When and why did you decide to become a writer?
I’ve enjoyed writing since I was a teen. For a junior-high assignment, I wrote a lengthy, four-thousand-word short story. It was rejected as the subject, my taking a multi-day cross-country drive included, horror of horrors, a female companion. An angry teacher told me this was inappropriate material for a seventh-grade assignment. The offending documents were sent to my mother, an English major, who chastised me…but later the same day, I overheard her telling my father, “I had no clue he could write…let alone with such an emotive voice.” I also wrote short stories for my children where they were the heroes of an adventure. Shortly before I retired, I wrote a short article for a friend’s blog about my experience in Vietnam. The friend asked how long I had been writing. I replied, “I hadn’t.” She replied, “You should.” A history lover and lifelong learner, I decided, at age sixty-one, after a successful career in software development, to begin a new career as a novelist. After four volumes in the contemporary romance genre, I decided my primary writing effort would be directed toward historical fiction.
What is your writing process: where do you write, how often do you write, are you a full-time or part-time writer, do you outline or do you plot as you go, etc.?
My writing space is a converted bedroom with blank walls, two tall bookshelves, an electric drum set, a corner desk with two computers, an e-reader and a printer. My wife works in her home office twenty-paces away, which I find useful so I can bounce ideas off her fertile imagination. While I’m a full-time author, thirty-percent of that time is used for research on the era my characters will journey through. The only outline I use is the order of history. My characters tell me the plot as I develop them.
Where do you find your inspiration for your stories? Do you draw from your own experiences?
People watching fascinates me. A number of my characters were inspired from people I observed at locations such as street fairs, airports and beaches. Example: On a cool fall day in Nashville, Tennessee, I saw a little boy with a dog at his side, walking along the fence of a, closed for the season, water park. He peered through the fence, sadness in his expression. He sighed. The sounds of laughter, screams, and water splashing, a distant, summer-time memory. This brief observation inspired a short story which began with the above scene.
I certainly draw on my own experience. As a Vietnam War combat soldier, I could empathize with the soldiers and medical personnel of the Civil War as portrayed in my third novel plus the soldiers in Vietnam, along with the environment they returned to, as portrayed in my fourth novel. Those who have been in combat, of any war, are brothers and I felt I was writing about my brothers. Also, I travel to historically significant locations such as; Vicksburg, Ms. to see and walk the battle ground, and Tyler, Texas to visit a Civil War prison camp.
Who is one of your favorite characters from your story(ies), one that you enjoyed creating and writing about, and why?
In my first historical novel, I had a problem with one of my characters as he was beginning to appear flawless. I decided an illegitimate daughter would bring his character down to earth. But the more I explored the born-out-of-wedlock daughter in that and the following novel, the more her character grew such that Abbey is the major character in my third novel, A Female Doctor in the Civil War, (now titled THE SURGEON: A Civil War Novel).
Do you incorporate (or inadvertently find) any of your own personality traits into your characters?
If I do, I carefully consider whether they are going to advance the story. If not, out they come. Characters should be quirky. Everyone has their own daily life, full of vanilla characters. A novel should draw readers out of their own world, into a more exciting, dramatic adventure of the mind. I’m a firm believer every word that appears in my novels should only exist to create an emotional response in my readers.
Do you find your stories are more plot driven or character driven? Please explain.
I’ve never constructed a plot. My characters drive my stories; my imagination finds turns and twists that fit the construct of the history my characters pass through.
Did you read much as a child?
I was a voracious reader of both fiction and non-fiction. My mother read to me constantly as a preschooler then gave me a library card the summer before kindergarten. My father made a child sized book shelf for me. As a second grader, my mother, insisting I need more exercise, regularly ran me out of the house. I caught hell from her, when she discovered I’d run as far as our garage where I’d secretly established a reading corner.
How important do you think reading is for writers?
In my honest opinion, this is overrated. It is similar to believing you qualify as a good mechanic if you’ve driven many cars. Reading and writing are substantially different disciplines. Techniques which various authors use may be interesting, but a writer’s imagination should provide his or her own set of tools and methods of implementing a story. Great writing is hard work. A member of Fleetwood Mac, when asked about his creative method, said, “I bleed from my fingertips.” I understand. There is only one book which should be thoroughly read and understood, for every writer of fiction and non-fiction alike, On Writing, by Sol Stein. It provides all the tools, except imagination, for successful writing.
Who are some of your favorite authors and/or books? What draws you to them?
- Elmore Leonard: no one, IMHO, writes better dialog or tells stories with such an economy of vocabulary. Every line he writes, advances the story in a concise, descriptive, and engaging manner. One of my favorite lines, where he introduces a character: “The old man squinted into the distance through steel framed spectacles: a seventy-three-year-old turkey buzzard face beneath a farmer’s straw hat; tight mouth barely moving and a hunk of plug stuck in his sunken cheek.”
- Leon Uris: his characters come alive as people we’d like to interact with.
- James Michener: a master at combining history, people and places.
- Greg Isles: action and tension are thy byline.
- Steven Hawking: an expert at explaining complex science in every day vocabulary.
- Shelby Foote: wrote a three-volume series on the Civil War. A peerless, non-fiction work, which draws the reader in like a great work of fiction. Truly one of the greatest non-fiction writers of my lifetime.
- William Shirer: I didn’t have an adequate understanding of the Third Reich until I read his non-fiction work, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Descriptive and engaging, if you want a thorough understanding of the Third Reich, leading up to and during World War II, this is the book to read.
Anything new in the works?
I am currently researching and writing the fifth and sixth novels in my American Journeys series. The fifth novel, covering the time period from the end of the Civil War up to early 1900s, is the follow-up to THE SURGEON (previously titled A Female Doctor in the Civil War), to be published in February 2021. Dr. Abbey Kaplan becomes an activist as a suffragette and campaigner against the cruelty of the Industrial Revolution and asylums for the insane.
The sixth novel, to be published in March 2021, continues with the characters from my Vietnam War era novel, THE SOLDIER (previously titled Windchimes, War and Consequence). It follows them from the 1980s until the Twin Towers disaster. I’m also writing a few short stories.
Bonus question 🙂 Do you have anything you’d like to add?
I live to write is a cliché but, at seventy-two-years-old, I look forward to mornings because I get to continue writing stories. We own a motorhome, which I adore because our condo-on-wheels contains a writing space. My wife, a voracious reader in her own right, read seven novels during an eleven-day road trip to Nashville, TN.
richard@villagedrummerfiction.com
https://villagedrummerfiction.com