writing Archives - Page 5 of 82 - Trisha Sugarek, Author, Playwright & Poet

Interview with author, Victoria Costello

Victoria was the kind of kid who would sit high on a tree branch for hours at a time, lost in thought. Unsurprisingly, she became a writer, beginning with reams of poems never seen by a living soul. She “also thought it would be cool to be read.” In high school, she started an underground newspaper which caused a sensation and got her suspended.
As an undergraduate, she studied journalism at American University in Washington, DC, where her career started in TV news and documentary. After raising two sons and working as a freelance TV writer/producer in LA and San Francisco, she returned to college for my MFA in writing from Mills in Oakland. She wrote what became her memoir on nights and weekends. A Lethal Inheritance was published by Prometheus Books in 2012.

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.

VC. My current writing space is a cozy loft, big enough for my desk and a small bookshelf. But it gives me a gorgeous view of Southern Oregon’s Rogue Valley, at least my chunk of it, from the north hills of Ashland, across the I-5, to Grizzly Point.

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.)

VC. After feeding the cats and drinking two cups of coffee, but before I start writing, I try to spend twenty minutes meditating at the ancestral altar I’ve erected in the attic.

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

VC. My brand of spirituality is a bit unusual in that I’m a high church Episcopalian and a pagan. The progressive Episcopal congregation I attend in Ashland, Oregon offers both traditional and Celtic Christian worship and gives me an avenue for doing community service. Then twice a month, I attend a Crone Soul Circle, an online gathering of wise women at the Sacred Wellness Grove, who meet my need for non-patriarchal, Goddess-centered earth worship and visionary feminist thought on issues of our day.

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

VC. I’m a keyboard kind of girl for actual writing, starting with my first draft. In the research and thinking stages, I gather piles of books and source materials on which I exhaust numerous yellow highlighters while filling spiral notebooks. I can’t even imagine writing, let alone the endless rewriting I do, without a computer. I have nothing but awe for authors who came before us and toiled by pen and paper alone or even a typewriter. White-Out is a nightmare I’d just as soon forget.

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

VC. Early on in my career, I made several documentary films and videos on social and political issues like abortion, nuclear power, and climate change. At a certain point, I got tired of shlepping around the world with crews and heavy equipment and I was happy to return to the solitary writing life. I also had two sons I had to raise, primarily as a single mom.

See Part 2 next week.
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To receive my weekly posts, sign up for my On the home page, enter your email address. Watch for more interviews with authors. March-Apr: Joshua Hood, author of ROBERT LUDLUM’S THE TREADSTONE RENDITION April: Author, H.W. ‘Buzz’ Bernard, May: Victoria Costello.
June: Laila Ibrahim

A few BOOKS BY TRISHA SUGAREK

Monday Motivation for the Writer! #22

You’re a great writer.
Not an aspiring writer, a mediocre writer, or a someday, somehow, almost writer.

You’re a great writer right now.
People are going to line up ten deep to tell you that you
aren’t good enough. Don’t do their work for them.

Maybe you aren’t published.
Maybe you aren’t successful.
You definitely aren’t perfect.
But you’re a great writer.
Being great doesn’t mean you won’t continue to improve or be excited and passionate.

My awesome takes nothing away from your awesome;
your awesome takes nothing away from my awesome.
Awesome is not a finite resource.

So say it. Out Loud. Every day.
“I’M A GREAT WRITER!!!” (and improving every day that I write.)
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A few BOOKS BY TRISHA SUGAREK

Monday Motivation for the Writer! #20

R U Passive? waiting for your muse to strike and help you write your novel or story? Back in the day, a muse was thought to be a creative spirit that unleashed your creativity. If you weren’t creative, it was the muse’s fault.

R U External? Setting an external reward for completing your daily writing task. Usually food, drink or an activity such as watching your favorite TV show.

R U INTERNAL? Ah, now we’re talking! Writers need to examine their own brains to get that motivation working. Your pain/pleasure receptors, in your brain, need adjusting if writing is painful. If your writing causes you more pain than pleasure, waiting for a muse or an external reward is all you have.

