The Indies Are Back!

I’m winding up a two-month promotional tour for my new novel with some really good news: independent booksellers are back.

Everywhere I went on my 20-city tour, I found independent book stores that are thriving; owners who possess that essential combination of a love of books and good business sense; staff who are knowledgeable and enthusiastic and helpful.  It’s a dramatic reversal of a 20-year trend, and for midlist writers like me who depend on word-of-mouth to sell books, it’s the best news in years.

Here’s an example of what’s happening in a good-sized city I’m very familiar with: fifteen years ago there were perhaps a dozen independent bookstores of various stripes scattered about town, some of them doing well, others gamely muddling along, showing slim profits but having lots of fun in a business they loved.  Today, there is one full-service, general-purpose independent bookstore in this city.

What happened was the double-barreled onslaught of chain bookstores and Amazon.  Within a ten-mile radius of this one surviving independent, there were suddenly four big chain stores – offering a huge selection and bestsellers at loss-leader prices, cheaper than the independents could buy them.  Customers the independents thought were fiercely loyal bolted for the chains and their discount prices.  The bottom fell out of the independents’ business and one by one they agonizingly gave up – all but this one store, which struggled mightily but held on by its fingernails.

Today, the landscape is profoundly different.  One of the chains went belly-up.  Two more closed their stores in the area of the city where the independent survived.  The last remaining chain is, in many parts of the country, closing stores and reducing inventories.  And many of the customers who shopped the chain stores are turning back to the independents, re-discovering what made them once-loyal customers.  That surviving independent in this city is seeing double-digit increases in sales from a year ago.  Life is good and getting better.

Independents still face an uphill battle.  There is stiff competition from the remaining chain operations.  Online booksellers offer books at discount prices.  And there is the steady and continuing movement to e-book formats, especially for fiction titles.  Kindle, Nook and Kobo have taken a big cut of that market.  But there are still huge numbers of people who insist on holding a real, physical book in their hands, and they are the core of the independents’ audience.

If you go into an independent bookstore and ask, “What do you have that’s good to read?” the staff will give you an informed suggestion, based on what they know about you as an individual reader.  If you’re looking for a book on a particular subject, the staff will help you find what fits your needs, and if it’s not on their shelves, they’ll have it for you in a couple of days.  If you want to spend an hour just browsing, soaking up the smell and feel of books while you have a cup of coffee and a muffin, you’ll find it a comfortable, inviting place.  If you want to meet one of your favorite authors peddling his or her new book, you’re likely to find them at an independent.  It’s old-fashioned customer service, married to modern technology and store owners with a keen sense of what makes a successful business. 

What’s happening these days with independent bookselling is a nationwide phenomenon, as noted by Fortune Magazine in a recent article: “The Indie Bookstore Resurgence.”  Author Verne Kopytoff noted that sales at independents grew 8% last year and are on track to do as well this year.  And membership in the American Booksellers Association is up 16% over the past five years.

Independents’ competition won’t go away, nor should it.  People who buy books and related items want choice, convenience, a good deal.  But for the moment, that immensely important part of the book culture that independent stores inhabit is the healthiest in years, and getting more so.  And the folks who are happiest about that (after the owners themselves) are scribblers like me.

The Moment I Became A Storyteller

I’m back home today – Elba, Alabama, the neatest little town on earth – with my new book.  About four thousand people live here, and that’s about what it was when I was growing up in the 50’s.  It was, and I’m sure still is, a village that nurtured its young.  And it was a great place to learn to be a storyteller: a small stage on which the same people interacted with each other day after day.  If you were smart enough to keep your eyes and ears open and your mouth shut, you could learn a lot about what makes human beings tick.  You could see people accommodating each other despite their differences.  And there were just enough oddballs of various stripes to make it intriguing.

As I drove into town, I remembered the exact moment when I became a storyteller.  It happened in the attic of my grandmother’s house, which is still standing.  The attic was a large room, added by my grandfather after Elba flooded in 1929 so his family would have a dry place to seek refuge if the river got out of its banks again.   When I was a kid, it was a sort of family dumping ground.

My father and three uncles were in World War Two, and one of them, Uncle Bancroft, was a fighter pilot.  He flew P-51’s out of England, supporting the Allied march across Europe.  Part of the rich family lore was the story of how Uncle Bancroft was shot down and lived to tell about it.  He was escorting bombers when his plane was crippled by anti-aircraft fire.  Somehow, he managed to nurse the plane back to the English Channel, where he bailed out and was rescued by a British ship.  As a youngster, I thought that was about the coolest thing I had ever heard.

When Dad and the uncles came back from the war, they stored various items of their memorabilia in my grandmother’s attic, and in Uncle Bancroft’s footlocker, I found a parachute.  It had a silk canopy about four feet across, which I later learned was used for a flare.  But in my fevered 10-year-old imagination, I got the idea that this was the very parachute Uncle Bancroft had used when his plane got hit.  I could just see him there in the cockpit, getting the last bit of juice out of the smoking, dying engine, managing with great skill and courage to make it to the coast, throwing back the cockpit, climbing out on the wing, and leaping into space.  Dang!

Propelled by terminal foolishness, I tied that parachute to my skinny shoulders, climbed out on the attic roof, and got ready to emulate Uncle Bancroft’s death-defying leap.  It was at the moment my feet left the roof edge that it dawned on me I had done a very dumb thing, and that I should probably tell stories rather than act them out.  Luckily, I crash-landed in the nandina bush below with nothing more than a few scrapes and bruises.  There was no British ship to pick me up.

In the considerable years since, I have done any number of foolish things.  But mostly, I have written about other people doing foolish things.  It’s a lot safer.

