The Junkiest Closet In My House

I was listening to Tchaikovsky’s “Capriccio Italien” on the radio the other day, and it got me to thinking about how music and storytelling are related.

The story behind this particular piece of music, as related by the radio announcer, is interesting in itself.  It seems that Tchaikovsky took a room at a small hotel in Italy – hoping, perhaps, to find some quiet and solitude to do his composing – and learned to his chagrin that it was located next door to an Italian cavalry regiment.  Every morning at the crack of dawn, a bugler blasted the quiet solitude, calling the soldiers from their bunks to duty.  But rather than let the surprise ruin his visit, Tchaikovsky put it to use.  “Capriccio Italien” begins in rousing fashion with trumpets, summoning the listener to a stirring and beautiful piece of music.

A thought I had after listening to the music was how creative people use what they have at hand, and throw nothing away.  Maybe it’s because when they are young, their mothers admonished them to clean their plates at the dinner table.  More likely, it’s because they form the habit of weaving the bits and pieces of life into the fabric of their stories, making something much more than the bits and pieces would be by themselves – a whole, much greater than the sum of its parts.

I think of my mind as a closet – the junkiest closet in the house.  We all have a space like that where we toss stuff we don’t really have a place for.  Each morning when I sit down to write, I open the closet door and stuff falls out.  I use what I can in that day’s business and cram the rest back in, to possibly be useful another day.  What goes into that closet?  Who I am – the sum of everything I’ve seen and done, every person I’ve met, everything I’ve read.  Is my fiction autobiographical?  Of course, because it’s the result of all of that stuff that’s in my closet.  It flows out of who I am.

My new novel, The Governor’s Lady, due in September, is a good example.  It has a background of southern politics, a subject I know something about after a career in journalism, much of it covering politics and politicians, and even a brief stint years ago working for a southern governor.  My central character is a feisty, independent woman – and I’ve known a fair number of those, including my dear wife.  The characters and story all came from my closet, and there’s a good deal of me in the result.

And now, there’s a fine piece of music by Tchaikovsky in my closet.  Some day, it may come tumbling out and find its way into a story.  Probably, when I least expect it.

Robert Inman’s novels are available on Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook, and Kobo e-readers.

The Girl He Couldn't Do Without

They’re honeymooning at the beach – our young friend and the girl he couldn’t do without.

It’s a piece of advice my mother gave me when I was single, dating this girl and that one, occasionally bringing one home to meet the parents.  “Marry the one you can’t do without,” Mother said, and I took her advice to heart.  When things began to look a trifle serious with a young lady, I would ask myself, “Could I do without this one?” In every case but the last one, I could.  Then I met Paulette.  We’ve been married for 46 years.  I couldn’t do without her back then, and I can’t now.

I suppose it’s a tough yardstick to use when you’re considering a relationship that could become a lifetime.  But as mother said, if you choose someone you could do without, the odds are you eventually will.  Better to be tough going in than tough coming out.  Better a broken heart when a relationship is in its infancy than when it’s over.

So Paulette and I joined the crowd of friends and family in a rural Baptist church in south Alabama last weekend to see John and Candy begin a life together.  The way they looked into each other’s eyes as they stood before the preacher and said their vows told us they’ve chosen the ones they can’t do without, and that bodes well for a long life together.

There are times in any marriage when things seem to be coming apart at the seams.  It’s easy to just walk away.  But if the person on the other side of the conflict is the one you just can’t do without, you’ll make the extra effort to work things out and keep the partnership together.

I thought about my mother’s advice a lot when I was writing my new novel The Governor’s Lady which comes out in September.  There’s a marriage at the heart of it, and there a point where Cooper and Pickett have to face the essential question: can they do without each other?

Every good story needs a dilemma at its heart.  How the characters respond to the dilemma tells us who they are and how the story unfolds.  How this one unfolds will have to wait for September.

Fun With Briggs & Stratton

I can tell it’s Spring by the sound of lawnmowers in my neighborhood.  It’s been cool and wet for the past couple of months where I live, but the weather has warmed and things are blooming and growing.  Especially grass.

The sound of a lawnmower in full throat takes me back to my boyhood.  My Dad would advance me enough money at the beginning of a summer to buy a lawnmower: 21-inch cut, Briggs & Stratton engine, and self-propelled – by me.  I would line up customers and spend the summer pushing that mower across expanses of bermuda grass.

