced the bulk of his work. It housed his writing desk and typewriter and a day bed. The best part is that it was built on a swivel so that he could rotate it throughout the day to follow the sun. If it’s good enough for George Bernard Shaw, it’s good enough for me!
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.)
CH. I try to steer clear of rituals when it comes to writing. I don’t want my creativity to become dependent on having to meet particular needs. That said, writing itself is its own ritual for me. For a while, I used to start my writing sessions by doing a few minutes of stream-of-consciousness writing to get my creative juices flowing. I don’t do that anymore, but I journal and meditate before I write, and those serve a similar purpose.
Q. Could you tell us something about yourself that we might not already know?
CH. My favorite bit of trivia about myself is that I’ve officially resided in nine different counties in North Carolina in my life, dispersed throughout the state, from the piedmont to the mountains to the coast.
Q. What tools do you begin with? Legal pad, spiral notebook, pencils, fountain pen, or do you go right to your keyboard?
CH. I tend to do all my work on a computer. I’ve tried notebooks and legal pads and index cards, but my organizational skills are subpar, and I tend to lose track of
Debut book
them. If I keep everything in the same folder in Word, there’s a chance I won’t lose them. When starting a project, I begin with research and characters, and those usually go hand in hand. When I was beginning my current work-in-progress, I knew that it would be set in North Carolina in the 1860s and I had a good sense of two of the main characters. I then immersed myself into the era and place, and gained a lot of ideas and insights for the arc of the book that I fleshed out in different documents on my computer.
Q. Do you enjoy writing in other forms (playwriting, poetry, short stories, etc.)? If yes, tell us about it.
CH. Yes. I often write short stories and poems in between my longer projects. I have an ideas document that contains a number of ideas for short stories or poems. When I have time, I’ll work on those. Short stories and poetry are harder for me to write than novels. I was a long distance runner in my younger days, and I think I’m just built for sustained pacing over time. A short story is like running the 400, and a poem is like a 100 yard sprint. I can do them if I force myself, but it induces a lot of pain and suffering to get them right, and I’m never going to be great at them. Just like it’s good to mix in high-intensity and low-intensity modalities of exercise, I figure it’s good for me to mix in different forms of writing every once in a while.
My writing partner
Q. What’s your best advice to other writers for overcoming procrastination?
CH. There’s procrastination, and then there’s writer’s block. It’s probably good to figure which one you’re dealing with. If you know what you want to write and just aren’t able to make time for it, I think there are a number of strategies that can help. Most of them boil down to making it easy on yourself by setting small, attainable goals. My goal for any one writing session is to grow my manuscript by at least one page. Sometimes that means I don’t even have to write a full page. I can just edit my work until the manuscript grows by a page. So, if I have 35 total pages in the document when I start, I want to see that there are 36 pages when I finish. (Note: adding spaces between paragraphs doesn’t count!)
If I’m having trouble getting going, that’s more of a writer’s block issue. I may just tell myself that all I need to do is to write one word. If I can change or add a single word, I will have made progress. Also, it’s freeing to remember that whatever you write today, you’ll probably wind up changing during revision. All that really matters is that you make progress. This takes the pressure off. All of that said, once I get going it’s rare that I only add that one word. I usually wind up writing a page or so, and a page or so per day is a novel a year.
Join us next week for Part II of this wonderful interview with new author, Culley Holderfield.
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As I swiveled around in my office chair I faced the back wall of my office and stared unseeing at a (manually) typed letter from James Clavell dated June, 1971. Clavell being the author of the classic and world renowned, ‘SHOGUN‘. (for you poor pathetic illiterate readers out there who have never read this classic or heard of James Clavell.) The letter was a response to my asking him for more information on the word ‘joss’ and how it was used in ancient Japan. He responded with my answer and an invitation for us to sail up through the Strait of Juan De Fuca and the Georgia Strait to Vancouver Island and his home. WOW!
‘SHOGUN‘ began my love affair with Samurai Japan and the history of ancient Japan. The Samurai, a military caste in feudal Japan, began as provincial warriors before rising to power in the 12th century with the beginning of the country’s first military dictatorship, known as the shogunate. They continue to rise to great power, known for their superb fighting skills, their unwavering loyalty, and (oddly) their poetry. I became a student of this warrior class for over two decades. Searching out and reading their Haiku and Renku writings.
I was fascinated by the fact that these fierce, bloodied, bigger-than-life warriors who dedicated their lives to their lord and war could, in turn, write delicate, tender poetry. So delicate you felt as though the paper the poetry was written on would crumble if you held it too tightly. So tender your heart wept at the reading.
