LONG LAKE – There is a secret to Jamie Sutliff’s success as a screenwriter, novelist, artist and musician, a seemingly paradoxical trick he is happy to reveal with a smile to anyone willing to listen.

“The secret is you convince yourself that you will never make it, so you’re just in it for the fun,” he said at his home studio in Long Lake. “Then it’s acceptable. You can live with it.

“If you’re not having fun when you start, you get the hell out of it right away. It’s not something to be stressed out about from the beginning. You’ve got to have a great time. You’ve got to laugh a lot, and you’ve got to be your own worst critic. That’s the only way it works. You never want to have so much ego that you think everything you do is the best thing in the world.”

Sutliff seems to be having a lot of fun these days, and with good reason. His screenplay, “The Ghost and the Gold Louis,” won first prize for Best Featured Screenplay at the Utah Film Awards on March 25 in Orem, Utah, beating out submissions from all over the world to take the top spot. He plans to release a novel by the same name, adapted from the screenplay, that will be available May 6 at ADK Trading Post, Hoss’s Country Corner, The Bookstore Plus, Barnes & Noble, B&N UK, Amazon and Amazon UK.

When he’s not writing screenplays or novels, Sutliff stays busy hand-carving wooden sculptures and furniture, some of which have been featured in publications like Smithsonian Magazine. The work on display in his home studio displays his keen eye for detail, and his sculptures range in size from door-sized black walnut relief carvings to wildlife yellow birch sculptures you can hold in the palm of your hand.

Also, he played guitar professionally in a Colorado-based touring band for 15 years, writing and performing original music across the United States before settling in Long Lake 37 years ago.

Given his prowess in the above fields, it’s not an exaggeration to refer to him as an Adirondack Renaissance Man.

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Roots and the road

Sutliff’s father was born in Raquette Lake. His job as a tool and die maker kept the family moving around, something that suited the young Sutliff.

“I grew up everywhere,” he said. “Traveled around. It was good in the sense that it gave me a broader scope of people.”

While he remembers always being interested in art and music, he pursued music professionally until he learned it was no longer healthy for him to do so.

“We were in Denver at this enormous nightclub called The Plankhouse,” he said. “Back then, everybody smoked.”

Sutliff said he was on stage and began to feel a prickling sensation around his midsection that grew in intensity until it was burning. After asking the bass player to cover for him, he went to the bathroom and inspected himself.

“There was this bright red rash under my belt all the way around my stomach and around my back,” he said. “It looked like prickly heat.”

He saw a specialist the next day who told him he was allergic to 35 to 40 of the chemicals in tobacco smoke. The specialist recommended he avoid smoky environments, and Sutliff knew his days as a touring musician were numbered.

“I had to give it up,” he said. “I saw it going nowhere. I didn’t want to be 50 years old and wake up playing in some damn saloon, and that’s what we were doing.”

Sutliff said he drifted back into art to get away from music.

“I came back (here) and got into art and woodworking full-time,” he said. “I made a living at it for awhile. I made a lot of doors.”

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Self-taught screenwriter

About 10 years ago, Sutliff decided to try his hand at writing novels. He began a young-adult fantasy trilogy called “The Elves of Owl’s Head Mountain” set in the Adirondacks.

“I’d always been sort of a half-assed writer with music,” he said. “I just expanded on that and started writing. I wrote eight novels.”

Four years ago, Sutliff said he decided to adapt some of his novels into screenplays, even though he had no experience writing screenplays.

“All of a sudden, things started breaking for me,” he said. “I started winning contests and festivals, things like that. I won six first-place contest selections.”

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The Ghost and the Gold Louis

Sutliff’s latest creation, “The Ghost and the Gold Louis,” follows the money, so to speak. The story traces the path of millions of dollars of gold Louis coins, which Sutliff describes as “a favorite coin of slave traders,” and their impact upon one specific family involved in both sides of the American slave trade from the time of the French Revolution to the modern day.

“Our young people are addicted to special effects and this mindless crap, like ‘The Transformers’ series,” Sutliff said. “It’s garbage, absolutely no story value whatsoever. Not even a hint. It’s ‘chase-kill-wreck, chase-kill-wreck,’ and lots and lots of booming noise, but kids, unfortunately, are attracted to it.

“What I wanted to do was write a screenplay that had powerful special effects to suck them in. It’s sort of like ‘Poltergeist’ meets ’12 Years a Slave,’ and it opens with these powerful effects images.”