The Seat Of The Pants

A nice visit today with Nicole Allshouse, host of “Talk of Alabama” on ABC 33/40 television in Birmingham.  She was kind enough to invite me on her show to talk about my new novel, The Governor’s Lady, and my signing at Alabama Booksmith.

Nicole was telling me that she is working on a book, but she finds it mighty difficult to find quality work time to make progress on her manuscript.  I could commiserate, because it’s a problem that afflicts every writer.  Unless we’re blessed with a patron saint who pays the bills and takes care of the mundane details of life, we are busy, distracted people.  Jobs and families take priority, there’s always more to do than there’s time to do it, and the days roll by without getting many words on paper.  Too often, we’re tempted to just put the project aside, vowing to get back to it in retirement.

I shared with Nicole the advice I got from the late Barry Hannah, who was my fiction teacher in graduate school.  “The way you write,” Barry said, “is to apply the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.”  Easy to say, hard to do.  But Barry was right, and I’ve found in my own experience that when I follow his advice, I get my work done.  What I told Nicole is that you have to carve out a time in the day – an hour, more if you can afford it -- that’s just yours, and warn the rest of the world to stay away.

The formula here is time + momentum.  And one is directly related to the other.  When I get a piece of writing going – characters in place, a dilemma for them to chew on – it’s important for me to visit them every day I possibly can.  The story builds up momentum, sort of like a football team scoring just before halftime, and at some point it reaches a critical mass.  After that, it has a life of its own, and it begins to tell itself.  The key thing then is to keep the momentum going.  And that takes the commitment of time.

Momentum is time’s best friend.  When a story has gotten up a head of steam, you’re eager to get to the work each day, and you don’t waste time getting up to speed.  That hour a day becomes a quality hour.  Good things happen.  Pages build up.  The locomotive is barreling down the track, and the writer’s holding on for dear life.  I know.  It happens to me over and over.

Writing is not easy.  Even when I have everything going for me, the words never go down right the first time.  I read and cringe and then rewrite.  If I expected the first effort to be perfect, I’d be easily discouraged and probably quit.  So it takes some stubborn persistence, too.

There are plenty of folks with the ability to write and a good story to tell – fiction, nonfiction, poetry, memoir, whatever.  Only a few actually do, and those are the ones who are willing to be fierce about some time of their own. 

Putting The Parts Back Together

The older gentleman in the locker room at the gym, fresh from his workout and shower, is looking for his glasses.  “I need ‘em to see which hearing aid goes in which ear,” he tells me.  “It’s no trouble getting dressed,” he says, “the hard part is putting the parts back together.”  Glasses, hearing aids, dentures, knee braces – the older we get, the more parts there are to put back together.  But thank goodness, there’s still a place to put all the parts.

I celebrated one of those milestone birthdays recently.  I love celebrating birthdays, being a year older.  The alternative is not worth thinking about.  In fact, I celebrate what my daughter Lee and I call birth-halfdays.  Her birthday is February 22, mine is August 22.  When she’s having a birthday, I’m having a birth-halfday, and vice versa.  Another 6 months vertical.  It’s cause for rejoicing.

Thankfully, I come from sturdy stock.  My maternal grandmother, Nell Cooper, lived to be 94.  She spent most of her life comfortably in her own home, but when she turned 92, she called my mother and said, “Emma Margaret, it’s time to go to the nursing home.”  She lived comfortably there until she fell and broke her hip and spent her last days bedridden.  But at the last she told me, “Bobby, I’ve give out, but I haven’t give up.”  Nell Cooper is my hero, more so with each passing birthday.

I’m fortunate to have a job I love, a wife I cherish, and an extended family that provides me with endless entertainment and grist for my stories.  The late North Carolina author Reynolds Price once said, “In the South, our families are our entertainment.”  I think that’s not just the case in the South.  And the older we get, the more family lore we have to ponder, agonize over, and often enjoy.

In my second novel, Old Dogs and Children, I used some of my family lore – people and happenings that are part of my tribe’s history.  I turned them into fiction, but to the members of my family, the generation of my grandmother and my parents, they were thinly disguised.  When the book was published, I braced myself for the worst.  To my great relief, one of my uncles called and said, “You got it right.”  I think they loved it, at least most of them, most of it.  What they were appalled over, they kept to themselves.

There’s still a lot of stuff in the family baggage I haven’t used, but I keep writing these books, and everything – well, most everything – is possibility.  And I do keep writing.  It’s what I want to do when I grow up (not that I intend to ever completely grow up).  If things work out perfectly, I will write my last word as I’m drawing my last breath, and the undertaker will have to pry my fingers from the keyboard. 

Meanwhile, I’ll celebrate those birthdays and deal with the growing number of parts I have to put back together.

All Those Young Men

A few hours to spare on my book tour visit to Charleston, SC last week, spent at Patriot’s Point.

If you haven’t been, go.  It’s a living tribute to the men and women of the U.S. Navy in war and peace – ships, aircraft, stories.  The stunning centerpiece is the USS Yorktown, the World War Two-era aircraft carrier saved from the scrap heap in 1975, towed to Charleston Harbor, and dedicated as a memorial.

As you wend your way through the narrow passageways of the Yorktown and stand beneath the wings of the aircraft on the hangar deck and flight deck, you can’t help but feel a powerful sense of the history of America in armed conflict.  Most importantly, if you take time to be quiet and think about it, you get a sense of individual lives, the thousands of young men who lived on the Yorktown, and through them, all our young who fight our conflicts and often die.  It’s the same feeling you get standing on Omaha Beach at Normandy.

