I wonder, are writers born with the gift of lying…uh, natural storytelling on paper, or is it inspired by some event in our lives?

In my opinion, a lot of it has to do with our interest in reading and gathering a lifetime of stories. Anyone who’s heard me speak knows I grew up in rural Chicota, Texas, where the old men up at the store loafed on the porch and talked about the world while I drank RC Colas and listened in silence.

My maternal grandparent’s little frame farmhouse had two bedrooms. Back in my larval stages, I slept with my mother in the room with two beds. My grandmother slept in the other. Being country folks, we turned in with the chickens and after lights out, they talked quietly in the darkness while a soft breeze and the call of a whippoorwill flowed through the rusty screens.

And I absorbed every word from every one of those old folks.

I think all those stories planted a seed that morphed into the obsession to spin my own fictional tales. Choosing what to write about might have been hard for some budding authors, but not for me. I fell into mysteries before migrating to thrillers and now, westerns both traditional and contemporary.

Looking back, my life and ultimate genre choices came from books and movies. Stephen King can point to the comics and horror movies he read and watched as a youngster. I’d bet a dollar to a donut that John Grisham writes law thrillers because of his profession, though I imagine he always wanted to be an author. Louis L’Amour wrote his westerns because he loved cowboys, honor, and the west.

Mine came from different sources.

I guess I was pretty malleable back in 1963 when the Old Man took me to see a movie that significantly impacted my life. Y’all likely know the story that started with Earl Hamner Jr.’s novel and eventually became the successful television series, The Waltons. The original movie, though, was filmed in God’s Country, the Grand Tetons in Wyoming, and featured Henry Fonda and Maureen O’Hara.

In Spencer’s Mountain, Clay and Olivia Spencer are the fourth generation of a family living on Spencer’s Mountain in the Snake River Valley. Though a solid family man with high morals, Clay distains religion while Olivia raises their nine children in the church. They live with his parents, and he promised to build her a dream palace on the mountain to replace their small house.

Their goals are redefined when Clay Jr. is the first Spencer to ever graduate from high school at the top of his class. He wants to continue his education so he won’t have to work in the quarry like his father, but money is issue. Clay Jr.’s teacher, Miss Parker, and the newly arrived Preacher Goodman, do what they can to help him achieve his goal.

An engaging, yet simple movie, but here are my similarities. Dad promised to build mom their dream house, but due to financial difficulties, it never happened. I went to college to become an architect (they helped and I paid the rest), the Tetons are my favorite place to visit and I was once offered a principal’s position in nearby Jackson (which I turned down when I found they had the lowest income and the highest cost of living in the state). I was the first on Dad’s side of the family to graduate college. I live by Clay Sr.’s moral code, though up until I met the Bride I wasn’t much of a churchgoer. I was inspired to read and write by teachers who took an interest me. Clay and I love to fish, especially for trout, and like him, I don’t mind a drink or two…

So, did that movie become the foundation for my life, like the often-seen framing structure of the Spencer house? Did that story spark an interest in becoming an author? Houses and the land are always significant items in every book I write. Hummm….

Before we recline on the couch while a doctor lights a pipe and takes notes, let’s look at another significant movie in my life, Junior Bonner.

One of Director Sam Peckinpah’s lesser successful novels, this rodeo picture skewed me into an entirely different direction the year I graduated in 1972.

Junior Bonner is an almost over the hill rodeo rider. He first appears on the screen taping his injuries after an unsuccessful ride on an ornery bull named Sunshine. He returns to his home town to ride at the annual Fourth of July Prescott rodeo in Arizona to find his brother Curly, a disreputable real-estate developer, is bulldozing the family home in order to build a trailer park. Junior’s womanizing father Ace, and down-to-earth, long-suffering mother, Elvira, are estranged. Ace dreams of emigrating to Australia for once last chance at finding his fortune, but he’s broke.

Junior eventually floors his arrogant brother with a punch and bribes rodeo owner Buck Roan to again let him ride the bull that broke his ribs, promising him half the prize money. Buck thinks he must be crazy, but Junior actually manages to pull it off this time, going the full eight seconds.

Junior walks into a travel agent’s office and buys his father a one-way, first-class ticket to Australia, asking for it to be delivered with the line, “Tell ‘em Junior sent you.” The film’s final shot shows Junior leaving his hometown, his successful ride on Sunshine continuing to put off the inevitable end of his rodeo career.

After seeing that movie a couple of times, I launched a brief, unsuccessful rodeo career that ended when a doctor taped my own ribs after being thrown (familiar, huh?). “You need to find another job, kid. You’re not too good at this one.”

The  movie, Junior Bonner, also taught me pacing, style, dialogue, and action. There are tiny moments in that film that have made their way into my work. If you haven’t seen it, buy the blue ray and listen to the comments, especially about a scene involving a typewriter. It’s an education in filming, directing, and character motivation.

I think both of these films helped me see my work cinematically as it progresses through the evolution of a manuscript. Reviewers often comment that my novels have a cinematic quality, and the comes from watching well-crafted movies.

You won’t get that with today’s super hero pablum.

What I am good at is collecting ideas and writing, and I have the feeling those movies, experiences, teachers, mentors and friends have all guided me toward my success. Oh, and don’t forget those early books I read like The Old Man and the Boy by Robert Ruark.

Now that book truly did change my life and sparked a dream to write novels.

The Two-Ton Albatross by William C. Anderson, Nothing Lasts Forever by Roderick Thorp (eventually filmed as Die Hard), Leaving Cheyenne by Larry McMurtry, and Recollection Creek by Fred Gipson, and dozens, if not hundreds more, established a solid path to writing.

So the question is to published and budding authors alike. Do you have a movie or book, or a combination of both, that sent you on this interesting and frustrating road?

Oh, and I have a follow up. Is there a movie, or book, that mirrors your life?

I turned my pickup left at the light coming from our neighborhood and accelerated onto the hot six-lane past a gravel truck, then a dump truck, then a pickup pulling landscaping equipment. Merging into the far right lane, I noticed several brand spanking new houses across a field that ten years ago was full of dove, but now contained nothing but rows and rows of houses marching toward the highway.