Mowing Bermuda with a dinky mower in the hot, humid fullness of a South Alabama growing season is like trying to hack your way through dense jungle with a Swiss Army knife.  Many of my customers – the cheapskates – insisted on having their lawns mowed only every other week.  By the time I arrived, the bermuda would be three inches high or more.  For three months, I would propel that mower with my skinny teenaged body under blazing sun, praying for rain so I could go home, and dreading rain because it made the bermuda grow that much faster.

But I persevered.  By the end of the summer, I would have made enough money to repay Dad’s loan, with a little pocket change left over.  Being no dummy, I knew what Dad, that sly devil, was up to: keeping me occupied and out of trouble.  I suppose it worked.  I have no criminal record.

And then one Spring, I escaped.  Dad approached, loan money in hand.  “Au contraire,” I said, “I have a job at the radio station!”  I spent that glorious summer in air conditioned comfort, spinning records and dedicating mushy songs to my girlfriend.  It was powerful incentive for a career in broadcasting.

But my lawnmowing summers were not wasted.  In my novel Captain Saturday, teenaged Wilbur Baggett self-propels an under-powered lawnmower across expanses of North Carolina lawns, struggling against heat, humidity, vegetation and a sense of powerlessness.  Later, when grown-up Will Baggett, Raleigh’s most popular TV weatherman, loses his job, he falls back on his boyhood profession. 

Writing books of fiction is somewhat like mowing lawns.  You struggle against the elements – fear, self-doubt, failures of imagination, rejection --  and just keep applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair until you arrive exhausted at the far end of the thing and write “The End.”  In the process, you go time and time again to the well of your experiences, transforming them into something new.  It’s what my teacher Barry Hannah called “fracturing reality and putting it back together as truth.”

A good writer never throws away anything.  Even a wretched old lawnmower.

Robert Inman’s novels are available on Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook, and Kobo e-readers.

My Bird Can Whip Your Bird

Spring: a time of awakening, blossoming beauty, rebirth, possibility…and combat. 

There’s the male cardinal who’s assaulting my house.  I came downstairs one morning to make coffee and heard him bashing himself against the breakfast room window.  “Good Lord,” I said to my good wife, “he’s trying to get into the house.  I wonder if he wants a cup?”  But a friend set me straight: it’s mating season, and the cardinal is fighting what he assumes to be a rival – in truth, just his own reflection in the glass.  This fellow is profoundly territorial, defending his turf, making sure he’s the sole beneficiary of his lady friend’s affections.  He’s been at it for more than a month.  So has the cardinal in the glass.  I give them both an “A” for  persistence.

Then there’s the aerial combat I witnessed – a flock of crows chasing a single hawk.  They came in across a valley, a dozen crows clustered around the hawk, slashing in to the attack.  The hawk was by far the biggest bird in the melee, but the crows made up for their lack of size with numbers and daring.  The hawk was clearly in flight, getting the worst of it.

It was easy to imagine what had happened.  The hawk had gone hunting, as hawks will do, and happened upon a nest.  “Ah, eggs for breakfast!  Make mine raw.”  The crows had risen to the defense, as crows will do.  It was nature at her purest and most basic -- both savage and beautiful. 

The writer in me has an attack of imagination.  There’s a bird bar and grill – beer on tap, a good band, a billiard table, a baseball game on the wide-screen TV.  There’s this male cardinal and a bunch of crows sitting around a table -- drinking,  smoking cigars, and telling war stories.  The cardinal is bragging about how he kicks his rival’s fanny daily.

“You have to do this every day?” asks one of the crows.

“Yeah, the guy just won’t give up.  But I tell ‘ya, he ain’t been near my nest.”

“Well, our hawk ain’t been back.  When we chase ‘em off, they stay chased off.  You need help with that cardinal?”

“Nah, I got it under control.”

The crows exchange knowing smiles, but they don’t tell the cardinal what’s what.  They just let him keep bragging and buying the beer. 

Robert Inman’s novels are available on Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook, and Kobo e-readers. 

Bear Bryant's Mama. And mine.

Legendary Alabama football coach Paul “Bear” Bryant was once hired by the phone company to do a Mother’s Day telephone commercial.  Coach Bryant’s only scripted line was, “Call Your Mama.”  When the camera rolled, he spoke the line perfectly.  And then he ad-libbed, “I wish I could call mine.”  The phone company folks loved it, and they kept it in the commercial.

