The Writer's Experience. . .Well, My Experience Anyway.

I don't remember when I didn't make up stories. I wasn't a liar except for a few lies told during childhood, but I guess it could be argued that fiction writers are creative liars. We write the lies that people want to read, at least some do, knowing up front that what they are reading is false. We just let readers know upfront; this is fiction, a creative lie.

I think I was inspired to write from a very early age. After my mother died when I was a little boy, the one connection I had to my father was through his book Laughter in Hell about his true-life experience as a POW in Japan during WWII. I didn't meet my dad until I was eighteen, but I knew that he had written a book. He narrated his experience to Stephen Marek, who wrote it, and Marek's book (initially published in 1954) was the first to be published about Japanese POWs. I kept the book and thumbed through it as a child, but the reading was too complicated for me then. I actually didn't read it cover to cover until after I met him. My experience with my dad is referenced in my blog post Standing in the Shadow of Courage.

The first time I actually remember writing anything was in the sixth grade, after I played Bob Cratchit in a production of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. The play was a total flop, and other schoolchildren booed us from the first grade through the sixth. Nonetheless, it gave me an understanding of script format, and with that knowledge, I decided to write my own play. I called it Who Ate the Tree, and it was a story (even in 1966) about saving the environment. I have no idea what happened to it, and the content is lost in the deep recesses of my memory, so deep that I am not willing to dig for it.

I continued to write in high school, poetry mostly. What troubled teen, and many who are not so troubled, does not write poetry? I kept a journal as a teen, bla... bla... bla, daily musings. Those have also disappeared over many years of moving. Then in college, even though I didn't major or minor in anything remotely related to writing, I continued to write poetry and short stories. In college, I also began writing songs. There were guys who would sit on the front steps of the dormitory and play guitar and sing. I asked them if they would teach me how to play the guitar, and ended up buying a cheap pawn shop guitar, learning chords, and discovering I could set poetry to melody. I wrote songs through much of my college years and for several years afterward. I also edited the college literary magazine, in which students, including myself, would submit poetry, essays, and short stories.

After college and graduate school, I continued to write mostly music. I even moved to Nashville to see if I could break into the music business, but I was too insecure to have a good stage presence, and my songwriting, except for one or two songs, didn't really fit the country formula. I lived in Nashville for fourteen years, and during that time, I wrote a monthly feature for a regional magazine focused on addiction recovery. I wrote about my own childhood in those posts and about the effects of addiction on families. I had multiple ideas for novels during that time, but found I couldn't get more than three or four chapters done before I hit writer's block and couldn't take the writing any further. Maybe it just wasn't time yet. Those ideas (mostly science fiction) are still in my head, and maybe I will write them one day.

I moved out of Nashville in 1997 and went home to the Ozarks, where I got a job at a local hospital near my grandmother's home, so I could spend a few years with her and care for her before she passed on. I was pleasantly surprised when I moved back to find that things had progressed in the area. I had initially expected that I would be going back to the conservative hell of my childhood, but I discovered that there are enlightened people everywhere. I got involved with community theater, and the hospital would frequently ask me to do radio spots or write articles for the local paper. I had pretty much given up on the idea of writing a novel. I expected that I didn't have it in me and that it would never happen. Yet, there was always a nagging in my heart to write.

Around 2010, I was joking around with a friend and playing a character of a burned-out old hippie woman who smoked, was irreverent, and basically didn't give a shit about what other people thought. We had a good laugh out of it, but something occurred to me. What if I were to give her a voice? What if I were to sit down, allow her to tell her story, and write as though she were the one telling it? I sat down at the computer with no intention of writing a novel. I figured that there might be some good jokes coming out of it, but something happened that I didn't expect. Not only did she tell her story, but she kept telling it and kept telling it. It didn't turn out the way I expected, and it was as though I was watching the story unfold as I was writing it. It felt more like channeling a spirit than creative writing. In 2012, I went through a rough breakup, hit a snag in the writing at about the twelfth or fourteenth chapter, and decided that the same thing had happened as always when I tried to write a novel. I was stuck. I kept the file and didn't touch it for about a year after that. When I finally did sit down at the computer again, she backed up, deleted a couple of chapters, and then she finished telling the story. It was not the kind of story that I had ever thought about writing, and the comedy in it was minimal. The story she told was about family, about frustration and fear, and about her experience living through the tumultuous 1960s, when she discovered that her paradigm did not match the reality of life.