How did they do it?  How do you strap yourself into a fragile craft and fling yourself off the heaving deck of a carrier, heading into aerial combat and knowing the chances are you won’t make it back?  How do you stagger off the ramp of a landing craft on a June day in 1944 into a wall of steel and lead, knowing you probably won’t make it across the beach?  Watch the first twenty minutes of “Saving Private Ryan,” then sit in stunned silence and ponder how a person faces the hopeless and acts anyway.

And then think about what comes after, how young men and women go off to war, and if they survive, come home and make lives.

My father and three uncles served in World War Two – a sailor, an infantryman, two pilots.  They went in harm’s way, confronted people who wanted to kill them, dealt with their own terrors, and made it back.  They settled in a small southern town and got on with things.  Worked, raised families.  They stored their war experiences in duffel bags and footlockers in my grandmother’s attic, and as a curious youngster, I rummaged through their memorabilia and came to a glimmer of understanding of what it must have been like for them, being far from home and loved ones, facing their own mortality.  They didn’t talk about their lives at war, but I came to see how it must have altered them in profound ways, large and small.

It affects me deeply as a writer, knowing that there are undercurrents, histories, things hidden in all our lives – good and bad – that give us depth and texture.  What is not seen is often most important.  I treasure that in my characters, and as their lives unfold in my stories, I come to appreciate how their textures and histories and undercurrents shape who they are and what they do, say, and think.

If I ever suspect I’m losing sight of that, I know what to do.  Go back to the Yorktown.

A Sense of History

I like history.  I think we have to know where we’ve been before we can understand how and why we got where we are now.

It’s true of the world at large, and a lot of what we call history is the recounting of momentous events and larger-than-life people doing momentous things.  But I’m even more interested in small histories -- the very personal, intimate stories of individuals.  The sum of our small histories gives texture and meaning to the larger sweep of mankind.

If you read one of my novels, you know the importance I attach to backstory.  I have to know how my characters got here, how the baggage they tote from their past affects how they’re moving through the present.  When I offer a story, I’m like a lawyer arguing a case before a jury.  I need to give enough background to let you know that my story and characters are authentic.  I need to offer what lawyers call extenuating and mitigating circumstances.  In my new novel, The Governor’s Lady, I devote chapters to my central character’s history.  In other works, it may be a sentence or paragraph here and there.  But the backstory is crucial to me in understanding the character, and then presenting the character to my readers.

That really hit home when the Hallmark Hall of Fame folks were making a movie from my first novel, Home Fires Burning.  I adapted the two-hour screenplay from a 500-page novel, so I had to leave out a great deal.  But Glenn Jordan, the director, required the cast members to read the book before they came to the set, and I’m sure that in a thousand ways, they brought a richer understanding of their characters to the portrayal.

StoryLine Project

My love of histories large and small is what intrigues me about an oral history project going on these days in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.  It’s called StoryLine, and it’s based on the premise that when people in a community share their stories, it fosters an understanding of what they have in common.  StoryLine does its work from a small bus that serves as a studio.  You and a story partner sit down before microphones and have a conversation about who you are and where you come from.  Some of the stories, in edited form, air on local radio stations.  They all go into an archive at the Forsyth County Library: a treasure trove for the community’s understanding of itself, now and in the future.

But you don’t have to have a studio in a bus to record history.  Any kind of recording device will do just fine.  The thing is to sit down with a friend or relative and just talk about who you are, how you got where you are now, your hopes and dreams.  It’s especially important for the older generations in our families.  Before it’s too late, preserve their stories.  I wish I had been smart enough to do that with my parents.  When they passed on, I lost a good bit of my own history.  I’m poorer for that.

I once heard a semi-famous man say, “We never see the handwriting on the wall until our backs are to it.”  I think he was right in the sense that we often turn our backs on our history and keep repeating mistakes.  But it needn’t be that way.  It takes having a sense of and appreciation for history – and then, like StoryLine, doing something about it.

Give A Bookseller A Hug

Some authors are shy.  I’m not.

I remember a bookseller telling me some years ago about a visit to her store by an author whose work I admire.  This fellow had a fine new book, which the store owner had read in advance of his visit and was eagerly looking forward to recommending to her customers.  She arranged an appearance for the author, drew a crowd, had plenty of books available.  But she realized to her chagrin that the author was a terminal introvert.  He mumbled a few pages from his book to the assemblage, didn’t take questions or comments, barely met the eyes of people whose books he autographed, and scurried quickly away as soon as possible.  It was not a successful event.

Contrast that with another writer whose work I like a very great deal – Pat Conroy.  Pat is warm, funny, self-effacing, accessible, generous, and enormously talented.  When Pat appears at a book store, he seems to reach out and gather people to him.  Pat’s writing alone guarantees him an audience, but Pat makes the experience of meeting him in person a treat.  And it’s all completely genuine.  Booksellers love Pat Conroy.

Booksellers have a tough job – especially independent stores whose very existence has been in jeopardy for years.  The big box stores, Amazon, the e-book tsunami, have decimated their ranks.  In one good-sized city I’m familiar with, there were perhaps a dozen fine independent full-service bookstores not too many years ago.  Now there is one.  The stores that have survived are owned and run by people who combine savvy business sense with a love of books and work hard to deliver personal service to their customers.

Mid-list authors like me survive because of the independents.  We love to have our books available in any store of any size, and we have come to embrace the brave new world of the e-book.  But independents hand-sell our books.  Walk into one and ask, “What have you got that’s good to read?” and the bookseller will have a ready recommendation.  If independent booksellers like an author’s work and are willing to recommend it, that’s huge.

Park Road Books, Charlotte NC  

When I visit a book store of any kind or size, my attitude is that I’m there to help the bookseller.  I’m grateful for the invitation and I love meeting and talking with readers.  I really like people, and I’m thrilled when someone thinks enough of my work to want to read it and hear me talk about it.  If I enjoy myself and genuinely connect with the folks who take time to come out, it makes a successful event for the store and leaves a warm glow that will last long after I’ve left.  I try to be just like Pat Conroy.