You need to write for the sheer joy of writing. Writing becomes the motivation for writing. Writing becomes your addiction. Turn off the negative voice in your head that tells you you’re a crappy writer, have no talent…you know the voice I’m talking about. Reinforce yourself by making positive statements, to yourself, about your writing. Take the time to admire that well-turned sentence, page, or chapter that you just wrote!

“Writing is a journey of discovery because until you start, you never know what will happen, and you be surprised by what you do~~expect the unexpected!” Mini Grey

“Writing is not a calling…it’s a doing!” Trisha Sugarek

H.W. ‘Buzz’ Bernard tells us more…Interview (part 2)

Q. What’s your best advice to other writers for overcoming procrastination?

HWB. Little elves are not going to come in the dark of night and write your book for you. So: BUTT IN CHAIR, FINGERS ON KEYBOARD.

Q. Where/when do you first discover your characters?

HWB. I don’t have a magic formula for that. Since I write historical fiction, some of the characters I run with are real. Many others that I create and plop into historical situations are an amalgam of traits and backgrounds drawn from friends, family, and coworkers I’ve known over the years . . . many years. And a few are just flat out made up.

Q. What first inspired you to write?

HWB. I’m not sure. I always enjoyed reading. Then in high school I discovered I could write pretty well, too, and received some recognition for that. I was also sports editor for the high school newspaper. At the University of Washington, even though I was a physical science major, I took some courses in creative writing and managed to hold my own.

Q. What comes first to you? The Characters or the Situation?

HWB. Usually the situation, although I often develop the characters in tandem with the plot. In the end, it’s the characters that carry a story. If you don’t have 3D, believable people in your tale, nobody’s going to care about it.

Q. Do you ‘get lost’ in your writing?

HWB. Not really. But I hate to leave a scene unfinished, so I’ll keep plowing through one until it’s complete, or until I find a logical break in it. It’s then I may discover it’s 4:30 in the afternoon, not 3 p.m. like I thought.

Q. What compelled you to choose and settle on the genre you now write in?

HWB. The history of WWII is packed with stunning tales that totally fascinate me. They are stories filled with facts and statistics, and strategies and timelines. But I want to bring these things alive. I want readers to realize that real people, just like them or their friends, lived these dramas. I want folks to pick up my novels and not just read about history, but experience it, live it. I want them to sit beside a pilot on a bombing raid, to experience the mind-numbing shock of discovering a Nazi death camp, to become lost in a Burmese jungle crawling with enemy troops, native headhunters, and blood-sucking leeches. I want my readers to keep turning the pages in my books long after they should have turned off the lights and fallen asleep. Or I want them to tear up because a character they were rooting for didn’t make it . . . or had something surprisingly good happen when all seemed lost.

Q. Are you working on something now or have a new release coming up? If so tell us about it.

HWB. DOWN A DARK ROAD will be released May 9th. It’s a “gut punch of a novel” based on the WWII exploits of a prominent Oregonian, Jim Thayer. You’re side-by-side with Jim when, as a young infantry lieutenant, he and his platoon stumble into the very heart of darkness near the end of the war. The scenes are chilling and unforgettable, and Jim refused to discuss what he had witnessed for decades after. When he finally did, my wife—who had worked for Jim when she was a young girl—was one of the people he talked to. After that, she kept a scrapbook of write-ups about Jim. She showed it to me after our recent marriage (and after Jim’s passing) and insisted there was a great story there. I was reluctant to agree initially, but after further research and getting support from Jim’s family, I saw the light, and DOWN A DARK ROAD was born.

Q. Note to Self: (a life lesson you’ve learned.)

HWB. Always have a Plan B, and maybe a C and a D. You’ll need them.

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To receive my weekly posts, sign up for my On the home page, enter your email address. Watch for more interviews with authors. March-Apr: Joshua Hood, author of ROBERT LUDLUM’S THE TREADSTONE RENDITION April: Author, H.W. ‘Buzz’ Bernard May: Victoria Costello.

A few BOOKS BY TRISHA SUGAREK

Monday Motivations for the Writer! #18

TS: A fellow writer that I have interviewed was kind enough to contribute to my Motivational Moments… Thanks, Mike!

‘One of the most common questions that novice writers ask me is “How do you overcome writer’s block?” I would define
writer’s block as a heavy psychological state in which you’re completely out of ideas about what to write. Usually, writers seem to experience it somewhere in the middle of a story rather than near the beginning or end. It can last for days or even weeks, getting you down and undermining your confidence.