“Where’d those houses there come from? I don’t remember them being built.”

“Yes you do.” The War Department gave me one of her patented sighs, indicating that I’d once again taxed her in some way. “We talked about them the other day on the way to Greenville.”

“Oh, yeah.”

She was right. For the past year, I’d watched a variety of trucks cut a dirt path across the pasture and into what was once woods, only to emerge full of dirt, rocks, and unknown items covered with tarps. At the same time, other large trucks carrying equipment, sand, and concrete made even more inroads into the former woodland.

But I hadn’t noticed those houses so close to the road.

No one was in the lane ahead, so I gave the growing housing edition a second look. They’d drained a stock tank that held ducks in the wintertime and pushed down all the trees they could find with a bulldozer, not even giving them the dubious dignity of falling from chainsaws.

I squinted at the Tyvek-wrapped houses that would soon be hidden by brick walls, gates, and the most despicable trees every to disgrace a landscape, Bradford Pears. Then it hit me.

The new houses hadn’t registered because of my perspective. I hadn’t paid any attention to the last of the dead and dying trees still anchored at the edge of the road, and when I did, they framed the buildings and made them pop. It’s an old photography trick to catch the eye and make a photo more striking.

Perspective changes everything.

Webster defines perspective as the capacity to view things in their true relations or relative importance, including the appearance to the eye of objects in respect to their relative distance and positions.

It was my perspective that was off when I was looking at all that new construction, and I realized that’s true in everything, especially…

Well good Lord, the boy’s finally gotten to the point here, Ethyl! Hurry up with that popcorn and let’s see what he’s trying to say!

We all have a different way of looking at things, from opinions to politics, to real positioning of physical entities. It’s the same in writing. Perspective is how your characters view and deal with the events unfolding within a story, and you have control of all that.

Don’t get Point of View confused with Perspective. An author’s POV focuses on the type of narrator he or she wishes to emphasize. It concentrates on defining the narrator’s characteristics while perspective focuses on how the chosen narrator perceives and feels about what’s happening in the novel. There’s no need to belabor this point any longer, because my running buddy John Gilstrap covered this well in his last post, so give it a read.

And to add a personal note here, I hadn’t read John’s post until I’d finished this one. It seems that we’re on similar, but distinctly different paths this week.

Taking a note from personal experience growing up with an extremely annoying little brother, I often had to explain of what had just happened, while the Old Man stood there with his eyes flashing, before Little Brother told his side.

The story changed depending on which of us was telling it. And my version was always right. “He fell through the wall!”

“Did not! He knocked me through the wall, Dad!”

To me, it was a subtle but important different based on how we viewed the events leading up to that significant moment in our lives that day. Frankly, I was shocked that a small human could fly completely through two layers of sheetrock and into my parent’s bedroom without hitting the studs.

In the first book of my Sonny Hawke series, Hawke’s Preya, I switched perspectives between Ranger Hawke and the villain Marc Chavez, to show (show, don’t tell!) how each man thought he was right. From Chavez’s point of view, he was using a violent takeover of a small town trying to change the world to better for himself and others of like mind.

Ranger Hawke dealt with the bad guys according to the law and did what was necessary to save a class of high school students, including two of his own, from terrorists.

I tried something different in a later novel, alternating chapters mirroring the same events in a specific timeframe based on the perception of each particular character. One reader misunderstood what I was doing and complained that the chapters were repetitive, but I felt this real-time shift in perspective added richness to the story, and hope that individual was the only one confused.

Another thing to note is that readers often insert their own beliefs into your character perspectives, and you might hear from them, good or bad. I always find these emails and reviews fascinating and look forward to wondering exactly what they read and interpreted according to their own viewpoint(s).

One reader sent me an email lambasting my “beliefs” about firearms. That person called me an “Obama Groupie” and suggested that I was an anti-gun liberal. Less than a day later another email accused me of being a right wing Republican and said I was a gun-carrying, Bible-thumping warmonger.

It’s unavoidable, but let it roll off. If it happens to you, then your character’s perspective struck a nerve and as far as I’m concerned, you’re successful.

Write on!

I often utilize reality into works of fiction. I can honestly say that actual conversations can be so bizarre and funny that your agent or readers will sometimes say they can’t be real. The old saying, “you can’t make this up,” is true.

For example, back in 1982 my starter wife and I were in a popular Dallas steakhouse called The Shed with another couple. Partway through the meal, I watched four people take a table not far away. I assumed it was a set of parents and their children until I saw the teens holding hands. The young lady and her boyfriend sat facing me across the room and I couldn’t take my eyes off her.

Halfway through the meal, she and her beau had a spat, and she left for a few minutes. When she came back, the older woman said something and the brunette threw her head back and laughed. The evening ended for our dinner party and the four of us left, but the dark-haired girl never left my mind.

Years passed. Life happened. Divorces occurred.

The Bride and I were sitting in our back yard one cool evening about ten years ago, sipping Coppola’s Director’s Cut wine. The conversation wandered to our lives before we met, old Dallas, and long-gone restaurants. I mentioned The Shed, she told me it was her high school boyfriend’s parents’ favorite restaurant.

I recalled their rustic dining room. “Didn’t you love that all you could eat steak idea?”

She threw her head back and laughed. “I could pack it away back when I was eighteen or nineteen.”

Her huge laugh snapped me back to 1983, and that’s when it clicked after all our years of marriage. “Did you have a white fisherman’s sweater at one time?”

“I did. I loved that sweater. I wore it in high school and college…” She paused, giving me a long look over the top of her glass.

“You came in with your boyfriend while I was there. Y’all had a disagreement…”

Her eyes widened. “It was his parents’ favorite restaurant.”

“That was you.” I told her about what I saw that night. “I knew you were the one for me even then.”

The Bride allowed it was her. I’d been captivated my Shana Kay way back when she’d just graduated high school, eight years before we met.

I used that coincidence in a manuscript, but my agent said it was too unbelievable. “I’d take it out.”

Sigh.

Incidences and conversations like this are inspirations, and usually make their way into my work in some way or another. I think I’ve mentioned in passing that I’ve been a newspaper columnist since 1988, and in that time, I’ve written well over 2,000 columns and magazine articles. Most stemmed from real life, and as I’ve always said, there’s always a grain of truth in every column.