I’m embarking on a promotional tour that will take me to a lot of bookstores of all kinds in the next couple of months.  After the years of hard labor it took to bring my new novel, The Governor’s Lady, to life, this is the payoff, and I don’t just mean in monetary terms.  It’s a time when I get to tell booksellers and readers how grateful I am for having the work to present, and the opportunity to present it.

We’d be a poor, sad society if we didn’t have booksellers.  So visit a store, give the bookseller a hug, and take home something good to read.  If you visit while I’m there, I’ll be mighty glad to see you.  Hugs are optional.

The Case For Women

I’ve just finished what I think is an important book for our time: Lean In: Women, Work, and The Will to Lead.  The author is Sheryl Sandberg, the COO of Facebook.  She makes a compelling case for the greater involvement of women in every facet of leadership in today’s society.

Sandberg is a staunch believer in the right and obligation of every woman to choose the life that fulfills her, whether it’s in the home, or in the world at large, or some combination of the two.  She says it is all honorable and valued work.  But the crux of her message is for women who choose careers in the public arena – especially, business and government.  Her fervent advice for those women: welcome challenges, take risks, boldly seek opportunities to lead.  Sandberg lives her advice.  She leads one of the world’s most successful, most vibrant businesses.  She has found balance in life, dedicating herself equally to her family – husband, children, home.

While reading her book, I thought about the raising of our own two daughters.  My wife and I encouraged them to think boldly about their futures, to choose the paths that suited them.  “You can be whatever you want to be,” we told them, “and we will help you prepare yourselves and overcome obstacles.”  They’ve chosen different paths, but the important thing is, we made sure they felt free to choose.

I also thought that Sheryl Sandberg was talking about the central character of my new novel, The Governor’s Lady.  Cooper Lanier, after spending much of her life in the shadow of politics and politicians, chooses to leap headlong into that world.  She is elected governor of her southern state, and makes the choice to fight for her place in the often-treacherous world of male-dominated politics.  She welcomes challenge.  She seeks leadership.  She goes boldly.  I love her for it.  I think Sheryl Sandberg would be proud of Cooper Lanier.

As Cooper and her story unfolded in my imagination, I came firmly to the notion that we need more women in government at every level – local, state, federal, elected and appointed.  We have a gracious plenty of testosterone in public life – men whose primary purpose often seems to be simply winning a point, skewering an opponent, advancing an ideology at all costs.  (See Congress, United States).  I think women often come at the business of governing from a different angle: What works?  How can we get things done?  How can we work together?  We could use a great deal more of that.

Women are making strides, gaining ground, breaking glass ceilings.  But not enough.  We need to let them know that what they’re doing is important, valuable, enriching to all of us.  We need to keep encouraging them to lean in.

If You Want To Be Published, You Will Be

            I sometimes lead writing workshops.  Folks who sign up are a diverse group – women and men, young and old and everything in between, folks from just about any walk of life you can imagine.  There’s one thing in common: they write and they passionately want to be published.

            I try to be honest with the folks in those workshops, and until fairly recently, I had to describe how difficult it is to get a book of any stripe into the hands of readers.  I warned them about unscrupulous agencies that will offer to read your manuscript for a hefty fee, then blithely tell you there’s not a market for it.  Companies that will promise to publish your book (for an even heftier fee) and market it (another big fee).  They ship you boxes of books, and that’s it.  Little or no marketing or promotion.  You’re on your own.  I had to tell them how difficult it is for a first-time author to find an agent, how hard it is to get an editor at a reputable publishing house to even look at your work.

In short, publishing these days is a daunting affair, and many good, worthy books never make it into print.  For a first-time writer (and even for some grizzled veterans like me) it can be a crushing experience.

            But now I can give my workshop friends some really good news.  I start the first session of a workshop by saying, “If you want to be published, you will be.”  Faces light up, the energy level in the room goes way up.

The reason, of course, is the e-book: Kindle, Nook, Kobo, Apple.  The traditional publishing houses have embraced it.  John F. Blair Publishers is making my new novel, The Governor’s Lady, available in both hardcover and e-book editions.

But the e-book phenomenon has given new life to literally millions of people who don’t – or can’t -- go through a traditional house.  They publish an e-book themselves – straight from computer file to internet.  It’s not hard to do, and other than some initial out-of-pocket expenses (cover art, copyright registration) it’s free.  Kindle, Nook, and the like welcome your work and walk you step-by-step through the process.  I put my first four novels on the internet last year and did the vast bulk of the work myself, with some great guidance from writer friends who had already done it.

The big challenge is those millions of other people self-publishing e-books.  Some of it is sheer junk, some so-so, some really good.  As a new author, you have to compete with all those other folks to find readers, and there’s no traditional publishing house putting its muscle behind marketing and promotion.

The first thing you have to do is make your work as good as it can possibly be, to separate it from the junk and so-so.  When readers find something they like, they tell other readers.  Then too, there are lots of resources out there – Websites such as Goodreads, how-to books on the internet – to give you marketing ideas.  People who’ve done it successfully are eager to share what they’ve learned.

By some accounts, half the fiction sold in America is now on e-books.  Fiction is easier because it’s usually just text.  Non-fiction and children’s books are harder because e-books don’t handle pictures, illustrations, charts and graphs very well.  But that’s improving.  We’re just at the beginning of the e-book wave.

I’ve heard writing described as a disease you can’t cure.  I like to think of it as a passion that’s both maddening and exhilarating.  For so many of us who scribble, the e-book makes it possible to show the world what our passion has produced.