One day; I don’t know which day or what prompted me, I wrote my first Haiku. And as they say, the rest is history. I have written Haiku for over three decades, published three books of poetry.
It is a wonderful exercise in brevity and translates over to your other writings. Helping you to cut away the excess, the fluff in your writing. And if you write enough of this poetry, the fluff in your writing will never appear in the first place.
The Garden
I wander my blooms
the morning sun barely peeks
above the far hills
~~Trisha Sugarek
Samurai Song (Renku)
delicate blossom
rests in the still gnarled hand
bruised petals weep tears
weary eyes open
tiny cuts, the body bleeds
peace still years away
sun rise breaks the hill
heralds another battle
draw your sword and charge
~~Trisha Sugarek
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My weekly BLOG features INTERVIEWS with best-selling AUTHORS! November: Susanne O’Leary, December: Mimi Mathews, February: Jennie Gautet, April: S. Brian Jones To receive my weekly posts sign up for my
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You find inspiration in the strangest places. I was dedicated to writing scripts for the stage. A few years back, I attended this production of my children’s play, Emma and the Lost Unicorn, outside of Boston .
After the actors had their curtain calls, the Director told them that if they changed out of their costumes and did their assigned tasks back stage, they could ‘have some time with Trisha’.
So I found myself holding impromptu stage craft classes with these adorable young actors (age 5–18). I was struck how serious they were about their craft. Their questions were very sophisticated. And then it happened……the inspiration to dare to write something completely out of my comfort zone…..a book.
Emma
The youngest ones begged me to write the stories from my scripts into storybook form. They wanted to have Emma, Stare, Cheets, and Stanley in their personal libraries. Six children’s books, a mystery series and three novels later I have found a new outlet for my story telling. These children, who knew no fear, gave me enough courage to try chapter books, poetry, and becoming a novelist. Experimental at times, risky at times, scary, but so rewarding.
I was lucky and had a head start using my stage plays as a story outline as I adapted them to story book form. But for my true crime series and the novels, I was flying solo….staring at a blank screen, typing that first sentence (that I am always talking about).
So step out of your comfort zone and try writing in a different format… it’s very liberating and you might surprise yourself. I did!
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Another pair of cowboy boots
beneath my bed
banishing dreams of
a permanent man
right out of my head
They call me a buckle-bunny
but that sets low the bar
for at the end of the night
I take home the rodeo star
He rides wild horses
and even wilder bulls
I lap him up by the mouthfuls
Lust curls in my belly
when I spy the champion buckle
his laughter is sweet as honeysuckle
An aging buckle-bunny is what I see
until the next cowboy smiles at me
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With years of practice writing Haiku, Renku (and prose) poetry, I feel as though I have acquired some skill. Because that is what it takes, practice. The more you do anything the better you become. This my first attempt, ever, at ‘rhyming poetry’. For two consecutive mornings I had lain in my bed, between that creative space of half-sleep and wakefulness. The poem swirling around and around until it distilled to this and I had to write it down. (for better or for worse.)
The biggest reason that “rhyming poetry” has fallen out of favor is that it is often forced and unnatural. … To the ear, it will sound more like internal rhyme (but to the eye it will appear as some form of end rhyme). In a good rhyming poem, the reader might not even realize it is rhyming poem (until later). (Unknown. From the Internet.) If I accomplished this, dear reader, it was by pure accident.
The title: A young country-western song writer made up this term and it caught my fancy. She meant it as a name for the groupies that follow the rodeo and its cowboys.
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My weekly BLOG features INTERVIEWS with best-selling AUTHORS! November: Susanne O’Leary, December: Mimi Mathews, February: Jennie Gautet To receive my weekly posts sign up for my
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My weekly BLOG features INTERVIEWS with best-selling AUTHORS! October: Life Coach, shaman, author, Jennifer Monahan, November: Susanne O’Leary, December: Mimi Mathews, February: Jennie Gautet To receive my weekly posts sign up for my
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25 minutes: into rehearsal
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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?”
How to Write Rich Characters.
“One of the things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time.
Writers! Jump-start your day with more Monday Motivations!
“If only life could be a little more tender and art a little more robust.” Alan Rickman, actor
It’s perfect when it arrives and puts itself in our hands. It hopes we’ve learned something from yesterday.” John Wayne
and receive your ‘Monday 
PoetrySoup.com home page this week. Poems are rotated each day in groups of 14-16 to give each poem an equal opportunity to be displayed.