The following conversation among the strangers in the following story is absolutely true. I swear, because I lifted all of the unbelievable dialogue from a neighborhood chat/complain social media site, and can testify it’s still on my cell phone. All I had to do was change it enough to avoid plagiarism, (but then again, is it plagiarism if I’m really reporting what was said?) add a setting, personal characteristics, and descriptions to make it my fictional story.

Why did I post my newspaper column for June 26, 2022, on this blog? Because I’m firm a believer in teaching by example. Hope you enjoy this and maybe it’ll help in some way.

*

The Hunting Club membership (my old, graying friends who have hunted and fished together for over forty years) was gathered around the large round corner table in Doreen’s 24 HR Eat Gas Now Café when a gaggle of women pushed through the glass door.

It’s our local gathering place out on the highway, and we’d spent the morning sipping Doreen’s excellent coffee and talking about a big doe lying in the median. Someone hit her the night before and we wondered if she had a fawn when she died.

Woodrow rested his elbows on the Formica table and ran his forefinger through the handle of his thick white coffee mug. “It’s a surprise to see a doe hit this time of the year.”

“I wish it had been a rabbit.” I sighed and watched the women stop to survey the cafe. “Rabbits are like roaches around here these days.”

The ladies ignored us and took a table in the center of the café, putting them in close proximity to our big booth. Had it been a group of men, they’d have moved to the opposite end of the large eating area, as far as possible from where we sat.

One woman who looked like Maude on the Golden Girls spoke with a voice heard by cattle dogs a mile away. “I texted out a warning on the way over here. I just saw a dead deer on the side of the curb in the middle between Eldorado and Panther Creek.”

Woodrow grinned and scratched at his gray beard in thought. “Now I know where to hunt this season. That has to be the same doe we were just talking about, but it’s in the median, so there’s no danger to anyone unless folks are slowing down to look, or texting while they drive!” His voice rose in emphasis, but the newcomers appeared not to hear.

“That’s so sad.” It was a skinny gal with lots of eye makeup and a set of artificial lashes that reminded me of large, dead spiders. I assumed she was talking about the doe, and not Woodrow’s comment.

Jerry Wayne spoke in his usual loud voice, since he can’t hear it thunder these days and refuses to wear his hearing aids. He says he’s cutting down on caffeine, but the big guy still twitches like an outhouse fly. “It’s not so sad. It’s the nature of things. I was raised on venison in Mississippi. Wish I’d have seen that little doe right after it was hit. I could use some backstrap right now.”

As a group, the women frowned and leaned in.

Wrong Willie shook his head. “I’ve told you over and over again it ain’t right to eat roadkill.”

“Depends on how long it’s been on the ground.” Jerry Wayne leaned back to make his point, his version of “drop the mike.”

Maude waved Doreen over to order. “Poor animals. No wilderness to live in anymore. It’s because of all this construction around here. These animals are going to come out more and more. They should take them to a habitat somewhere, because it is very dangerous and sad to see them die this way.”

Constable Rick’s mouth opened and closed, as if he wanted to say something but couldn’t get enough air. He was either laughing, or in shock. Her astonishing comment clammed all of us up, and we listened as they took turns spilling inaccurate thoughts.

“If you call the game warden and tag it, they will give it to you. If you want the meat.”

Woodrow slapped his forehead. Doreen shot him a glare from behind the counter. She wiped her hands on a stained towel and gathered up a handful of empty mugs. I took a moment to look for the mole on her face that seems to move at random from one day to the next.

It must have migrated to the back of her neck that day.

A brunette lady with painted-on eyebrows frowned them together. “You have to bleed it out immediately for it to taste good. That one’s been dead too long, unfortunately. Sad.”

“I can’t stand deer hunters and I’ve been living here twenty-one years when it was wilderness and I’ve never seen anything but bobcats, coyotes, and greyhawks.” That run-on sentence came from a lady covered with tattoos.

Willie tore his eyes from her art and turned to me. “Wilderness? This has been farmland for over a hundred years.”

I shrugged. “Who knows. They’re on a roll, but there’s a million rabbits and squirrels they haven’t seemed to notice.”

“You know,” Maude took a cup from Doreen and smiled her thanks as our favorite waitress and business owner filled it from the fresh pot in her hand. “We need one of those Deer Crossing signs so these poor animals will know where to cross safely.”

Doreen glared in our direction, daring us to say anything. I looked around the table and saw Jerry Wayne, Willie, Woodrow, and Constable Rick all bite their lips at the same time.

The youngest of the female troupe frowned. “I didn’t know deers were prevalent in this area of Texas. It looks like we need wildlife overpasses.”

Willie slipped down in the booth, dissolved into hysterical giggles, and slapped the table. I hoped his red face wouldn’t explode.

A dishwater blonde shook her head at the enormity of it all. “I was surprised to see a deer in the residential neighborhood by the ponds. But to a deer, the ponds are connected to the wooded lakeshore that is their habitat encroached by human development and cars and roads. It’s arguable whether that backdrop of wilderness area is manicured by human development or if it belongs to wildlife or humans.”

Jerry Wayne raised a finger to make some point, but I shook my head. I wanted to hear more.

“Of course, they don’t have GPS to guide them back to the wilderness areas.” The blonde sighed. “Of course that poor deer was lost because how would it expect wooded lakeshore pond trails to dead-end in concrete roads and blocks of framed structures that we call houses?”

The boys, who were having a helluva time, nodded in encouragement, hoping to keep the conversation on track.

“It’s a puzzle for the deer to navigate their way back to the native wooded areas without running into human-erected structures.” Maude squared her shoulders and sent us a glare, likely preparing for battle. “They are stuck in the urban area not because they want to live here, but are lost in the maze, thinking crossing the street would get them back to the wild when they’re desperately trying to find a way out.”

I studied the boys’ faces. “I don’t even know what that means.”

She paused again. “You know, I have an idea. I suggest the city create a deer farm for them so they don’t have to run in the street. Then you’ll have time to stop even when a deer dashes out in front of you, and people need to slow down. It’s hard to hit a deer if you drive the speed limit.”