A few years before I finished the novel, I had met friends who had retired to the Ozarks from New York, Frank and Su Sherry. Frank was an author and had written multiple novels, mostly about pirates. Su had been part of his writing process throughout their marriage, and she had written her own memoir, My Three Lost Girls, about growing up in an orphanage. I would have asked Frank to review my novel and tell me what he thought, but he had developed fairly severe dementia. Instead, I asked Su to read it. She came back to me with the affirmation that the story was good and that I needed to publish it. Then, she set about teaching me how to prepare it for publication. At the time, I also knew that Marideth Sisco had just finished working on the Oscar-nominated film Winter's Bone, based on a novel by Daniel Woodrell and starring Jennifer Lawrence. I had met Merideth and asked if she would read and review the book. To my surprise, she did and gave it a glowing recommendation. After that, I thought I might actually be onto something here.

The next thing I knew, I was learning about the publishing industry, and it has been a long and difficult journey indeed. When I was recently asked what advice I would give to young writers, I said, "The writing is the easy part, and that is not easy." In the ensuing years after that first novel, I began to learn about the truly difficult part of writing: marketing and publishing. I withdrew the novel Confessions from the Pumpkin Patch from the first publisher because they didn't publish it in eBook format. Then I discovered that I could self-publish on Amazon. So, I kept it as a self-published book for several years while I continued working on the next novel. I entered the book in a writing competition in 2015, and, to my astonishment, it won a New Apple Awards medal for general fiction. Then, I was beginning, but after continued affirmation of my writing, the only thing I could think of was to write another novel.

There had been a character in Confessions from the Pumpkin Patch who had kind of intrigued me, and I thought, What would he say if I let him tell his own story? That character was Pastor Ronald Dennison. I did the same thing that I had done with the first novel and let him tell the story. There were no snags with writing this novel, no writer's block, and the story just told itself. The snags came later when I realized, after trusting the wrong people to edit my work, that there were major flaws in the writing, not with the story, but with grammar, punctuation, and occasional spelling mistakes. This was when I took the second novel, The Calling Dream, off the market. I then had it published by a New York publisher, and it was well edited, but after about a year, I found myself dissatisfied with how they were handling the book. I then took the book back from them and went with Fresh Ink Group Publishing. Although Fresh Ink Group did a wonderful job, there were numerous formatting issues when I transitioned from the other publisher. Included with that were at least eight crashes of my PDF service, which dumped corrections that I had made while going through the book. I finally got a good PDF program and, after nine proofs, we were ready to publish the second edition of the book. During this time, Fresh Ink Group also allowed me to make some alterations here and there and add an epilogue to the book. The result, I think, is a much better version of the book.

While I was going through all of this, I continued to work on the third novel, which is based on a character who appeared during the writing of The Calling Dream. I guess, therefore, this has turned into a series of sorts. It is what I call The Soul Encounters. Basically, a soul encounter is when we meet someone who has a profound, perhaps life-changing, effect on us. That could be someone we meet briefly at a party who shares a concept that we had never considered before. It could be a chance encounter. It could be a relationship that lasts a little while, but when we walk away from it, we find we are not the same person. We all have soul encounters almost every day. Most of the time, that is simply the recognition of a connection with another person. Still, sometimes it amounts to a shift in consciousness and the development of awareness that we never had before. Sometimes, it is experienced more in the heart than in the mind, and we feel a deep connection with someone who may never cross our path again. So, based on soul encounters, the protagonist of a different novel is generated from the novel currently being written. That protagonist shows up as a cameo character in the current novel, and there may be one or two chapters devoted to that character, or maybe only a couple of paragraphs. The protagonist of the current novel gives his, her, or their account of the encounter, and when the next novel is written, that protagonist gets to tell his, her, or their version of it. So, unlike a traditional series that follows the same characters across several stories, each of my novels is a standalone story that interacts with characters in another novel.

After I realized that The Calling Dream was not up to par in terms of mistakes, I took a look at the other books and found that they were also not ready for prime time. I, therefore, took those books off the market to revise and correct errors, which are sometimes as simple as a misplaced comma. When they are ready, they will be published as second editions of the same book, and the story of my writing continues, and will likely continue for as long as I can sit at a keyboard and let the words flow. I don't know that I would ever become a famous writer, but if that never happens, I pray, at least, that my work will not only be entertaining but also uplifting and encouraging to those who read these stories.

4/26/26: Since writing the above blog post, I have converted to screenplay writing and have written two award-winning screenplays. When my first screenplay, an adaptation of my novel Edge of Smoke, won awards, I wrote what would become my next novel as a screenplay, and it won awards as well. At present, my focus is more on screenwriting than on novels, but I will get around to writing my second screenplay as a novel someday.