By John Ramsey Miller

http://www.johnramseymiller.com

Eudora Welty once said, “Every story would be another story, and unrecognizable if it took up its characters and plot and happened somewhere else… Fiction depends for its life on place. Place is the crossroads of circumstance, the proving ground of, What happened? Who’s here? Who’s coming?…”

A great story and solid characters mean nothing if they are walking around in a territory unknown to a reader. Successful authors know that setting is as important to a story as any of the characters. We have the characters, their conflicts and dilemmas, and all else is setting. Setting adds texture and our readers should feel as though they are right there with our characters. What are the characters seeing? What are they smelling? How does their environment feel? What are the characters hearing? Is the sun shining? Is it hot or cold, wet or muggy? Is the sun out, the light failing, or is it as dark out as six inches up a bull’s butt? Are the tall weeds these characters are running through infested with chiggers or poison ivy?

In James Lee Burke’s Dave Robicheaux novels his bait shop is so real you can almost hear the air pump and smell the minnow tank. You can feel the thick heat in the Louisiana air and see the ceiling fan as it stirs it. When he is sitting in a bar, you can smell the bourbon and see the condensation on the glass in front of old Dave.

Settings influence action. Nothing gets a reader’s blood flowing like a chase in a place where there’s no chance of outside interference. When the pursuer knows the territory and the victim doesn’t it adds suspense.

Writers should know enough about a place to describe it accurately, even if it’s made up from whole cloth. A made-up location should be taken from a real one the writer knows intimately and can convey. If you can see it, and you had better have it in your mind so it is real to you, you have to make your reader see it as well. You should take the time to describe the book’s settings in enough detail for the readers to have a clear idea of where the characters are and what is going on. Many authors, depending on style, leave a lot of details up to the reader’s imagination, while others define the setting so there is no guessing or imagining.

Your settings should be of interest to the readers. I have set books in cities and in swamps and in each I bring the setting in so the reader will see how the setting affects the characters and the plot. I think of locations as characters, and the feel of them as texture. In the way the choice of a hat can say more about a character than two paragraphs of description, something a character says or feels about the environment can set a scene adequately in very few words.

I stick to locations I am familiar enough with to make them seem real. I do occasionally set a chapter in a place I’ve never been, like a jungle in South America, or most recently Route Irish in Baghdad, but those are isolated instances where I need an action to take place that impacts my story. A jungle is easy since I lived in Miami. Iraq was also easy since I’ve all seen it on my TV screen over and over for the past few years. That is okay for the way the place looks, but not good enough. Since my son was in Iraq with the Marine Corps, I talked to him to get his impressions––about how the country felt and smelled to him, especially at night when my scene took place.

The best writers place us right next to the characters. There are authors who can do a great job with the other elements necessary to a successful work of fiction, but fail to bring in the setting to their advantage. In order for a story to involve a reader effectively and to satisfy them, setting has to become one of the major characters.

Who among your favorite authors uses setting most effectively?

By John Ramsey Miller

We have been talking about research this week on these blogs and I’m going to touch on how life provides the majority of research that finds its way into our work. Life as our main source of material, and the material that matters most on our pages.

As I get older my major characters grow older with me because I understand aging and how older people relate to the world, and how the world affects them. For instance, I don’t mind change as long as things remain the same. But I also think I see younger characters more clearly, and especially how they relate to older characters, and how older characters see them. Somebody once told me that young writers depend more on style and older writers more on substance. We write what we know, and what we get to know is what life does to people, and how they get through it.

I am writing a book now about how an older man meets his teenage granddaughter for the first time and it changes his life in rather dramatic ways. I won’t go into details, but it is about how their relationship forms and evolves, and how the trials they are subjected to attach them to each other. In writing, I am drawing on my relationship with my granddaughter who is fourteen. She was seven when I first met her, and I was just a stranger who’d been thrown into her life. Mostly I bored her, until I taught her something useful that she was interested in––shooting guns. Now she’s a crackerjack shot, and she is so because I took the time to teach her gun safety and the relationship between her eyes, the gun’s barrel and the target. I doubt she’ll ever do more than shoot targets, and she may not do that given the strong draw of her other interests like texting her friends, boys, and fashion, which does not these days seem to include Eye protection, Beretta shooting jackets, lace-up boots, and Carhardt canvas pants. So it goes. I just wanted her to be able to protect herself, but in the process we bonded. I used that relationship in my WIP (work in progress), but I changed shooting to fishing. That was my research.

Last weekend we had chicks born in our new incubator, and I can’t tell you how amazing, delightful and flat wonderful it was to see the little feathered creatures fighting their way out of their hard shells. Nature. Nothing like it. Two of the Silky chicks had hip dysplasia, and couldn’t stand because their legs were at right angles. One of my nieces and one of my granddaughters had the same problem and they wore a brace for months after they were born to correct the angle of their legs. My wife went on a chicken board and discovered this happens sometimes when the hatchlings are crowded and can’t stand up just after they are born. And you can’t help them by opening the incubator to make room by removing the broken shells because opening it threatens the yet to be born by lowering the humidity. Lowering the humidity means the yet-to- be hatched could stick to their shells and perish. From the experience of other people who’d faced the problem, and after it was safe to do so, my wife and I took band-aids, cut long thin strips, and taped their legs at the correct angles so they could stand and walk. That came from my wife’s research. We’re just talking about fifty-cent chickens, and it was either splinting or taking a sharp pair of scissors to their necks. Not worth the effort, most chicken growers would say. But we had seen them fighting to become part of this world for the short time God grants a chicken. The mechanical interference proved successful, because we were willing to try it. I can kill game, and I do, but I love life and, while that’s quite a contradiction, so much of life is just that. Left to nature’s whims and solutions, the chicks would have starved to death or been pecked to death by the healthy chicks. Nature doesn’t well tolerate weakness or difference and animals. It culls its mistakes and accidents. And animals, like humans, can be cruel and prejudiced against anything different.