Giving Birth to an Elephant

Writing a novel is similar to giving birth to an elephant: the gestation period is very long, and when the dear thing finally pops out, you hope nobody notices that it has long, floppy ears.

Well, I’m in the final stages of labor.  My new novel, The Governor’s Lady, debuts August 29 at Park Road Books in Charlotte, NC.  My first four novels were birthed at the same great store, where owners John Barringer, and later Sally Brewster, have nurtured and supported my scribbling from the beginning.  You might call them the delivering physicians.

This book has been more than ten years in the making, and there were times I wondered if I’d ever finish it, and if so, if it would ever see the light of day.

The book publishing industry has changed dramatically in the time since my fourth novel, Captain Saturday, came out.  It’s mostly a bottom-line business these days, and midlist writers like me, even with decent publishing records, have a tough time placing a new work.  So many books of merit that used to get published with little problem now have a much slimmer chance of finding an audience.

I’m incredibly fortunate.  The Governor’s Lady will be birthed by a wonderful house, John F. Blair Publishers in Winston-Salem, NC.  Yesterday, I held the first copy off the press and marveled at the beautiful presentation Blair has made of my story.  Carolyn Sakowski and her staff have done everything right and given the work its best possible chance to succeed in the marketplace.  They’ve arranged an extensive promotional tour (www.robert-inman.com/appearances) where I’ll get the opportunity to present my book to booksellers, librarians, and readers.  It will also have an e-book edition for those who are making the move to devices like Kindle, Nook and Kobo.  I’m proud to be a Blair author.

Now, it’s up to me and my little elephant.  Readers will decide the merits of the story, and I’ll do everything I can to help the cause.  It’s where art meets commerce.  I’m proud of the work – the characters and the story -- and immensely grateful to everyone who has provided wise counsel and guidance along the way.

If you see me on the street pushing a very large baby carriage with a long-eared little darling inside, at least honk and wave.  We’re on a mission, and we need your good wishes.  A few bucks for the book would help, too.

Elrod's Summer Job

My friend Delbert Earle was telling me the other day about this great summer job he found for his boy Elrod.  Now, Elrod is a good kid, not inclined toward serious mischief.  But Delbert Earle is a firm believer in the notion that if you wear a kid out with work, he’s less likely to stray.

Delbert Earle read in the paper that the state had decided to let private contractors do some of the mowing on roadsides, instead of state crews, figuring it would save some money.  So Delbert Earle submitted a bid on Elrod’s behalf for a stretch of Highway 16 between Charlotte and Newton.  And the bid won.

Delbert Earle figured that a summer of mowing 50 miles of both sides of a road would be an all-season project.  One big, endless lawn.  So he dropped Elrod and his lawnmower off right outside Charlotte in early June and plans to pick him up in Newton about the middle of August.  Elrod is responsible for grass, equipment, food and lodging.  It’s a nice contract, so Elrod is easily able to take care of his expenses.  It is, by the way, a riding mower, so there's no problem with transportation.  Delbert Earle is available by phone in case of emergencies.

So far, the only call about the matter was from a state trooper.  Elrod had flagged him down when he figured out what was going on.  The trooper heard Elrod out, called Delbert Earle, and asked him if he thought there was still time for his own kid to get a contract.  Maybe Ashville to Hickory.   

 Robert Inman's fifth novel, The Governor's Lady, will be published in September by John F Blair Publishers.  See home page for details and tour schedule. 

Floating To Earth On Faith

My father was a paratrooper.

He served as an infantry officer in World War Two, and settled into a mostly quiet life as a father of four in a small Alabama town.  Then the Army summoned him again.  He was called back to active duty for the Korean Conflict, and that’s when the paratrooper business began.  He was a rugged guy, a former college football player, and for some reason he sought the more rugged side of Army life.  He joined the Rangers, and then the Special Forces.  He was a Green Beret who jumped out of airplanes.

I suspect my mother thought he was nuts – a guy with four young children at home who jumped out of airplanes.  It wasn’t until he was back from Korea that we learned that he and his comrades jumped out of airplanes behind enemy lines in North Korea and did mischief.  It’s a good thing we didn’t know.  He stayed in the service for awhile after Korea and we lived on Army posts – Fort Bragg, Fort Campbell, Fort Benning.  He kept on jumping out of airplanes.

Sometimes we watched.  Mother would load the four kids in the car and we would park next to a large field.  We’d hear the drone of the planes and then they would roar into view and people would start jumping out of them.  Suddenly the air was filled with parachutes, hundreds of them, all floating to earth.  It was an awesome sight, and as the oldest of the four kids, I thought it was fabulous.

It all came to an end when Dad’s unit got orders to go to Japan – a two-year peacetime deployment.  That’s when Mother put her foot down.  Enough foolishness.  Dad got out of the Army and we returned to small-town Alabama life.  If Dad missed it, he never said so.  But I suspect he did.

I’ve thought about those paratroopers often in my adult life.  I did an Army hitch, but never jumped out of an airplane.  But I’ve always wanted to.  It’s on my bucket list.

I’ve also thought about it in another way – how similar it is to writing.  When a guy jumps out of an airplane, he’s taking a leap of faith – trusting that his parachute will open and he will float to earth.  When I stare at a blank page and begin to tell a story, that’s also a leap of faith.  I have to believe that my characters will truly come to life and lead me through the roller-coaster ride of the tale.  I have to believe that somewhere in the future I will land safely and write “The End” and think I’ve done okay.

It’s taking that first leap of faith that’s the hardest part – flinging oneself out the door of the plane of imagination.  It takes a bit of a certain kind of courage, and maybe – like my Dad – a touch of madness.  There are so many people with a tale to tell and the aptitude with words to tell it.  But few ever do.  Taking the first step can be daunting, even terrifying.  My friend Ralph Keyes talked about this elegantly in his book The Courage to Write.  If you’re thinking about writing, you should read it.

