There are 26, ten minute plays to choose from in this collection of single plays. Most address real life issues facing our tweens and teens today. NO sets, NO costumes. Five are dedicated to different forms of BULLYING. Check out the titles here at my book store.
A couple of years ago I heard from teacher friends that most arts programs were being cut. Anything that the teacher wanted to do was funded out of their own very meager pockets. So I developed these single short plays and priced them cheap. (6.50)
There is also a ‘collection’ of 10 minute plays under one cover. ‘Ten Minutes to Curtain’.
Available Now! This handsome journal/handbook was created especially for men who want to write.
‘Real Men Work Out…on Paper’
The spirited journal/handbook, intended specifically for men and your creative writing, offers over 275 lined, blank pages. Each section has instruction on ‘where to begin’, storytelling, how to write a play, and developing rich characters. Nestled in the margins of each page are more tips about writing and quotes from famous writers, actors, playwrights and poets. The bold and masculine cover can be carried anywhere! Great gift idea!
I can’t believe that it was just this past September that I wrote this blog about an idea becoming a one act play and NOWI’m writing my fifth book in the World of Murder mystery series. The first four novels are available here and on amazon.com and now are audio books at audible.com So I am thinking it is worth posting this again to let my fellow writers see how an idea can grow into something pretty damn amazing!!
If you missed the story here it is again:
Let’s see….I think it was 2005 and we were in rehearsals for “Cheatin'” in Port Aransas, Texas. I was the director and we had pulled together a terrific cast. The title pretty much tells you the story line but the fun part and what made it so funny was it was set in….where else?…… Texas and was filled with good ole’ boys and girls. It was the highest grossing play for that theatre in many a year and won Best Production and Best Set Design (thanks to Janis Johnson’s contribution). I was very proud of the cast and crew! Continue reading “An Idea..A New Mystery Series! “The World of Murder””
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!
A recent review I offered on Maya Angelou’s book, “Mom & Me & Mom” reminded me, once again, of the importance of recording family histories and story telling.
Since man formed his first vocabulary, family and tribal news was carried from tribe to tribe, village to village by a storyteller. They would be welcomed in each cave, hut, and council house as an honored guest and nights would be spent around the fire listening to the latest news from family members living afar. Famine, a good harvest, movement of wild herds, warring tribes, births, deaths, alliances, all were carried by the professional storyteller. After a few days passed the news had been told and the storyteller, rested and refreshed, would move on to the next tribe or settlement.
While growing up in the mid-fifties my mother (certainly a modern day storyteller) would tell me the stories of her and eleven siblings growing up in the forests of Tumwater, Washington (state). The story of my mother’s sister, Ivah, cutting off her eyebrows in retaliation. When all the kids were down with seafood poisoning and a dairy cow wandered into the yard crying to be milked (milk being the remedy for stomach disorders). Another of my mother’s sisters’ panties falling down around her ankles while dancing at her first dress-up dance.
I believe that these oral histories, as told by the elders of our families will soon (if not already) be a thing of the past. Whenever I have the opportunity, whether it’s teaching a class on writing and storytelling or giving a lecture on same, I relate how important it is for each of us to record our own family’s rich history. When grandparents are gone, the stories are gone with them. My family story, whose origin began in Ireland and France, was great material for my writing. I have just published my second novel, “Wild Violets“. It is loosely based on my mother, as a young entrepreneur, flapper and owner of a speakeasy, in San Francisco in the 1920’s.
In this day of television, dvd’s, and computers with games, these stories handed down from elder to child, will be lost forever. Do YOU know some great stories that you were told as a child?
It’s a great place to begin your writing career!
(Photo of five sisters above from left to right: LaVerne, Violet, , Gladys, Ivah, & Lillas)
Start your month off right!! DON’T MISS UPCOMING BLOGS. INTERVIEWS with other best-selling AUTHORS! Join us at the Writer’s Corner!
I have had a wonderful response from other authors and will feature an interview once a month . I have invited such luminaries as: Ann Purser, Susan Elia MacNeal, Mark Childress, Rhys Bowen, Dean Koontz, Sheryl Woods, Jo-Ann Mapson, Jeffrey Deaver, Elizabeth Gilbert, Amber Winckler, Robert McCammon, Caroline Leavitt, Sue Grafton, 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! Mark Childress is our April author. Robert McCammon is scheduled for May. Caroline Leavitt is June‘s author. July features Rhys Bowen. Sue Grafton is August’s author and September will feature Tasha Alexander.
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To receive my posts sign up for my Go to the home page; On the right side you’ll see a box where you can enter your email address. Click on “join my blog”. You need to confirm in an email from ‘Writer at Play’ . Thanks!