My solution is simple, and many writers report that it also works for them. When you experience writer’s block, jump to some other point in the story, some other scene or episode that you already know will be there, and start working on that. This can include jumping all the way to the very end and working backward. Writers who prefer to write their stories sequentially, from start to finish, may feel uncomfortable with leaping over to some faraway section of the story, but believe me, if you force yourself to do this, there’s a strong chance that you’ll break through the barrier.

I don’t know how this solution works–maybe subconscious plot connections take place or it’s simply getting your creative energy flowing again, but it usually does. Give it a try next time you’re stuck and see if it works for you.’ ~ Mike Wells

“Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

“A straight line is not the shortest distance between two points.”― Madeleine L’Engle

Did you see my interview with Mike Wells? Click here
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To receive my weekly posts, sign up for my On the home page, enter your email address. Watch for more interviews with authors. March-Apr: Joshua Hood, author of ROBERT LUDLUM’S THE TREADSTONE RENDITION April: Author, H.W. ‘Buzz’ Bernard , May: Victoria Costello

A few BOOKS BY TRISHA SUGAREK

Monday Motivations for the Writer! #17

TS. My friend and best-selling author, Jodi Thomas, did me the honor of contributing to Monday Motivations.

‘The hardest thing a writer does each day is sitting down to work. In 28 years as a working writer, I’ve published 45 books and 13 novellas. The hardest thing wasn’t learning to write but learning to manage time. I picked up a few tricks but it is still the dragon I fight every day.

Build your nest. I find this makes it easy for me to step into fiction. It doesn’t matter if your nest is in a secret room in the attic or a small desk in a hotel room. It needs to be your nest. I usually start with a notebook.

My facts book, my bible for the series. It includes all characters’ names and basic facts. Maps of the area—if you’re making up a town, make up the map.’ ~~Jodi Thomas

‘Peace and rest at length have come, All the day’s long toil is past; And each heart is whispering “Home, Home at last!‘- Thomas Hood

‘Two roads diverged in a wood and I – I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.’- Robert Frost
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To receive my weekly posts, sign up for my On the home page, enter your email address. Watch for more interviews with authors. March-Apr: Joshua Hood, author of ROBERT LUDLUM’S THE TREADSTONE RENDITION April: Author, H.W. ‘Buzz’ Bernard May: Victoria

A few BOOKS BY TRISHA SUGAREK

The Guyer Girls will open soon in the Black Hills of South Dakota

The Black Hills Community Theatre of Rapid City, South Dakota is opening performance dates for my play, The Guyer Girls, beginning March 31st.

Writing down my memories of my mother telling me these wild stories about herself and her four sisters when they were teenagers in the 1920s in a tiny town

Mama, Violet, Gladys, Ivah, Youngest sisters

in the Pacific Northwest was a joyful trip down memory lane and a perfect genre to preserve her stories. When I was a child, thankfully, I knew all of my aunties as older women. It’s a special event when I am notified by Samuel French, my publisher, that this particular play has been licensed to produce by a theatre group.

Synopsis:

Critics have described The Guyer Girls as a cross between Little Women and I Remember Mama. From the opening moments when Ivah cuts Violet’s eyebrows off, this story romps through the sibling antics and rivalry of a large family. The first act takes place as the young teenage girls are growing into lovely women.

The five sisters grown: (left>right) LaVerne, Violet, Gladys, Ivah and Lillias.

(left>right) Tish Evans as LaVerne, Carol Cameron as Violet, LaRee Mayes as Mama, Wendy Lowe as Lillas, and Marilyn Hovland as Ivah

In a series of family stories set in the 1920s, we enjoy the girls’ hilarious pranks, antics, joys and humiliations. There is laughter in abundance. Tears, love, and sibling rivalry as these four delightful sisters grow up under the guidance of their matriarch, ‘Mama’. A prestigious marriage, a female pro-basketball player, and a run away to Alaska, these young women couldn’t be more diverse. Fast forward to the 1940s. The sisters are adults, starting their own families and Pearl Harbor has just been attacked.