This new book I have coming out in September, The Governor’s Lady, took me ten years to write.  It was a time when I was becoming a playwright – seven plays, two of them musicals, all produced and all published by Dramatic Publishing Company.  But the book was always there, and I always returned, trusting that I would land safely and write “The End.”  Eventually I did, and readers will decide if I did okay.

There’s an old joke among paratroopers.  A young trooper, about to make his first jump, goes to his sergeant and confesses he’s terrified.

“Nothing to it,” Sarge says.  “Your parachute is attached to the plane, and when you jump, the line pulls the chute out of its pack, it opens, and you float safely to earth.  In the very unlikely event the main chute doesn’t deploy, you pull the handle on your emergency chute, it opens, and you float safely to earth.  When you get down, there’s a truck waiting to bring you back to the barracks.”

Reassured by Sarge, the young trooper leaps out of the plane.  The main chute doesn’t open.  He reaches for the handle of the emergency, and it comes off in his hand.  As he plummets toward earth, he says, “Yeah, and I bet there ain’t no danged truck down there, either.”

I guess that’s the risk paratroopers and writers take when they make the leap of faith.  As one who’s leaped a few times, I can say the risk is worth it.

The Power of Expectations

Photo by T. Ortega Gaines - Charlotte Observer

My friend and mentor Alan Poindexter died last week and left a huge hole in a lot of hearts.  I treasure a lot about my relationship with Alan – among them, his expectations.

Alan was, for ten years, the creative director at Children’s Theatre of Charlotte.  He shepherded two of my plays – “The Christmas Bus” musical and “The Drama Club” through the long process of production and performance.  “The Drama Club” was an especially arduous undertaking.  Alan approached me about writing a play about modern school race relations, reflecting on what had transpired in the years since Charlotte’s public schools desegregated.  I offered an idea, and we worked together for long months through the process of script development, table readings, the intricacies of production, rehearsal, and performance.

The play takes place in a high school that is desegregated, but not integrated.  There’s not much interaction among the ethnic groups – except in the drama club, where students are focused on the art and craft of theatre, not the color of their skins.  But even here, racial tensions erupt and spread through the school.  How those drama students deal with the challenge is the heart of the story.

It’s a tough subject, and the play was intense.  But perhaps the hardest part was telling a story about people much younger than Alan and me.  It had been a long time since either of us was in high school.  We knew that if our teenaged audiences thought it was inauthentic, we had failed.  Thousands of them came to performances, and they loved it.  Most importantly, they took the subject matter back to their own schools to ponder and talk about.

Alan Poindexter made that play happen.  A play is just words on paper until director, cast and crew invest themselves in the characters and the story, bring them to life, and make magic.  What made magic in that play was that Alan expected each and every one of us to give our very best, and then some.  As Tim Parati, Children’s Theatre’s scenic artist said in a Charlotte Observer article, “He had a very tough exterior, could even be intimidating, but if you knew him very well, he was a sweetheart.”  I came to know him well, and believe me, he was a sweetheart.  He nurtured all of us – sometime with biting criticism, more often with encouragement.  He was a consummate theatre soul and he made all of us better with his guidance.  When the play worked, it made us all proud.

I believe profoundly in the power of expectations.  All of us, no matter our age or stage, need for people to expect us to give our best, and tell us so.  When I was growing up, my parents sure did, and so did lots of people in our small town.  Sometimes we kids disappointed them, but we were theirs, and we knew that the expectations were there, even when we let them down.  I believe we do young folks a favor when we let them know we expect them to do right and do best.

As for me, whenever I think about writing a new play, I have Alan Poindexter looking over my shoulder.  His expectations guide me.  He casts a long shadow, and I am grateful.

The Music of Writing

            My grandmother was a piano teacher.  Widowed in middle age with four children, she made her living by sharing her love for music with several generations of young folks, me included.  The popular book for beginners back then was “Teaching Little Fingers to Play,” which is about an apt a title for any book I can imagine.  Thousands of little fingers stumbled across the keys of her Story and Clark upright piano, and many became proficient, a few truly talented.  I fell somewhere just shy of the middle.

            I wish I had stayed with those piano lessons longer, but at a point in junior high school I got a job and discovered girls, and left the lessons behind.  Still, there are things about my hours at the keyboard of that Story and Clark that have stayed with me.  I can read music, I understand harmony, I have a good feel for rhythm.  The basics.

            Music has always been an important part of my life.  I sang in the high school glee club and church choir.  I became a teenaged disc jockey and worked my way through college spinning records for stations in Tuscaloosa.  I came over time to an appreciation for just about any musical genre  you can imagine – rock, pop, country, bluegrass, classical, jazz.  I retained enough of those basics of composition to write the songs, music and lyrics, for two stage musicals.  I hear music in my head, and some of it is new stuff.  I know enough to put it in a lead sheet and then turn it over to my music professor friend, Dr. Bill Harbinson, who arranges it into what I call “real music.”

            Music informs my storytelling.  I figured out early on in my playwriting career – from studying the work of talented people like Rodgers and Hammerstein – that a song in a play should illuminate character, advance the plot, or (hopefully) both.  The songs should be an integral and seamless part of the story.

            Music and lyrics are woven into my novels.  In Old Dogs and Children, Dorsey Bascombe plays the trombone, and he tells his small daughter Bright that “a trombone is the sound of God breathing.”  In my new book, The Governor’s Lady, a bluegrass band “makes the air dance with their fiddles and guitars and banjos.”  And Pickett Lanier, later to become a governor and presidential candidate, writes and sings a song for his new wife Cooper:

            If I was a three-legged dog, two legs front and one leg rear,
            I’d rouse myself in the evening time, get my three old legs in gear;
            Leave my place in the cool, cool shade, drink my fill of Gatorade,
            And hippity-hop to you, my dear.