Stop! Enjoy! Writing is a lonely business….oh sure, family and friends read our stuff (sometimes reluctantly) and sometimes they really like what we’ve done! LOL But, a good(or great, if we’re so lucky) review from someone who doesn’t sleep in the bed next to us, or sit across the Thanksgiving table from us, or see us at work every day; that’s a rare validation that keeps us writers doing what we do. Perhaps non-writers don’t know this but most of us who put pen to paper have no idea whether or not what we write is good or worthy of your attention and when we put it out there we hold our breath while it is judged.
The fine folks at BookReview.com have written a thorough (and very complimentary review of “Ten Minutes to Curtain”. Scroll down to take a gander, or click here to read it on the original site.
Teen Fiction Title: Ten Minutes to Curtain! A Collection of Short Plays for the Young Actor Author: Trisha Sugarek Rating: Must Read! Publisher: CreateSpace.com Web Page:www.amazon.com Reviewed by:Eric Jones
Trisha Sugarek is a writer after my own heart. Her work is an ode to life meant to introduce children to the wonders and horrors that make life worth living. Ranging in length and production value, many of her plays invoke the feel of the old morality plays, and inherit their sense of distinction. They have been collected under the aptly titled, “Ten Minutes to Curtain”, and reading them back to back encourages them to be performed together as they flow exceedingly well from the first story of 1920’s poverty, to her final comedy about a loving, and unusual, modern housewife’s bizarre meeting with a multi-millionaire.
“Ten Minutes to Curtain” contains ten mini-dramas meant for middle school or high school production. They are appropriately simple in construction and complex in conflict, lending great emphasis on the characters established in each play. While Sugarek offers brief explanations on the stage sets, she sharply leaves them open to interpretation, allowing for many of the plays to be performed on a blank canvas as might be necessary in a class room or school yard.
“Love Never Leaves Bruises” is the pinnacle of Sugarek’s dramatic angle, and occurs at the peak of the book’s arc. It revolves around an abusive high school relationship between a boy and girl, and the emotional battle that the girl fights with her mother. While being representative of a classic case of high school hormonal imbalance, the play puts a major problem on its face and demonstrates to kids how harmless dating can quickly turn dangerous.
But Sugarek is not content to keep all of her plays in a setting familiar to the children who will be performing them. Her plays encourage an exploration of both time and emotion. “Pan of Potatoes”, “La Verne and Mr. Service”, and “The Waltz” all take place during the 1920s, and while dealing with situations that children can relate to; poverty, dance parties, and poetry, they also introduce them to the work of Robert Service, as well as the social constructs of other periods.
Sugarek’s master work can be cut up and performed in the segments that make up the larger work, but I believe that they would be best served in performance back to back. The over arching theme is that of children’s natural conflict with parents as they grow older. It’s an astonishing work that finds a way to say so much with so little, and turns the bare stage into every young man and woman’s living room. A perpetual battle ground for issues of trust and mistrust, laughter and misery, overwhelming loss and astounding triumph. ~~BookReview.com
We writers are very self-critical……but remember to stop and enjoy the successes….something that you know is well written….your book sales….or a review that tells you that you are on the right track. You deserve it!!
I had almost forgotten how to take a break. Spoil myself, sleep in late, eat ice cream, read some fiction over a cup of tea.
It’s been a very busy, productive summer. Since July first, I’ve published twenty-one of the “Shortn’Small” series of short play scripts. Finished writing “Bertie, the Bookworm and the Bully Boys” and released my second book of poetry entitled “The World of Haiku”. Just released is my newest book, “Monologues 4 Women”, something I have wanted to write for a while now.
But now with the successful completion of “Monologues…” I’m forcing (almost) myself to take
a break this week. I chose to do it at my cabin in the woods.
Fall is here and you can’t walk anywhere without the crunch of leaves under foot. There is a cheery fire in the fireplace and the feather quilt is on the bed for snuggling during night-time temperatures of 37 degrees. The Canadian geese are on the pond taking their break on the long flight to warmer climes.
The book I’ve chosen to curl up with, during my ‘pause’, is by an old friend
(or so it seems as I’ve been reading her for thirty years) Nora Roberts. It’s her latest trilogy, Inn Boonsboro. The thing that I love about Nora is that she always seems to sneak in a little tidbit that only her dedicated readers would pick up on and enjoy.
In “The Last Boyfriend” the story continues as the three Montgomery brothers are putting the final touches on an old, abandoned building which they have re-purposed into the Boonsboro Inn. Each room is named for a historic, romantic couple. Nick and Nora (The Thin Man), Elizabeth and Darcy (Pride and Prejudice), Jane and Rochester (Jane Eyre), Westley and Buttercup (Gone with the Wind) and Titiana and Oberon (A Midsummer Night’s Dream).