The Guyer Girls are the children of Sophia and Levi Guyer who migrated to America and then moved out west. The stage play is a rich tapestry of an American family spanning three decades and based upon the true story of the Guyer family. 4f.
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To receive my weekly posts, sign up for my On the home page, enter your email address.

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 April: Author, H.W. ‘Buzz’ Bernard

A few BOOKS BY TRISHA SUGAREK

Monday Motivations for the Writer! #16

Why momentum is more important than quality. Blasphemy, right? Wrong. Momentum is more important, in this writer’s opinion, than quality.

The writer with momentum is an author who is MOVING FORWARD. Writing every day, six or seven days a week, if only a page or two a day.

The writer who is so stuck on ‘quality’ that they have only written one book in their life time, and they are still writing it, is the writer who is not moving forward or growing. If you only write one or two words a day, your manuscript is moving forward.

Many writers, who believe a,s I do, say that if you leave a project for a month, six months, a year, it is likely that you will never go back to it. And during that time the doubt creeps in: “who do I think I am?” “I’ll never be a great writer.” “I’m no good at this.” “My mother was right, I’ll never amount to anything….” “how good could I possibly be?” “I should go get a day job.” “How dare I?”

Remember, Quality gets layered in, draft by draft. Some newbie writers think that the first draft should be perfect. Sorry, that’s simply not the case. You’ve heard me say over and over: ‘that’s what rewrites are for.’
Quality is a multi-draft proposition. Momentum is the only thing that will get you a FIRST DRAFT!

“Write until it becomes as natural as breathing. Write until NOT writing makes you anxious.” Unknown

“The role of the writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say.” Anais Nin

“When we deny our stories, they define us. When we own our stories, we get to write a brave new ending.” Brene Brown
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To receive my weekly posts, sign up for my On the home page, enter your email address.

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, April: H.W. ‘Buzz’ Bernard, WWII historian

A few BOOKS BY TRISHA SUGAREK

Monday Motivations for the Writer! (#15)

When characters stroll into your story….LET THEM! A little while back, I completed an interview with FreshFiction.com and was relating to the interviewer that several characters had walked into my story (Song of the Yukon) quite unexpectedly. I welcomed them in. It happens to me frequently. They contribute interesting tributaries to my main story stream. Even though I had to stop and do some extra research, it was so WORTH IT!

Keep writing, my fellow writers!

‘This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap.’~~George Bernard Shaw

‘An original writer is not one who imitates nobody, but one whom nobody can imitate.’ Francois Rene De Chateaubriand

‘I’m not the heroic type, really. I was beaten up by Quakers.’ ~Woody Allen
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A few BOOKS BY TRISHA SUGAREK

Interview with writer, Joshua Hood, writing Robert Ludlum’s newest book

Joshua Hood is an Army vet, former SWAT sniper, and “current full-time author with a beautiful wife and two wonder-kids.”

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.

JH. I have a small office next to a gas station on the historic Collierville Square.

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.)
JH. Can’t think of any.

Q. How do you ‘get inside’ Robert Ludlum’s head and write for him?

JH. Besides his books, I spent time reading articles and watching interviews.

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

JH. I almost quit writing last year, but the hardware store I wanted to work at wasn’t hiring. And no, I’m not kidding.

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

JH. I use a white board and a legal pad for each book.

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

JH. I have a Chocolate Lab named Meg.

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

JH. I writing articles for gun magazines like Personal Defense World, Tactical Life Soldier of Fortune and Ballistic.

Q. What’s your best advice to other writers for overcoming procrastination?

JH. Creativity isn’t a vending machine; you can’t just drop in some quarters and hope to come away with a good idea. It takes time. Time to let your ideas incubate and grow. To an outsider this might look like procrastination, but in reality, it’s a process.

Q. Where/when do you first discover your characters?

JH. They just kind of show up during the process.

Q. What first inspired you to write?

JH. The summer before junior high I was watching an old James Bond movie called Goldfinger. I remember not wanting it to end and when it did, I started my first short story to try and recapture that magic.

Q. What comes first to you? The Characters or the Situation?

JH. The situation.

Q. Do you ‘get lost’ in your writing?

A. Yes. I think all writers get lost in the flow.

Join us next week for the conclusion of this interesting interview with Josh.
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A few BOOKS BY TRISHA SUGAREK

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