Don’t we all feel that way, those of us whose Mamas have passed on?  I sure do.  I think when we lose a parent, especially a mother, we lose part of our history.  Sure, we can have photos and letters and clippings and the like, but it doesn’t compare to calling Mama – or better still, going to see her – and sitting for a spell to recall something of the past we share.

When I was writing my first novel, Home Fires Burning, I set it in a small southern town that physically looked a lot like the place where I grew up.  I drew extensively on the history of the town and its people, and when the book came out, folks in my hometown tried to figure out who was who, and why I put the fire station on the wrong side of the courthouse square.  It was fiction inspired by reality, and when I was writing, I would frequently pick up the phone and call my mother, a native, to get the background on one thing or another.  When the book was published, she said I got it right.    Alas, when I was in the middle of my second novel, Old Dogs and Children – set in a similar small southern town -- she passed on.  I couldn’t call Mama any more.  I was on my own.

But in a much more important way, my mother lives on in my writing life.  I was born in 1943, and soon after, my Dad shipped out for Europe to fight in the war.  Mother filled a lot of empty hours in that small southern town by reading to me.  She started as soon as I was old enough to hold my head up, and somewhere along the way, I began to associate words on the page with a story that set off pyrotechnics in my young brain.  I was hooked.  I hungered for stories, and later, I began to want to tell my own.

What my mother gave me was the gift of imagination.  That, more than anything else, is the reason I’m a writer, a storyteller.  I can’t call Mama, but every time I sit down to write, she calls me.  I’ll bet Coach Bryant’s Mama often did the same.

Robert Inman’s novels are available on Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook, and Kobo e-readers. 

It's All About The Audience

        When I was starting out as a playwright a few years ago, I had the great good fortune to work with Kenneth Kay, then the creative artistic director at Blowing Rock Stage Company, a professional theatre in Blowing Rock, NC.  He mentored me through that first experience – the musical comedy “Crossroads” --  and premiered the work at his theatre.  I was already an established novelist and screenwriter, but had never attempted a work for the stage.  Ken’s great gem of wisdom: Remember, it’s all about the audience.

         As I wrote scenes and dialogue and songs, that one piece of advice guided me.  If the audience got it, I was successful.  If they didn’t, I failed.  So I wrote as if I were sitting in the audience: what do I see, hear and feel as I watch what’s transpiring on the stage?  Is it clear to me who these characters are, where they’ve been and where they’re going, and why they and their story matter?

       Ken also told me to trust the audience, to make a connection with their imaginations and give them a solid foundation from which to make the leap of faith into the story.  The audience is smart; they’ll go with you, and all you have to do is suggest.  If I’m writing a scene that takes place in a church, the only prop I need to ask for is a stained glass window, or a good representation of one.  “Okay,” the audience says, “we get it.  We’re in church.  Now we’re ready to see what’s going on here.”

       I thought about all this as I sat in the audience at the Haywood Arts Regional Theatre in Waynesville, North Carolina Saturday night, watching a talented theatre company perform my play “Welcome to Mitford.”  The cast and crew were superb and the staging and direction were imaginative.  We in the audience knew where we were at each moment, and why we were there.  The theatre company took my modest words and made magic on stage and drew the audience into the story.

       I actually had two audiences in mind when I wrote “Welcome to Mitford.”  It’s an adaptation of the nine Mitford novels by Jan Karon – her masterful and intimate creation of a close-knit mountain community peopled by folks you can truly care about.  Jan’s Mitford books have sold 26 million copies worldwide, so there’s a vast audience out there who know and love the story.  My adaptation has to be true to Jan’s work and familiar to her legions of fans.  But there are also folks in the audience who aren’t familiar with the books, and the play has to work for them, too.  The play has been produced by theatres across the country and Canada since Dramatic Publishing Company published it, so its success would indicate that no matter what audiences bring to a performance, they get it.

        As I’ve continued my playwriting career over the years, I’ve realized how much Ken Kay’s advice applies to all of my storytelling – novels, movies, plays, essays, a blog.  It’s all about the audience.  If I write with my audiences in mind, and trust them, I’m likely to get it right.