And here comes the oh-so-clever part: The last room is named Eve and Roarke, the romantic and exciting couple from Nora’s own series, “…….in Death” written under the pseudonym of J.D. Robb. They’re not historic; they are iconic and they are hers! I love clever!!
This isn’t a book review. The point I’m making is sometimes we writers get so caught up we forget to fill our tanks, re-charge our batteries, get centered again. And we need to remember to do just that, give our creative spirit a little R&R. Have you spoiled yourself lately?
While writing another short play, “Daughterland“, I wanted a whole new spin on Disney’s Tinker Bell. So more research. This is what I found: James Barrie’s first draft of his famous story (1924) of the magical boy who never grew up originally christened the world’s most famous female fairy as “Tippy-Toe.” By the time the play was first performed, the little pixie had been renamed “Tinker Bell” and has remained so ever since.
Probably most readers know that a tinker was an itinerant tradesman who mended pots and pans. He rang his distinctively high pitched “tinker’s bell” to announce he was in the neighborhood
Barrie pictured the fairy with fiery red hair because she was so small she could only have one emotion at a time, and the red hair seemed to reflect her most common emotions. From Barrie’s unpublished screenplay, here is the description of the first appearance of Tinker Bell:
“The fairy, Tinker Bell. Swallows perched on the outside of the window. The fairy music comes up. The fairy, Tink, flies on and alights on the window sill. She should be about five inches in height and, if the effect can be got, this should be one of the quaintest pictures of the film, the appearance of a real fairy. She is a vain little thing, and arranges her clothes to her satisfaction. She also keeps shoving the birds about so as to get the best place for herself. Finally, she shoves all the swallows off the sill.”
When the animated feature was first released, the Disney publicity department insisted that this would be the first time that Tinker Bell would be visible as more than just the little spot of light flitting around the scenery. In actuality, a silent movie version of Peter Pan released by Paramount in 1924 had a live actress appear briefly in some close-ups as Tinker Bell. Courtesy of Wade Sampson My research changed the way I thought of Tinker Bell, the Disney version. In doing so, my ‘Tippy’ (yes, I went with her orginal name) is quite different. But the play is really about a father and daughter trying to find new ground in their relationship after divorce.
Okay, so now you have a publisher…your books will fly off the shelves or through cyberspace, right? Au contra, it’s still going to take some time. Or at least, that’s certainly been my experience….
Samuel French (biggest publisher for stage plays) picked me up in 2004 and has since published four of my stage plays. I am so grateful to be in the same publishing house as Louisa May Alcott, David Mamet, Anton Chekhov, and Tennessee Williams. And the staff is so nurturing to their authors. But, here’s the reality: No sales the first year, a few the second year, more the third year and so on…….but, sadly, no BIG immediate discovery of this playwright! Not like in the movies!!
So I kept writing and editing and submitting……and writing more!
I am happy to share with my readers the news that I received a nice fat check from French with reports that reflected my biggest sales period EVER, the first quarter, this year! Over the last six months they have sold seventy scripts of mine. Most orders were in multiple quantities which means a theatre company was buying enough books for cast and crew. And that means that somewhere, out in the world, theatre companies are producing my work! You might be saying to yourself, ‘that’s not so many’ but think about it. That’s 11.6 scripts per month. And like I said, most of them were NOT perusal copies (of one) but the number that they would need to produce a show! One production in Bangor, Maine and the other in Phoenix, AZ.
This summer has been a benchmark for me. We have created a vibrant, new, interactive web site and as of this writing August will exceed any other month on the other sales channels that I use besides my on-line store. My books are finally flying off the shelves of amazon.com (USA and Europe) after eight long years!!
So my message to you is: Keep writing, fellow writers. When you get rejection after rejection (as I did) let that be the spur to write more! Use private publishing. ‘Self publishing’ is not a dirty word anymore. ‘Vanity’ books are a thing of the past…or almost. Most of us, as writers, have something important to say and vanity is far, far away from our thoughts. With the advent of ‘print on demand’ self publishing is not the huge investment it used to be. I self publish for less than $100. plus the wholesale cost of the finished book. Sure your publisher takes a cut……but! You’re published!!
Writing is a lonely business but keep at it. I’ll believe in you if you’ll believe in me!
There are 26, ten minute plays to choose from in this collection of single plays. Most address real life issues facing our tweens and teens today. NO sets, NO costumes. Five are dedicated to different forms of BULLYING. Check out the titles here at my book store.
‘Ten Minutes to Curtain’.
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.
