Renaissance woman shares love for the arts

HOT SPRINGS – Stacks of paper envelope the house. With them, there is the occasional piece of newspaper or napkin complete with scribbles. Amidst the notes a woman writes, her mind consumed with the voices of characters. Hot Springs local Susan Faye Roberts has been dabbling in the arts since she was a little girl. When she was around six years old, Roberts wrote, directed and starred in an original play with her classmates.

“I wrote my first play in first grade. I got the idea for the Frog Prince on the playground and I recruited the kids to play the parts,” Roberts said. “I asked the teacher if we could perform it on the stage and she said yes, so we did.”

Roberts has had a passion for writing and the fine arts since before she can remember. She described keeping journals as a child and waking up having dreamt about detailed sets.

Although she started writing recreationally at a young age, as Roberts entered her college years her attention was devoted to drama and dance.

Roberts derived happiness from being involved in the arts and spent much of her time teaching drama and dance to students. Her writing was put on the back burner until the summer of 1995.

“I had quit my job and I took my brother’s word processor out on the deck and said I’m going to write a novel. I wrote 150 pages. That was the beginning,” Roberts said.

The flame had been ignited and Roberts continued writing essays and short stories, anything she could think up. The fire was lit but fuel was added when she took a reporting job for the Phillipsburg Mail newspaper.

The job made Roberts more serious about writing as she learned to work under the stress and discipline of deadline.

“Being a journalist was probably the best writing experience I have ever had because I had to write all the time and it really gets you in the groove of writing and helps the process along,” Roberts said.

From that point on writing became a way of life for Roberts. She worked as a reporter for three years before moving on but the writing did not stop.

Roberts has written several plays including a murder mystery ghost story, Cat Fandango which is a humorous take on older women and their cats, a play called Omelet that tells the story of Hamlet through fairy tale characters and the historical fiction story Scarlett Ribbons.

Some of these were performed with Roberts’ drama students. Others, like Scarlett Ribbons, have more mature content and were left to the adults. Scarlett Ribbons has been performed three times. The original show was directed by Roberts and starred Roberts and her daughter. Two more shows were done under a different director at the Silver Dollar Saloon in Butte.

Scarlett Ribbons has kept Roberts busy for some time. She wrote the original play back in 2007 and has continued revising and adapting it. Currently, she is working on converting the script into a screenplay.

Converting a play script into a screenplay is no easy task because the formatting is completely different from one to the other but Roberts enjoys the challenge.

“It is very tough because it has to be formatted perfectly. A movie is 120 pages and every page equals a minute. Every 30 minutes you want an exciting event to keep it moving and 60 minutes is where you flip your plot,” Roberts said.

Other than the formatting, Roberts said another difficult aspect of writing a screenplay is the dialogue. Good dialogue can be very difficult to write but she appreciates developing the skill.

Roberts has also enjoyed learning more about her own characters as she transfers them from play to film.

The play, Scarlett Ribbons, has a predominately monologue-structure so there is little interaction between the characters. That structure is not conducive for film so Roberts had to re-work the story to allow for more character interaction and dialogue.

“In the screenplay they have to interact so actually writing the screenplay has helped flesh out the characters more,” Roberts said. “I am glad I did it and would actually like to do a stage production that used part of the screenplay. It would take more characters and be more elaborate.”

Roberts is also working on turning Scarlett Ribbons into a book. She has seven eBooks available to the public already. Four of the books are fiction and three are non-fiction.

Ida Hawkins is the story of a private investigator from New York who finds herself in Montana to search for her Native American father. While there, a murder takes place at the ‘Old Soaks’ and Ida Hawkins takes the case. She tries to get to the bottom of the murder mystery while uncovering the truth about herself.

Hard copies of Ida Hawkins are available. One is owned by the Sanders County Bookmobile and another is at the Hot Springs Library. Roberts said she enjoys giving her books to the local libraries for free.

The Hot Springs Book Club is reading Ida Hawkins and Roberts is currently working on the sequel due to several requests and her love for the story.

Two of her fiction eBooks are compiled short stories. One is called Silenced and all of the stories are based in Montana. The fourth piece of fiction is a novella called Madame Delacroix’s Diary.

Roberts’ non-fiction works include a magazine called The West Old and New Magazine in which she juxtaposes historic and contemporary life in Montana. The second came from Roberts’ blog, Life in Montana. She pieced the blogs together in order to form a book. The third is called Simple Contentment and it is about the homesteaders. They describe what it was like coming to the reservation in their own words.

Roberts has several projects that are currently in the works, including the screenplay of Scarlett Ribbons.

It would be a dream come true for Roberts if Scarlett Ribbons made it to the big screen.

“I wanted to be a writer all my life, I think,” Roberts said. “I still don’t call myself a writer because it is an on-going process.”