           

A note for audiences: “Welcome To Mitford” will be performed by the Neuse Little Theatre in Smithfield, NC May 31 through June 8.  www.neuselittletheatre.org

Robert Inman’s plays and musicals – Crossroads, Dairy Queen Days, The Christmas Bus, Welcome to Mitford, The Drama Club, A High Country Christmas, and The Christmas Bus: The Musical -- are published by Dramatic Publishing Company and available for licensing and production by theatres worldwide.  www.dramaticpublishing.com.

Delbert Earle and the Author

“You don’t work,” says my friend Delbert Earle, “you’re a writer.”

My friend Delbert Earle has always had a jaundiced view of this thing I do to make a living.  His idea of work is anything in which you lift, tote, fetch, hammer, dig, explode, or stand around a hole in the ground watching somebody else do one of those things.

“But writing is hard work,” I protest.  “I sometimes sweat profusely when I’m writing.  I have occasionally broken down in tears.  Have you ever had to use a jackhammer on writer’s block?”

“Have you ever shed blood in the course of your work?” he asks.

“Paper cuts,” I answer defensively.  “Paper cuts can be painful.”

“Have you ever filed for workmen’s compensation?”

“No.”

"Well, then.”

So it was with some trepidation that I told my friend Delbert Earle about this new novel, which I’ve finished after years of sweat, tears, and paper cuts.  “I have even found someone to publish it,” I announced.  “In September.”

"What’s it called?” he asked.

“The Governor’s Lady.”

“What’s it about?”

“A feisty woman.”

“Like your wife?”

“Feisty,” I repeated.

“Does she get some of the profits?”

“All of them.”

“Okay,” says Delbert Earle, “what happens next?”

“I shall go forth and ask people to buy it and read it.  It’s where art meets commerce.”

“Shameless hucksterism,” he says.

“Yea, verily,” I say.  “Where two or more are gathered…”

Maybe I bear some responsibility for Delbert Earle’s notion of what it takes to write.  He once asked me, “How do you write a book, anyway?”

I replied, “You stare out the window until you think up something, and then you write it down.  Then you stare out the window some more until you think up something else, and then you write that down.  You keep doing that over and over until you’ve thought up everything you can think up, and then you write THE END and send it off to your publisher.”

Did I oversimplify here?

At any rate, Delbert Earle is my very good friend, and despite his misgivings about my profession, he is pleased by my good news.  He promised to buy a book in September, and says he might even find it interesting to read, since we are both married to feisty women.  And he has decided what he will give me as a congratulatory gift: a box of band-aids.

Robert Inman’s novels are available on on Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook, and Kobo.

The Art of Geometry

           

          I’ve never been a whiz at math.  I take after my father, who once said, “There are three kinds of people in the world: those who can count, and those who can’t.”  In my family, my mother kept the checkbook.  In junior high and high school, I was fortunate enough to have math teachers who, through patience and compassion, managed to teach me enough of the basics to get by.  In college, I took geology to avoid freshman algebra.  I know more about rocks than numbers, which isn’t much.

            So it was a surprise to me in high school that I discovered a love for geometry.  I might be a semi-klutz at equations, but I was good with shapes.  My teacher wasn’t surprised; geometry isn’t really math, she said, it’s logic.  It’s the way things fit together, the beauty of lines and angles in time and space.  Sure, there are numbers involved, but they are numbers you can see and feel, that you can push and pull and twist into fascinating objects.  The limits of geometry are imagination.

            When I began to think about how I do this storytelling thing I do, it occurred to me that part of it is geometry.  A story has lines and angles and shapes that exist in time and space – geometry as architecture. 

I start with a central character I believe in, and that’s the foundation.  I surround that person with other characters, some of which are actually places (a town, for instance, can be a character in my story).  I put the people in a particular time and place, give them a dilemma, and turn them loose to bump up against each other and make sparks.  Things begin to happen, to move in directions.  I’m building a house, with walls and doors and windows, floors and roofs, furniture and interior design, clothes in the closet and toys on the floor, all of the things that make the house a home where people live.

I don’t know how the whole thing will look when I start, or really even while I’m building.  I know a few things that might serve as signposts when I’ve reached a certain point.  But I have to be open to possibility and serendipity.  When I finish, there it is: a geometric shape, something like no other, fashioned out of my over-active imagination.  Each reader, looking at my geometry from a special and unique angle, will see something a little different.  Hopefully, all will see something artful – a memorable thing or two, and the geometry that helps it hang together.