Wheezing in delight, the guys slapped the table, giggling like schoolgirls.

Doreen came over and spoke through her teeth. “Don’t! Y’all shouldn’t be eavesdropping anyway!”

“But we were here first. They’re the ones who sat within earshot.” Woodrow laid his head on the table. “Put the deer in farms!!!???”

Doreen’s demeanor cracked and she leaned in to whisper in a giggle. “Well, they’re move-ins, bless their hearts.”

Maude took a deep breath. “Well, at least we’re aware of the deer now. That makes me feel better, but you’re right. They need to move the deer crossing somewhere with less traffic.”

And we all fell out.

Writing is fun, and that’s why we do it. Personal deadlines, self-imposed daily word counts, locking yourself alone in a room for hours at a time with your invisible friends, those hard deadlines that loom at the same time you have other things to do, and less than impressive paychecks aren’t roadblocks to most of us.

Staring at the flashing cursor on a blank screen seems to be a challenge to some, but I blow through page after page without a tingle of fear or apprehension. Then comes the day I hit Send and the manuscript is on the way to becoming a real book. That’s a huge satisfaction.

But then comes the fun and interesting part that I never expected as a novice writer. Those moments when memories are made.

Only a couple of weeks after I finished one of the Red River novels, my oldest aunt called from her assisted living apartment. “Reavis Zane!”

Dammit! I immediately became ten years old again when she used both names. “Howdy Aunt Billie. I’m sorry I haven’t been by to see you lately…”

“That don’t matter none. I called ‘cause I have a bone to pick with you, young man.”

I figuratively toed the carpet, chastised by one of those old gals who likely whacked my rear a time or two when I was a kid. Our family believed in that village theory of child raising to the point there were eyes everywhere.

I sighed and sat down at my desk. “Well, go to picking then.”

“I just read that book you wrote and I can’t believe you’re telling family secrets to the whole wide world.”

Uh, oh. I flicked through mountains of memory files, trying to figure out what she was talking about. Though a few of my characters are based on living people, I’m careful not to describe them in detail. Even family members in this litigious society can take you to task on such characterization.

Clearing my throat, I tried not to sound worried. “Well, Ned Parker’s based on Daddy Joe, and Top is me in a sense, but I don’t…”

“It’s not them. I’m talking about those two people who ran away with one. They’re Tommy and Gertrude as sure as shoot’n. I don’t see why you got to drag family into them stories.”

“Wait. What?” Tommy and Gertrude were family members who were banished from the family when I was little, but I never knew why. “You mean they…”

“Yessir. You know as well as I do that they were married to Bob and Elizabeth.”

Puzzle pieces clicked into place. Bob and Elizabeth were brother and sister, married to Tommy and Gertrude.

Her voice became stern. “So young man, you don’t need to be telling them secrets in any more books.”

“Uh, that’s news to me. Exactly what happened between them?”

“Well, my lands. I’m not gonna talk about that gossip!”

And she hung up on me without another word.

I was signing copies of still another book when I described a scene based on a real story my grandaddy told me. He was constable of Precinct 3 in Lamar County, Texas, that’s made up of several small rural communities. One day he got a call on his Motorola (son, they can outrun my car, but they can’t outrun my radio) that a suspicious individual was seen on a county road. When the highway patrol officer stopped, the teenager ran away into the woods.

The young trooper radioed back and organized a manhunt that was forming up when Grandad pulled up in his pickup. The trooper described the outlaw in great detail and my more experienced grandfather put a halt to the proceedings.

“You boys just settle down. I think I know who that is. Give me ten minutes and I’ll be right back.”

He drove off down a gravel road and turned down a dirt drive to a house back in the woods. A farmer’s wife came outside when she heard the car. “Hey, Ned. What brings you out here?”

“Is Leroy around somewhere?”

“He’s in the barn. He run again?”

“He did.”

Grandad called Leroy out, put him in the front seat of the truck, and returned to the building manhunt. He pulled up and called the trooper over. “Is this your suspect?”

He bent down and peeked through the window. “That’s him! You caught him already?”

“I knew who you were talking about. Leroy here runs from every lawman he sees, but he’s never done anything wrong. So y’all can go about your business and we’re gong to the store to get some ice cream.”

So there I was at the signing, enjoying the long line of fans holding my book with that story when a tall, gray-haired man handed me his copy. “I read this already, but I’d love to have your signature.”

“Honored. Just a signature, or would you like it personalized?”

“Personalized. Sign it, To Judge John Smith, That Young Trooper Who Had a Lot To Learn From An Old Constable.”

I glanced up to meet his eyes. “You’re that young highway patrol officer I wrote about.”

“Yep, your grandaddy taught me a lot back when I was full of piss and vinegar, and you wrote it exactly as it happened.”

“Uh, should I apologize, Judge?”

“Nah. It was the truth.”

No one told me what to expect after a book comes out, but I swear it’s always fun. Enjoy the experience, because only a small percentage of potential authors ever get published. It’s that carrot at the end of the stick, and it’s a helluva ride.

A few months ago, I bought a walk-behind DR brush cutter to clear several overgrown acres in the back half of our new weekend property in Lamar County, Texas. In our part of the world we usually use tractors with bush hogs dragging behind, but I didn’t want to lay out the capital for such a big rig, hence the DR.

This thing is a beast that chews up saplings three inches in diameter without even struggling to clear its throat. Chest-high Johnson grass and weeds? No problem. It shreds that kind of vegetation with satisfying, crunching sounds reminiscent of a sharp knife cutting through limp celery.

The front stretches out like the hood of a ’76 Ford Thunderbird and the monster cutter is driven by an engine big enough to power that same car. The belt drive will yank it from your hands in third gear, so the only thing one has to do is engage the blade thick as a Roman broadsword and follow…sometimes reluctantly when the terrain forces a veer off the operator’s intended path.

One such unplanned shift in direction took me through a thick patch of head-high thorny blackberry vines and oak saplings, resulting in long, bloody scratches down my arms. However, when I looked back, the new lane was clear as a walking path in a city park.