            It says a lot about Pickett, and not for the better, that he puts aside his guitar and turns to politics.

            Music has also given me a sense of the rhythm of a story, especially one played out over the length of a book.  To me, a good story has an ebb and flow to it.  It can’t go at break-neck speed all the time.  It needs moments to pause in the cool, cool shade and ponder.  Those are important moments to me in discovering who my characters are and why.

            So it started there on the bench of my grandmother’s Story and Clark upright as she patiently taught my little fingers to play.  Now, when I write, she’s always at my elbow.

Robert Inman’s previously-published novels – Home Fires Burning, Old Dogs and Children, Dairy Queen Days, and Captain Saturday – are available on Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook, and Kobo in e-book format.

Democracy's Not For Sissies

One of my all-time favorite books is “Miracle At Philadelphia,” Catherine Drinker Bowen’s excellent recounting of the September, 1787 convention that produced our American constitution.

Just what kind of government the framers would come up with was very much in question.  When the debates – often acrimonious – were finished, when the final document was done and signed, Benjamin Franklin emerged.  A man in the crowd outside Independence Hall asked him, “What have you given us?”

Franklin replied, “A republic, if you can keep it.”

I always think of that around the Fourth of July, the most widely-celebrated observance of our nationhood.  We wave flags, set off fireworks, play patriotic music, eat barbecue, visit with friends and family.  But do we take a moment to remember Ben Franklin’s sobering words?  A republic, if you can keep it.  They echo through America’s history, reminding us that the hard-gotten price of keeping our republic is a daily, ongoing thing.  A republic works, only if we participate – learn, think, debate, vote.

Sometimes, I wonder.  When the barbecue and fireworks are done, we too often go blithely on our way, forgetting that the business of governing ourselves is unceasing.  The best example: the woefully-small voter turnouts on our election days.  I’m too busy; my one little vote doesn’t matter; they’re all rascals, so why bother?  But the real work is in getting ready to vote.  Too often, we fail to be informed about the issues and people in our civic lives and engage in lively discourse and debate.  Our opinions should be well-reasoned, and they do count – but only if we voice them and act on them.

I’ve thought a lot about this as I’ve worked on my new novel, The Governor’s Lady, due in September.  It’s a story about relationships – mother and daughter, husband and wife – set against a backdrop of politics.  It’s about how people seek to govern, how they relate to the governed, how politics brings out the best and worst in people.

When politicians become isolated, when they start to think they’re bulletproof, that’s when the worst comes out.   We bring out the best in our elected officials when we pay attention and insist they do their best. 

That document the folks in Philadelphia gave us 226 years ago is an ingenious blueprint for a democratic republic.  When the system works, it’s the best and most-envied form of government on earth, a system that helps give us life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  But we have to make it work – with our involvement, our participation, and sometimes our blood, sweat and tears -- if we want to keep it vigorous and fresh.  If we want to govern ourselves.

Ben Franklin had it right.

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

The Man Who Took A Chance

My first boss passed away recently.

Paul Cunningham was the editor of The Elba Clipper, the weekly newspaper in my south Alabama hometown when I was a boy.  I was intrigued by the paper – not just the stories about what was going on in Elba, but the way the stories got there.  The process of journalism.

I decided to do something about it.  When I was in the fifth grade, I marched into the Clipper office and asked Mr. Cunningham for a job.  He looked me up and down and said, “Not yet.”  Two years later, I marched back in, and this time he looked me up and down and said, “All right.”  He put me to work in the back room, the print shop, learning how those stories became a physical thing, the newspaper.  I learned to set type by hand, make proofs and read them, operate the clanking, clattering machinery, get ink under my fingernails and in my blood.  It was newspapering from the ground up.  It was the best job I ever had.

Later on, Mr. Cunningham set me to writing a weekly column, “Twenty-five Years Ago in Elba.”  Each week, I would search the back issues of the paper and pick out items to put in my column.  I think it entertained and informed our readers, and it taught me a lot about my hometown’s history and the people who had put out the newspaper a quarter-century before.  It gave me a sense of the legacy of a newspaper, its place in the community through time.

Paul Cunningham was a fine editor.  He showed by example that journalism is an honorable profession, and that a newspaper is as crucial a part of a town as schools and churches and government.  If people don’t know what’s going on, they move blindly through life.  He was an excellent writer who appreciated the power of words to inform, educate, entertain, and – perhaps most importantly in a newspaper – disturb.

As I look back on that time, I realize that the most important thing for me personally was that Mr. Cunningham took a chance on me.  He looked me up and down and saw something worth cultivating.  He gave me an opportunity that led to a passion.  He taught me by example that one of the most important things we do in this life is invest time and interest in a person younger than we are.  I’ve tried to pay it forward.

Paul Cunningham was 94 when he passed away – a World War Two veteran, a veteran of a lifetime in the journalism business.  In me, a part of him lives on.

The Summer of Tom Swift

Rearranging my study over the weekend, wondering for a moment why I’ve been collecting those Tom Swift books over the years.  And then remembering the summer of 1955, when I couldn’t get enough of Tom Swift.  The summer I re-discovered the joy of reading.

Generations of young folks have been enthralled by Tom Swift stories, beginning with the publication of “Tom Swift and his Motorcycle” in 1910.  Tom was a boy inventor – smart, clever, industrious, creative, personable.  And his stories were a breath of fresh air for children, who had been fed a steady diet of “moral instruction” tomes up to then.  Tom had adventures!  He invented fascinating things – an electric runabout, a submarine boat, talking pictures.  Reading about Tom Swift was sheer fun, and if you were inspired to become an inventor yourself, more the better.  The lesson: if you use your imagination, you can do intriguing things.