The film follows the ghost of Evangeline as she leads her great-great-granddaughter to a lost cache of gold Louis coins that can save her family in the present day. Sutliff, a history buff, said his intent was to write a compelling story whose supernatural elements would help mask its educational intent.

“I wanted to make (young people) aware of the history of the trade,” he said. “When they see ’12 Years a Slave,’ they see all of that intense pain and degradation that was served up by the slave trade, but in my story, what you see is the transition, how the coins came to America from France during the Revolution.”

In the story, a French naval captain escapes the French Revolution with a ship full of gold Louis coins. He buys a plantation in South Carolina, a slave brokerage house and Evangeline, whom he eventually marries.

“I took this right out of history,” Sutliff said. “I went over old sales bills, anything I could find online from the slave brokerage houses of New Orleans. I came up with the names and dates. ‘Evangeline. Creole mulatto. 17 years of age. Good health. Sold for $600 in gold Louis coin.’

“There was an actual bill of sale, and then I had my story.”

The screenplay follows the gold Louis coins up until the time of the Civil War, where 55 pounds of gold donated to the Confederate effort goes missing.

“Evangeline, the slave, as a ghost knows where those coins are,” Sutliff said. “She leads her great-great-granddaughter on the path of those coins and takes her, which saves the family business and rights all these wrongs.

“She gets to play the part of a ghost and do some fairly nasty tricks on living people, and I use those special effects so the parts where she is a ghost are just as scary as ‘Poltergeist.'”

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Festival

While Sutliff was delighted to win the award, he said there was one rather big problem with it: he would have to fly to Orem, Utah, to accept it in person.

“I was flabbergasted when they called,” he said. “They let me know four days before I had to go out there.

“How do you do that in four days? I’m basically a poor individual. I don’t make much money. I own my house, and that’s about it.”

Sutliff said he figured there was no way he could accept the award on such short notice until he mentioned his dilemma to a good friend of his, Hillary Dechene.

“I told her about it, and she said, ‘Well, you’re going to go,'” Sutliff said. “She immediately, within 24 hours, organized a fundraiser, and people actually did it. They raised the money.”

Members of the Long Lake community raised more than $2,000 for Sutliff to travel to Utah with Dechene’s daughter, Prudence, a college student who Sutliff describes as his “surrogate granddaughter.”

“It felt wonderful,” he said of the community’s support. “I still don’t believe that they did it.”

Sutliff said the festival was chock full of producers, directors and actors like Michael Fassbender, who played a slave trader in Steve McQueen’s “12 Years a Slave.” Sutliff said he hopes someone will produce the screenplay and turn it into a feature film.

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Methods

Sutliff says he has a few unique working methods that aid his creative process.

“I have to work on a bunch of things,” he said. “I have about 18 projects (at any given time).

“I burn out really easy with writing. It requires an intense amount of mental and emotional energy. Sometimes, I can only write for 15 minutes, and then I’ve got to get away, but when I do, I’ll run upstairs to the carving bench and start farting around with a piece, which is mindless. It’s almost like my fingers have their own eyes and brain, and I don’t have to concentrate on anything other than watching that puzzle transform itself. So I think about writing so I can carve and dream up my next thing that I’m working on.”

An avid hiker, Sutliff said he always carries a notebook with him while he walks to write ideas down that might otherwise escape him. And, just as he was willing to share the secret to his success, he recommended a writing exercise to budding authors he believes may lead them to interesting places.

“Go on a walk,” he said. “Take a notebook (with) three separate pages. On page one, you write ‘beginning.’ Page two, you write ‘middle.’ Page three, you write ‘end.’

“Now, you do not have to start at the beginning. Maybe you’ve got a great ending – you go to page three, write it down and work your way backward.

“Page one – it’s just an idea. John and Mary meet at the fruit market reaching for the same piece of fruit. That’s an action scene of how two people might actually meet, strangers. There’s your beginning. They meet.

“What happens after that is whatever is turning in those gears. Do they become lovers? Maybe. That would be the middle. The end? Does John kill Mary? Mary kills John? They get married? So that’s how you do it – get a beginning, middle and end in three sentences, and then it becomes very easy to just jump from one to the other.

“Write down the random thoughts, the little scenes in the back of your mind of how people really do relate to each other.”

For more information on Sutliff, visit www.jamiesutliff.com.