Hang on, Ethyl, I think this boy’s gonna start reminiscing!

The whole thing reminded me of a scene that locked into my mind about twenty years ago when the legendary Y.O. Ranch in South Texas hosted a weekend cattle drive for outdoor writers and one of their children. Our youngest daughter who was thirteen at the time, nickname Taz, is a natural on horses and she was excited to go.

It was a real three-day cattle drive across that huge 40,000-acre ranch, moving a hundred or more longhorns from one pasture to another. On the first day, cowboys taught the city slickers how to ride, and later that evening kids learned to cook over an open campfire. It was a breeze for Taz, who grew up camping with us and already knew how to ride.

We pushed the herd on the second morning under a gray, leaden sky weeping with rain. The herd’s trail boss made it clear that if “things got western,” kids and dads were to get the hell out of the way and let the real cowboys handle the herd.

Ten experienced cowhands circled the cattle and pushed them into a long string through the first pasture full of prairie savanna grasses, cedars, and ragged mesquite. Mounted kids and dads filled in the loose circle of riders, walking their horses in pace with the longhorns and cowboys who looked to be straight out of casting.

I was riding point with the trail boss and Taz was halfway back when something spooked the tough, rangy longhorns. The leaders instinctively wheeled and charged into a thicket of fifteen-foot-high mesquite trees lining a dry wash. The rest of the herd followed, ignoring the experienced cattlemen’s attempts to stop them.

In the Trail Boss’s terms, things got western.

He spurred his horse and took off to the right and around the end of that big patch of crooked trees, intending to cut the herd’s leaders off and turn them until the rest of the cowboys punched through the dense foliage to help. Reins in one hand and a 35mm camera in the other, I followed right behind him and watched that man sit his horse like he’d been born in a saddle. Not nearly as graceful in the saddle, I held my own and we beat the herd coming through the brush and reined up in a small clearing to experience a scene straight from the 1880s.

The running cattle sounded as if a steamfoller was crashing through the thicket. Branches and limbs popped and crackled, hooves thundered on the ground, and whoops reached our ears both from kids and cowboys.

Then here they came. The leaders exploded through the thicket in a blast of dust and flying leaves with broken limbs and dead branches caught on their horns. The real cowboys popped out on both sides of the herd, doing their best to keep the cattle from scattering to the winds. My breath caught at the sight of a scratched and bloody kid bent low over the saddle horn to avoid the limbs, holding her hat with one hand, and riding like hell.

She passed us and flashed me a grin full of excitement and fun.

The trail boss roared and pointed. “Who the hell belongs to that kid?”

I raised a hand, expecting a good old fashioned dressing down in a cowboy way.

Instead, he built his own grin. “That little gal can ride with me any day!”

They passed, and I looked through a newly cleared lane stomped flat by hooves and huge bodies to see the rest of the kids and their fathers picking their way through the undergrowth.

Under a similar gray sky yesterday in Northeast Texas, I turned after unintentionally following the DR brush cutter through a ten-foot-high thicket of saplings and blackberry vines and the new lane looked similar to the one pounded flat by that runaway herd

So what does all this have to do with writing?

Creating your characters, building a scene, and then setting those fictional people on course is like starting that cattle drive. We’d planned to follow a two-track pasture road that day, an outline if you wish, but the thing turned on a dime.

I hadn’t planned on that lane the other day, just like Trail Boss hadn’t planned on his longhorns cutting a new path through the mesquites, but I was glad for the experience and such satisfying results, both times

My way of writing is to set everything into motion and then follow the plot as it turns when it wants, but those of you who outline may shriek and throw up your hands at veering off your course and abandoning your outline. Planners must push their characters say and do certain things at specific points in a manuscript, but wait a second.

Try this little exercise just once. Let your mind wander through five or six new pages, allowing your characters’ fictional personalities to find their way. They might turn around a sapling (read minor character), a mature oak (one of your major characters), or an unseen obstacle such as a dip or dry wash (clues or an unanticipated incident) and cut a different, open path that you can look back on with satisfaction.

What could a few bloody, mental scratches hurt in the long run?

Authors are world builders. We use a gift not many people possess to spin fictional tales about people who live in our heads. Some find that creating characters can be difficult, others concentrate on their characteristics, while many can reach out into the air and pull entire towns and places together without effort.

I find that my fully developed characters walk on stage when I need them. They take over, dropping bits and pieces of their backstories as the story develops and I watch them come alive as my fingers fly over the keys. I’m lucky that way.

Writers sometimes say they have issues creating characters, but I’ve never heard a writer say they have problems with locations. I know several who write about the cities or towns where they lived or grew up. They use existing locations, because they know them. If it’s a historical novel, they might spend considerable time researching a certain setting through whatever means works for them.

As I’ve written before, sometimes you have to actually visit a location during the research process, and there are authors who travel the world to better understand the environment, and the people who live there.

I use real settings in Northeast Texas, West Texas, East Texas and the Panhandle, and more recently Eastern Oklahoma and Hot Springs, Arkansas, but I handle those places differently in print. I change the names of those communities and towns.

But why, if they’re real places? You can use Google maps to find streets, highways, and even buildings. Keep it simple, stupid, and use what’s there.

There’s a reason for that. There are readers who delight in pointing out errors in a novel and I think they receive great satisfaction in writing to stay…

“I enjoyed your book, but 1^st Street NW in Paris, Texas, is one way. You wrote that it’s a two way, and sir, that’s wrong!”

Or…

“There’s aren’t any houses at the corner of West Lincoln and Highland Street in Marfa, Texas. They start halfway down the block. You should visit the places you write about.”

I get the occasional email pointing out elusive typos, or in their opinion, cars didn’t have push button shifters in the 1940s. Well, yes they did, I know, because I drove a 1948 DeSoto for a year in high school and it had Fluid-drive in addition to manual shifting.

NOTE: A 1948 DeSoto was not the car that impressed girls in 1970. Come to think of it, the four-door 1959 Galaxie 500 I drove for the next three years wasn’t either.