There were forty of the books in the original series, which ended in 1941 – all penned by Victor Appleton, who was actually a pseudonym for a series of ghost writers employed by the books’ creator, Edward Stratemeyer.  Later, there were other series featuring Tom’s descendants – the last, according to Wikipedia, published in 2007.

Tom Swift saved me from a summer of crashing boredom in 1955.  I was twelve – too young to chase girls, too old to play in the dirt with the little kids.  I was at loose ends until my mother sent me to my grandmother’s attic.  She and my three uncles had been great readers as youngsters, and the attic was full of their books – Tom Swift, the Hardy Boys, the Bobbsey Twins, Tarzan of the Jungle (my mother was the Tarzan fan…go figure).  I spent much of the summer in the swing on my grandmother’s front porch, immersed in and enthralled by those stories, which took me all over the world in thrilling escapades.  I’m pretty sure I would not be the writer I am today if not for Tom and his fellows.

These days, I’m thrilled when I hear school and library folks and parents talk about summer reading for young people.  It’s a time to read just for fun – no stodgy old textbooks to struggle through, no term papers to write.  Just fun.  Kids are pulled and tugged by a staggering array of summer activities, but gee, there has to be some time squirreled away to kick back with a ripping good story.  It’s the best way to stimulate imaginations, and like Tom, use imagination to do intriguing things.

The original Tom Swift books are hopelessly outdated now, but I still enjoy picking up one of them every once in awhile and letting it take me back to my grandmother’s swing.  For today’s young readers, there’s a huge array of good stories to choose from.  Picking up a book and turning to page one is, to me, the best summer fun of all.

The Thing About Rules...

A plumber once told me that it’s not hard to learn plumbing.  There are only three rules to remember:

1.   Hot on the left, cold on the right;
2.   Water runs downhill;
3.   Don’t put your fingers in your mouth.

Years ago, I had a teeny-tiny role in the CBS miniseries “Chiefs,” starring Charlton Heston, filmed in Chester, South Carolina.  It so happened that I arrived on the set to film my bit part as Mister Heston was finishing a scene.  “Any advice?” I asked him.

He passed along Spencer Tracy’s rules for being a successful actor:

1. Remember your lines;
2. Show up on time;
3. Don’t bump into the furniture.

I recalled those two sets of simple rules as I was preparing to lead a fiction workshop at the Appalachian Heritage Writers Symposium at Southwest Virginia Community College over the weekend.  Do I have any rules that I try to abide by as a writer?  The closest I could come was these:

1. Be honest with your characters.  Present them as they appear in your imagination, warts and all, even when they embarrass and aggravate you.  Their rough spots are invariably more interesting than their smooth ones.
2. Stay out of the way of the story.  Don’t fall in love with your own clever words.  The story belongs to the characters, not the writer.
3. Keep the momentum going.  When the characters bubble up from your imagination and you set them in motion, visit them every possible chance you can.  If you miss a couple of days, they’re likely to say, “Where were you?  We had some things to tell you, and you weren’t here.  And now we’ve forgotten some of them.”

Rules?  Maybe just guidelines, but I do try to follow them because experience has taught me that they work.

And I think I’ll stick to writing.  Rules or not, I wouldn’t make a good actor or plumber.

The Stand In The Schoolhouse Door

It was fifty years ago today – June 11, 1963.  I was a witness to a piece of history that, as much as anything, propelled me into a career in journalism.

The University of Alabama, where I was a student, was until that moment a segregated institution.  There had been one earlier attempt to integrate, but it ended in mayhem.  Now, on this day fifty years ago, two black students – Vivian Malone and James Hood – appeared to register for classes.  Governor George Wallace physically blocked their way, a piece of theatre that came to be known as “the stand in the schoolhouse door.”

Wallace had run for Governor, and won, on a segregationist platform, and it had backed him into a corner.  The University would be integrated, there was no doubt about that, but Wallace needed political cover.  So the “stand” was carefully orchestrated.  U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy and his aides worked out the scenario: Wallace would make a symbolic stand, the Alabama National Guard would be federalized, and when the Guard showed up, Wallace would stand aside.  Everything went as planned.  Wallace made his show, the students enrolled, and violence was averted.

I was working my way through college at a Tuscaloosa radio station at the time, and beginning to cover local news stories.  This was the biggest.  I was there, notepad and tape recorder in hand, in the throng of local and national press people several yards from Wallace on the steps of Foster Auditorium.  At the moment, my only thought was the story itself .  But in the days ahead, I had time to reflect on the moment and consider it from the perspective of a University student.  I had the unshakeable conviction that Vivian Malone and James Hood – citizens of my state – had every right to be students at my school.  And I thought Governor Wallace had used my school as a stage for political grandstanding.

A couple of years later, I graduated and took a job as a reporter for a Montgomery television station, covering the state capitol and state politics.  Governor Wallace and I had a cordial relationship – reporter and newsmaker.  I came to understand his multi-faceted personality.  He was, in a sense, trapped by his own political rhetoric.  But he had a populist and compassionate streak, too.  He helped created a system of trade schools and junior colleges across Alabama, and championed a free textbook program for elementary and secondary school kids.  There was light and dark in George Wallace, as in us all.

The “stand in the schoolhouse door” was my first big story.  It convinced me that I was on the right career path, and I never looked back.  I came to believe that a good journalist needs three things: integrity, curiosity, and a love of the power of words – to inform, enlighten, entertain, and even disturb.  I have George Wallace to thank for at least some of that.

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.