Robert Inman’s novels are available on on Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook, and Kobo. 

The Art of Transparency

       When I was in graduate school eons ago, my fiction teacher, the late novelist Barry Hannah, was kind enough to say my work showed some promise.  “When you learn the big tricks,” he said, “you’ll do okay.”

       “What are the big tricks?” I asked.

       “You have to learn those for yourself.”

       “How do you learn them?”

       “By doing the work.”

       I’ve done a good bit of the work since then, and I’ve learned a couple of big tricks.  The biggest, I’ve decided, is learning to trust my readers.  It sounds simple, but it’s not.

       I have to see a scene in my own mind before I can write about it – what the place looks like, who’s there, how they move about, how they interact, what they say.  The challenge is putting what I see on paper so you’ll see something similar when you read the words.  The more I try to describe, the more I inevitably burden the story with so much verbiage that it sinks of its own weight.  The words get in the way.  The big trick is deciding what not to say.

            There’s a sort of magic that transpires between writer and reader, an alchemy that occurs when two imaginations meet.  If I write a book and a thousand people read it, I’ve really written a thousand books, because each reader brings a unique and special consciousness to the process.  And that makes each reading experience special and unique.

            I constantly remind myself that I don’t have to do all the work, and the more I do, the more I’m likely to get in the way.  All I need is a few well-chosen words to set the reader’s imagination in motion.  If I write “cowboy,” you’ll provide your own image.  It won’t be the cowboy I see, but that’s fine.  Your cowboy is just as good as mine, probably better.  My job is to be transparent, to stay out of the way so you get right to the cowboy.  It’s the cowboy’s story, and I’m just there to be a conduit.  If you hear me, I’ve failed.

      Another of my grad school professors, the poet Tom Rabbitt, said there are three kinds of writing:

• Art -- we know what that is when we see it.  The characters and their story leap off the page and grab us by the soul.        
• Artsy -- words begin to get in the way, a sure sign the writer is becoming enamored of his own verbal virtuosity.        
• Artsy-fartsy – this guy is screaming, Look Ma, see how clever I am!

     When I finish a manuscript, the first thing I do is go back and ruthlessly slash modifiers and florid excesses of description.  I may need them in the first draft to help me visualize, but in sober reflection, I realize that for my readers, they’re largely unnecessary and get in the way of the story.  I dang sure don’t want to leave any artsy-fartsy, and I want artsy held to a bare minimum.  If what results is something vaguely similar to art, I’m a happy guy.

     Next time: another big trick: geometry.

Robert Inman’s novels are available on Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook, and Kobo.

Coming Home To The Paper

                It started in the seventh grade.  I was walking home from school one afternoon when I passed the open door of the weekly newspaper in my Alabama hometown.  I stuck my head in, intrigued by what I can only describe as the sound and smell of words.   I was already hooked on words, the product of a mother who read to me as an infant and gave me the gift of imagination.  Here, now, was a place consumed with words.  I took a deep breath, marched in, and asked the editor for a job.

            He put me to work back in the print shop, where words were physical things – pieces and lines of type, vats of ink, reams of newsprint, clattering and clanking machines – all employed in translating the life of that small town into words that people could share when the paper arrived in their homes every Thursday.  I got ink under my fingernails and deep in my blood, and when I got my first paycheck (fifty cents an hour, as I remember) I was suddenly in the word business.  It’s all I’ve ever wanted to do.

            Over time, I’ve written lots of different kinds of word things – journalism, novels, stage plays, movie scripts, essays – and I’ve come to this conclusion: no matter the form, it’s all storytelling, and all stories are about people.  So this new delivery system I’m using here is just my latest way of telling stories, of spending time with my old and dear friends, the words, and sharing them with you.

            I’ll write whatever occurs to me.  Some of it will be about the art and craft of writing – some things I’ve learned about putting words together to entertain, inform, and even disturb.  I’ll share what I’m working on – a new novel, a play, whatever.  Mostly, I’ll just tell stories about people – real and imagined – who catch my eye.  If some of it catches your eye, share it with others.

            No matter what I write, it all goes back to that day in the seventh grade at that little Alabama weekly.  Whenever and whatever I write, it amounts to coming home to the paper.

Robert Inman’s novels are available on Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook, and Kobo.