To alleviate those issues with reality, I simply change the name of existing towns and mold them into what I want, or need. In my Red River series, Paris, Texas, became Chisum. That name came from John Chisum, a central player in the New Mexico Lincoln County War (which made famous Billy the Kid and his Regulators). He’s buried in Paris and it seemed fitting.

I partially grew up in the community of Chicota, and changed it back to the original name of Center Springs. I also merged two towns in the Big Bend Region of the Lone Star state. Alpine and Marfa became Ballard (named after my college roommate), and I’ve created other towns from whole cloth.

Now I can run my streets any way I want. If I need the courthouse to be six stories high, I can do it, and no one has any reason to call me on it. This idea works for me in other ways, too. I was looking at Google maps one day and noticed the Red River twisted out of its banks several years ago. A sliver of Oklahoma wound up on the Texas side.

But it still belongs to Oklahoma and there was considerable litigation about that issue. That orphan piece of land is north of a rancher’s property, and there still aren’t any official roads in and out of there, other than the cattleman’s two tracks made by his own truck.

It was thin I began to wonder…what if?

What if there no one claimed the fallow land?

What if bad buys decided to “homestead” it, pay the Texas landowner for a two-track right of way and build a honky tonk?

What if they sold drugs and had gambling in addition to selling beer and liquor?

What if someone was murdered in this no man’s land?

In Laying Bones, (Book 8 in the Red River series), I addressed all those questions and more, built a fictional honky tonk world on that sliver of land, and explored what could happen.

The plot came from an offhand mention during a funeral about five years ago. Back in 1964, a distant cousin, R.B. Armstrong got drunk in an Oklahoma club one night, drove back across the river into Texas and overturned his car into Sanders Creek and drowned in only a few inches of water. He was my Old Man’s running buddy, and Dad wondered about R.B.’s death until the day he died in 2010.

I was talking to my first cousin, Roger, at the aforementioned funeral and we got to talking about the Old Man, R.B., and the rest of those old men who were part of the Greatest Generation. I told Roger Dad brought up R.B.’s drowning only he died, saying it sure was a shame.

Roger gave me a strange look and shook his head. His daddy was a Lamar County deputy sheriff at that time and Roger knew more than I did. “Rev, R.B. didn’t drown that night. He didn’t have any water in his lungs. He was murdered and they suspect a couple of guys drove him out there and pushed the car off into the creek. That story you know was made up to save the family more grief than they could handle at the time.”

I was stunned. What if that were true?

Our discussion bubbled along in my subconscious until I found that spit of land on Google Maps a few months later. Click. The light bulb went on and I had a novel because we’re world builders.

Use that wonderful imagination of yours, explore alternatives, and no one can call you out on it.

Oh, by the way, 1^st Street NW in Chisum is a two way, in my world.

The Earthling, which released wayyyy back in 1980, is one of the greatest, but most underrated movies I’ve ever seen. Three quarters of the way through the film, Patrick Foley, (William Holden) is in conversation with a traumatized six-year-old Shawn Daley (Ricky Schroeder), and delivers one of the most inspiring observations in movie history.

Dying of cancer in the Australian wilderness, Foley is trying to teach the youngster enough skills to survive in the Blue Mountains before he passes away. Recently orphaned and traumatized, Shawn is self-absorbed and spends too much time complaining, according to Foley.

Desperate, Foley finally breaks and attempts to jolt the child into understanding. “You’re not only a whining kid that wastes his time; you’re also deaf and half blind. Sure you can hear me now. But do you listen to that water? Can you hear those birds back there? Can you hear the insects – the wind and the trees creakin’ and rubbin’? You’re deaf to those frogs down there and the sun pingin’ off of these rocks. You’re deaf to your own heartbeat and me comin’ up behind you. My God, boy, there’s a whole symphony goin’ on here and you can’t hear a thing.”

And then later, he distills it down even further for Shawn, and gave me a line I used with my girls when they were growing up. “You hear, but you don’t listen.”

In writing novels, we should know who the characters are, and what drives them, and what they’re wearing (and I hope you didn’t spend two paragraphs of an info dump telling us more than we want know about their clothes).

That can be achieved by a line or two as the story progresses.

The symphony Foley is talking about, are the senses we take for granted, especially sounds and smells that are often difficult for some to integrate into the manuscript. However, writers don’t need to tell readers how something sounds. Showing is much better.

“The sound of thunder reached his ears.”

Or, “She room smelled musky.”

We don’t need to say, “Thunder outside of the musky room and the spider’s prickly legs tickled the hairs on his arm, creeped Herschel out.”

At this writing, I’m alone in our Northeast Texas cabin with the windows open to catch the fresh breeze flowing through the screens like an invisible river. Closed up for nearly three years, the dusty interior was stale and thick when we first bought the place, but now it’s fresh as line-dried sheets.

The soft spring breeze will soon be replaced by furious winds whipped up from a line of thunderstorms roaring down on the cabin from the west. I’m looking forward to the hail that’s sure to rattle on the tin roof sparking childhood memories of similar storms and rainy days playing in the hay barn.

It’s a rustic place that reminds me of those old-school cabins up in the Adirondacks. The rough cedar exterior of the 2,000 square foot retreat fits perfectly in the hardwoods that make up the entire 48.5-acre parcel. A pool wraps around three sides of the house and waves slap against the shore. Here in East Texas we call them pools, farther out in Deep East Texas they’re ponds or stock ponds, and out west, they’re called tanks.

The interior is honey-colored cedar, some commercially milled, but the rest hand-cut in a home sawmill, sanded smooth by a welder-turned-carpenter, and coated with a sealer that brings out the rich, warm colors only cedar can provide.

Thunder rumbles close enough to rattle the glass in an antique bookcase in the other room, creating an evening just like those movie makers use to dispatch promiscuous teenagers, but there are no serial killers or ax murderers creeping up to the front porch, as far as I know.

Besides, this isn’t a place full of partygoers (though I’ve been told the cabin once reeked of spilled beer and whiskey after a number of rambunctious parties thrown by the former owner), and there isn’t one young lady running around in her underwear. I’m sure, because I checked before coming in for the night.

The breeze occasionally brings another burst of air perfumed by the distinctive gin-and pencil-shavings fragrance of evergreen branchlets rubbing together in the wind.

