The old adage for fiction writers is to write what you know. East Hills novelist Bonnie Trachtenberg has won awards off that advice.
Each of the main characters in her two Indie Excellence award-winning romantic comedies, Trachtenberg said, is based on herself – her personal history, her insecurities, her passions, but perhaps, most significantly, her love life.
“I was one of the few people I knew who dated for 20 years,” she said. “I don’t know too many people who’ve had to really work hard to find that right person. I’ve lived in three states and have dated many people, it just became an integral part of who I was.”
Trachtenberg, 50, wrote on her Web site that in 1999, after she “briefly marr[ied] into a disastrous marriage which last[ed] about five minutes…I am inspired to begin my first novel,” a book called “Wedlocked: A Novel” about a woman who realizes the seemingly perfect man she just married isn’t so perfect after all.
“Wedlocked,” released in 2011, took home the Indie Excellence Award, which honors the self-publishing industry, for “Chick Lit,” and paved the way for her latest tale, “Neurotically Yours,” which won two such awards this year, for “Chick Lit” and “Romance.”
“It’s very easy to write off what you know, and when you’ve lived through it all it’s much easier to write characters from it,” she said.
“Neurotically Yours” follows a brash Los Angeles advice columnist named Dara Harrison, who opens a dating service for the “romantically challenged and perennially single” despite being single herself.
Again, Trachtenberg’s personal history was represented, not just for her trouble in finding a long-lasting relationship but because she also moonlights as an advice columnist.
In 2001, Trachtenberg began writing a relationship column that appeared on the Web site for re-vamped Chippendales adult entertainment company, though the editorial, she said, was a bit unconventional.
“I wrote as a man,” she said. “I would give the same advice I’d typically give other women, but under a male pseudonym.”
Trachtenberg still writes a relationship column today, a monthly installment called “In Search of a Happy Ending” featured on the lifestyle site Loveahappyending.
But these days, Trachtenberg said, she writes as herself.
“I write for everyone, and I don’t really need it to be secretive like it was with Chippendales,” she said. “At Chippendales, they thought it’d be a bit strange if I wrote as myself, like here are all these hot guy dancers, why would a woman give women romantic advice?”
Trachetnberg holds a degree in film and television production from New York University, but four days into working on her first film out in Hollywood, a B-movie she said “you’ve never heard of,” she threw out her back while trying to lift what she called a “man-sized coffee urn.”
And though she tinkered with screenplays while working in film, it was then, Trachtenberg said, that she turned to writing professionally.
“Writing was always what came naturally to me, but I had always been searching to do other things,” she said. “I always sort of thought I needed to find something I would take more seriously than writing, like writing wasn’t something I thought I could seriously pursue.”
So, Trachtenberg said, she began writing, answering a letter in a local newspaper calling for magazine writers, and her piece on alternative medicine was published in Ms. Fitness Magazine.
Trachtenberg has also been published in Muscle and Fitness Magazine and briefly worked at a community newspaper in Phoenix, Ariz.
In 2002, Trachtenberg landed what she considers her “dream job,” reviewing romance novels for the Book-of-the-Month Club, which she said allowed her the time to rub elbows with the publishing industry while working on “Wedlocked” in “dribs and drabs.”
But when she was laid off by the company five years later, Trachtenberg said she was given the inspiration to actually finish it.
“It was something I knew I had to do,” she said. “It’s so close to my heart.”
A year later, the novel was finished, and her former Book-of-the-Month editor, Victoria Skurnick, now an agent at Levine Greenberg Literary Agency, picked up the book for publication.
“I learned so much about the industry from her,” Trachtenberg said. “She really taught me so much about the business.”
But all the while, as her career took her from New York to Los Angeles to Phoenix, back to Los Angeles and eventually to East Hills in 2008, Trachtenberg dated, so much so that she said the wealth of experiences she’s already accumulated could fill books for the rest of her literary career.
In 2003, still living in California, Trachtenberg was reacquainted with an old friend from her days at Lawrence High School, through a mutual friend each had known over the years.
That old friend, attorney Mitchell Silbowitz, eventually became her husband, the happy ending to the story of Trachtenberg’s love life.
“My favorite movie in my genre is “When Harry Met Sally,” and with us it was kind of like that, with two friends getting together after so long,” she said. “Everybody around us could see it. Everybody kind of knew it but us, really.”
Trachtenberg said she has no plans to write about her current relationship, as “it’s too normal, I’m happy to say,” but her work as a romance writer will not just end because her search for love has.
If anything, she’s just branching out to write about other kinds of experiences she’s had.
Trachtenberg is currently at work on her next novel, which she described as a departure from the romantic comedy genre, with early drafts calling for a more serious romance. It results from a near-death experience.
“The experiences forces [the protagonist] to change in ways she didn’t expect to, until finally the right guy comes into her life,” Trachtenberg said.
In the last few years, Trachtenberg said she has taken an interest in the supernatural, researching documented near-death experiences and planning to write about them in a realistic and intelligent fashion, in the same manner she has written about love.
“The books in my genre that deal with the supernatural and ghosts are ridiculous and a bit silly, in that they aren’t necessarily realistic to people’s experiences or well-researched,” she said. “What I’m scripting is realistic and has happened to thousands of people all over the world.”
Trachtenberg said her interest with the supernatural began when she was a child, out of a fear of losing loved ones who had died.
As an adult, she said, she had an encounter with the spirits of her deceased cousin and grandfather that seemed too real to be a dream.
“It felt like I was hanging out with them and talking,” she said.
The night after the encounter, Trachtenberg said, she had another dream-like visitation with them, and when she woke up the next morning, she found a book in the middle of her living room floor whose title, “Still Watch,” was similar to the idea her family comforted her with that her departed relatives were “still watching us,” from the next life.
“I realized this was their sign for me that everything was going to be okay, and it was,” she said.
