Overview

Susan wants us to keep writing. That's what she has done and the advice she gives to other authors. We talk about writing more than one thing and how you keep writing regardless of your other feelings on the issue.

YouTube

https://youtu.be/wjFQZtBL2ow

Transcript

All right. Susan, welcome back to discovered wordsmith podcasts.

Let's talk a few authors things. So you've done some screenplays and screenwriting. You've been an actress. So what did you learn from that, that you apply to writing book and what have you learned from writing the book that you're applying to the next one?

[00:40:36] Susan: I'm good at dialogue, because I wrote so many plays and you really have to get good at making the characters, do what you need them to do within the, within the scene that they're in.

I like my dialogue. I think it's I think I get a lot of stuff in it. So I learned that from playwriting in terms of structure. I'm not a structuralist to begin with. I find if I [00:41:00] sit down and I know that I want to write something. If I think about it long enough I write little essays first.

What do you want to say? Do you want to say that a 50 year old woman could have a voice then once I've done that plotting out and essay form what the book is about? Then I sit down and the book writes me and I am very grateful for that. I very rarely have to make major cuts or major changes because I'm not really, it's not, I don't want to get all woo.

It's not automatic writing, but it does come so directly from my soul and from my brain. And if I've already mapped out, I want to write about. This, that then it will write it for me. And I can tell if it's not right and I will, I rewrite every day. So I go over what I wrote yesterday, every, the next day.

And that's how I rewrite. I change words. I change phrases, but I very rarely writing novels have had writing a novel, have had to change big [00:42:00] chunks. And my second novel, which I gave to an editor, she said, you really don't like commas. Do you? Which I've been told before. And there were no edits. She said, I didn't put in any edits.

I think the book is ready. I put in a lot of commas cause you seem to have a prejudice against them. It's the product of not having paid attention in grammar class. And my computer tells me when to put in commas and I get into arguments with it. But I learned from writing documentaries also, I learned a lot from writing documentaries about.

What are you writing about? W what are you doing here? You know what I mean? If you're writing a documentary about, I'm going to try to keep it light, I didn't write any light documentaries. If you're writing a documentary about an election, okay. That's as light as it gets then please don't find yourself talking about what you wore to go vote that day, because it's really not, nobody cares.

So I know how to stay on topic. And my topics are usually somewhat surreal, [00:43:00] or if not surreal, the debtors are usually a part of the living in my books. And I like that. I like to be able to do that. So I learned that is not part of documentaries, but it was definitely where I was headed. My first play was about a nightclub in the clouds where everybody had to perform something to get off the nightclub into their next existence, because they had all done.

So I've learned a lot of that. I've learned that

[00:43:29] Stephen: you mentioned your computer tells you when ...