A bat flutters past on dry, leathery wings that might creep some folks out, but I love the little guys who suck up mosquitos like vacuum cleaners. Unseen tree frogs of all sizes lend three-note voices to the symphony outside. Some chatter with a high pitch, like maddened amphibians laughing at the deeper croaking of heavy bullfrogs, who add bottom to the chorus.

Crickets under the window add their own backbeat as an owl hoots in the distance and a whippoorwill repeats a distinctively sad call over and over again, asking who whipped poor Will. Will’s name ends on a high note, reminiscent of a construction worker’s wolf whistle.

Pucker up and whistle that last note and you’ll understand what I mean.

But that’s not all. The night is never silent, even without the oncoming storm, nor are the woods. Wild hogs grunt and fight less than hundred yards away. At one point, a smaller, indignant pig squeals long and loud, and goes silent.

We’re not in the wilderness. High overhead, the hiss of a distant, passing jet seems out of place, as much as car tires sizzling down the oil road before hitting a hole. The whole vehicle rattles like it’s coming apart before passing.

The house pops as it cools, and the only other noise is the tapping on my fingers on the keyboard. Ice rattles in the glass after a sip of chilly Bombay Sapphire and tonic, the cool liquid refreshing as the evening.

Now, there it is. The screen is dusty and the damp wind across my makeshift desk brings the scent of petrichor, the familiar odor the odor of rain falling on dry ground.

Offer these senses in your work, letting the reader become part of the story, instead of hitting them between the eyes with “he heard,” or “she smelled,” or “they saw.” Spin your story in a way that the reader is there with your characters, using the recollections of their own senses.

That’s what Patrick Foley was talking about, that symphony around us that I’ve hopefully shown without telling. Add in an ax murderer and some teenagers in their underwear, and you have a thrilling scene.

Not long ago, (but before the lockdown) I was invited to speak at a library down in Mason, just west of San Antonio. That little south Texas town was where Fred Gipson lived, one of my favorite authors who wrote Old Yeller and Savage Sam.

They put me up in a quaint old hotel down there in the hill country, overlooking the town square that wasn’t much more than an intersection of two lane roads. It was one of those little perks I enjoy as an author. I spoke that night and signed my latest novel, then retired to the balcony and sipped a gin and tonic under the stars, thinking about an elderly woman who came to me after the talk, asking if I could help her with a problem.

I’d signed my last book and was getting ready to leave when she took a chair beside me. “You’re a famous author.” She spoke with a German accent, which isn’t unusual in that part of the Lone Star State. The German-Texan culture began here in 1831, five years before the Alamo fell, and significantly increased after the close of the Civil War. It’s estimated that over 40,000 emigrants moved to Texas by the close of the nineteenth century.

“No ma’am. I’m far from famous, just a pretty good writer who entertains people.”

“Well, you surely have an agent.”

“I do. She’s my second agent. I fired the first.”

“Oh, you’ve already fired one.” She pressed her pearls and looked around at her husband who stood slightly behind her as silent as a bodyguard. “Why, I can’t get anyone to even look at my work, and I already have a book out.”

“Well, congratulations. That’s an accomplishment. What’s it about?”

“My time in Germany during the war. I was sent to the camps and am the only survivor in our family.”

My throat caught and I studied the tall, slender woman with unruly white hair. Her wrinkled husband with equally white hair nodded, as if to confirm her statement.

“I’m sure it’s a powerful novel. Is it written as fiction, or non-fiction?”

“Oh, it’s nonfiction. It’s the story of my survival. It’s done well here in town. I think I’ve sold almost a hundred and fifty copies.” She nodded to punctuate the statement, pleased with her success.

“So you got it published without an agent.”

“Yes. It’s self-published, and that’s my problem. I need an agent to tell me what to do with all these books.”

I didn’t know where was she was going, but I had an idea. “Well, you’re kinda doing this backwards. You might have a hard time finding someone to represent works that are already out there.”

“Can you help me then?”

“I might offer some advice, but I’m far from an expert in this field.”

“I just need someone to tell me what to do with all these books that keep arriving.”

Alarm bells went off. “I’m not sure what you’re asking.”

“Books arrive each month and I have to pay for them. My garage is almost full.”

“Did you sign a contract saying you’re required to buy a certain amount each month?” I couldn’t believe anyone would agree to such a deal, and hoped I misunderstood what she was telling me.

“Yes. They keep coming in, and I’m running out of money.”

She explained it was a company that charged her to print the books, then required her to buy a specific number each month. Living on a limited income, she spent a fortune on the first run and after exhausting her list of friends and family, she tried to sell them from her trunk.

Bookstores in that part of Texas are about as rare as hen’s teeth, but she managed to get a few on the shelves of an antique store, and a couple of small independent bookstores within a fifty mile radius. However, she had more than she would, or could, ever sell.

There was no way to break the news to her in a gentle way. “Ma’am, I’m afraid you’ve been taken. I don’t know what you can do.”

Her face fell. She knew it, but had to hear those words from someone else. “You have no such contract?”

“No ma’am. I’m traditionally published.”

“You don’t use your own money to print the books?”

“No, it doesn’t work that way with a traditional publishing house. People pay me, not the other way around.”

“They won’t let me out of this contract. I’ve asked several times.”

“You might find a literary attorney to break the contract.”

“That will cost money.”

“Yes it will, but it’s the only solution I know.”

I suggested a Texas Writers Association that might be of some help, and gave her the names of two agents down here who were also authors. She thanked me, rose with an effort, and took her husband’s arm. He supported her as they made their slow way to the door and I had to swallow a lump before I could gather my things and leave.

That’s why I was drinking gin alone on the hotel balcony.

I have no experience with self-publishing, but can only offer this suggestion to those who are considering this non-traditional way of getting into print. Writers need someone to review legal documents with an eye toward minimizing their financial risks. Get yourself a good literary attorney to review any contract before signing your name. It might be expensive at the outset, but a bad publishing deal can hound you for years and ultimately impact your career as an author.

And because I’ve never self-published (though I have friends who are successful at it), I’d like to hear from those of you who took this route. You comments might help someone else. Please, and thank you.

I’m still haunted by that poor survivor who was taken by an unscrupulous publisher.

“Wortham’s outstanding sequel to The Rock Hole (2011)… Burrows combines the gonzo sensibility of Joe R. Lansdale and the elegiac mood of To Kill a Mockingbird to strike just the right balance between childhood innocence and adult horror.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

I read that review back in 2012 and wondered, “What’s Publishers Weekly?”

I honestly didn’t know much about reviewers, or starred reviews, but I hadn’t written a horror novel, had I?

Burrows was simply the second book in my Red River series about precocious ten-year-old kids living in a Mayberry-like setting when a killer comes to town.

But horror?

Always a fan of that genre, I cut my teeth on H.P. Lovecraft, graduating from there to Stephen King, Karl Edward Wagner, Gary Brandner, Richard Matheson and I admit, I read a lot of John Saul and shame on me, V.C. Andrews, but I hadn’t set out to write a novel meant to scare, startle, shock, and even repulse my new readers. I just wanted to tell a creepy story and start it with something I’d written years earlier.

They say the key focus of a horror novel is to elicit a sense of dread through frightening images, themes, and situations.

I didn’t know that either, at the time.

But I did remember that Lovecraft wrote, “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.”

It was the unknown part I was shooting for somewhere around 2001 with an attempt to get Stephen King’s attention as part of an online short story contest after his book, On Writing, was released. Once I learned that he was looking for short stories, I sat down to write one.

Wait, what? I’d never written a short story.

Well, that wasn’t completely true. I’d attempted one back in the 1980s that was damned near a novella and it was almost published by a magazine that shut down only a month after they accepted my submission. Sigh.

Hey, just write shorter, I thought. And I did.

Five entries out of 1,000 submissions won the contest and their names were posted on Mr. King’s website, but my story, Drip, didn’t make the cut. Not wanting to waste the effort, I submitted Drip to several magazines. No one else wanted it either. I wonder if it was the title. Anyway, with a stack of rejection notices the size of a ham sandwich, I stuck it in a drawer until my editor called.

“Well, now that The Rock Hole is scheduled for release in a few months, when can we expect your next novel?”

“What!!!???”

“We need it pretty fast.” She gave me a deadline. “I can’t wait to see what you come up with. Toodles.”

I spoke into the dead line. “Neither can I.”

Somewhat desperate, I had an idea and dug that old short story out of my computer files to re-read what I’d written so long ago. It began with one word, drip, hence the title. The scene? Kendall Boden has a casual, one-sided conversation with a man with a bullet in his head, as blood slowly drips from the victim’s nose to puddle in his lap.

From there, someone discovers a headless body in the Red River, and the novel is off and running with Cody Parker’s nightmare premonition playing out in real life. A hoarder of the first order has filled the multi-story abandoned Cotton Exchange with tons of scavenged garbage and booby traps. Pursuing a lead, Cody and Deputy John Washington find themselves inside the fire trap, lost in a deadly maze of burrows and their own personal terrors.

Everything revolves around a suspect from the town’s past who needs to be caught before more headless bodies pile up, and they do.

So what was it that made some reviewers call this a horror novel, while I thought I was simply writing a second mystery?

Well, it scared the pee-waddlin’ out of folks for one thing. Trapped inside a shoulder-wide burrow?

Brrrr.

Some readers said they couldn’t finish it because it was too claustrophobic. That makes sense, we all have certain things that terrify us, and that includes spiders…

…that are in the novel, as well as rats and moldering corpses…

…yeah, they’re in there too, along with a lunatic who is the architect of it all, but even that crazy person isn’t as he seems.

Upon submission six months later, my agent told me that first chapter was the most frightening thing she’d ever read. Yeah, the unsellable short story, Drip, was Chapter One. Take that, Mr. King.

We’re all familiar with movies in this genre that startles us with people who suddenly jump out of nowhere, or shock us with a hand reaching from the darkness, or a human-like creature who looks at the audience with psychotic eyes from under lowered brows. I call them shock films.

But movies are different than horror novels.

Written or literary horror slowly feeds on audience’s deepest terrors, and not the abovementioned Shock Factor. It’s built upon those things which scare us as individuals, such as death, evil, the supernatural, or creatures that slither around out there in the darkness. It’s built upon the unknown.

How do you write horror? In my opinion you have to quit trying to say things that you think are scary.

Instead, create an atmosphere of dread. Show, don’t tell.

Horror isn’t splattered blood and guts. Oh, I guess that’s horrific if you really come across it. When I was a kid I followed my grandfather into a murder scene (he was a constable), and was witness to fresh blood still running down the walls and dripping from the ceiling in the living room of a small frame house out in the country. When he realized I was behind him, he knocked me back through the screen door with the flat of his hand and ordered me to stay outside.

Come to think of it, the sight of all that blood wasn’t horrific at all, but maybe it waited somewhere deep inside to reemerge in a more subtle way through my writing.

Again, horror is a carefully designed build of dread and suspense. To be successful, get inside the reader’s head and show them what scares them the most. Create a world where their deepest fears can be reality. Find something that’s common and benign, and dig deeper to reveal a surprise or twist that will haunt your reader long after they close the book.

Find something that’s festering inside them, and pick it out.

What’s more creepy than a huge old decaying building full of living, squirming creatures that live in absolute darkness and brush up against you, or crawl over your trapped body.

What about a troubled character with a pitiful, miserable past full of secrets that comes calling after years of treatment in psychiatric hospitals?

One reader told me Burrows scared him because he had a personal fear that tons of refuse could come down at any minute to crush him into paste. I’ve often wondered where that dread originated.

I thought I’d written an historical mystery thriller, but in the end, I hammered out a work that seriously creeped people out. Fans still tell me, “That was the scariest book I’ve read in years.”

“Why?”

They answer, “Because it could happen.”

Or, “Because I’m deathly afraid of rats.”

And often, “Because I’m claustrophobic. I had to read one chapter a night, then calm myself each time.”

I’ve heard, “I was shocked at the twist.”

And when they say, “Because there could be people like that living amongst us.”

I reply, “There are, and that’s horrifying because it’s real.”

What’s your creep factor?