Humans are complex creatures, and we will likely never understand why we are so intolerant of people who are not just like we are. A friend of mine says that humans are just killer monkeys with clothes on, and maybe he’s right. It often seems like it. But when killer monkeys take the time and energy to save a pair of tiny birds, it gives me hope––not only for my own salvation, but for yours as well. So that’s more material for another time and another blank page.

Research is to good writing as Cool Whip is to sliced strawberries. You can go without the topping, but its infinitely more satisfying with it. While we all go to the internet [or other reference material] when looking to make our stories accurate (in the fact department), our human behaviors mostly come from our observations and not from a link to Psychology Today or Abnormal Psychology Tomorrow.

By John Ramsey Miller

I am a writer, but sometimes I fantasize about other occupations. This happens usually when I’m having a hard time with an idea for a book, or when I’m sure the books aren’t doing what the publisher or seller expected them to do. What else would I do? I’m a decent carpenter. I can paint a wall. I can run pipes and put in a bathroom from scratch. I can wire outlets. With a few hours of instruction I could probably do brain surgery. What I can’t be is a salesman. When I was in high school, I sold books to parents in rural West Virginia for their children. I’d be in people’s living rooms where the parents were worried about getting enough food for their kids to fill their stomachs and there I was trying to sell them books for kids to read while their bellies growled. I had learned to close wives before their husbands came home and freaked out that they’d given me the twenty-dollar deposit. It broke my heart and made me feel like I had the social conscience of Darth Vader. I decided it was a bad thing to take advantage of people with a prepared pitch cleverly designed so they couldn’t refuse without feeling like they were the worst parents since Ma Barker. I lasted two weeks.

I know I could probably make more money painting walls, and certainly if I performed a few brain surgeries if I could understand the instruction. But here’s the thing. The other day I wrote from eight AM until after five PM without taking more than 30 minutes away from the computer. I was outlining three chapters ahead as I wrote. It is days like that that keep me at this trade or craft or folly or whatever the hell it is. When I can walk into my book and feel the characters and the story I forget about the real world. It’s better than being on a vacation at the beach and it more than makes up for all those days when I can’t decide where I should go next or what I’ll do when I get there.

We authors talk a lot about being in the Zone, but getting there is illusive, and the bitch is that you can spend a day zooming and wake up the next day and fight to get back in again, and not be able to do it. It can’t be taught, it just happens. Or maybe all craftsmen can find that zone. Today I know I can’t get back into it because I have to go to the dentist, then meet a friend who’s coming by and I know it will be tomorrow before I can be alone to attempt to climb into the story again, find hopefully find the sweet spot and enter the Zone. We all know it’s better than any drug. How often are you writing and find yourself getting emotional, choking up, as the words hit the screen? How much higher than that can you get? What can be more rewarding? Okay, your wedding day, maybe watching a child come into the world, take their first steps, coming out of gibberish and calling you Daddy for the first time, or seeing your first book on a shelf in a store, or having a doctor tell you your spouse is cancer free is a better high. Yes, but short of that life-altering experience, …nothing.

So how often do you find yourself in the Zone? Can you make it happen by force of will, or does it just happen?

By John Ramsey Miller

I come from a town most people would describe as a slow, sleepy Mississippi Delta backwater. Cleveland, Mississippi is where I lived for six years, and I consider it my home town because those were my high-school years and I am connected to the people I knew there. Thomas Harris spent time living there as a young man, and has relatives there still. The town library was named for the Carpenter family whose members died from asphyxiation when their heating system malfunctioned and filled the house with smoke. The home had just been renovated and the windows painted shut. One of the bodies was found at a window and there were scratch marks …well I won’t delve into details. This week a friend of mine from high school wrote me a Facebook note that suggested that Harris modeled Hannibal Lechter on a man that was caught in our old town with a collection of human heads and human jerky in his pockets.

This took place in the late thirties and I’m sure Harris heard this story about the grave-robbing, head-collecting, human meat-eating Mr. Robinson. Mr. Robinson, an African/ American also murdered the entire Turner family, which incidentally happened to be Scot/Irish and cut an embryo from the murdered woman, whose body provided him with jerky. He was caught and admitted the killings, but said the heads he had accumulated were trophies from his grave robbing, not murders. Although it was reported in the media that he was shot while trying to escape, I believe the actual story is that he was de-celled and hanged while the town looked on, perhaps shot in the shoulder as he hung, and this was witnessed by an audience of angry, outraged individuals.

I suppose Thomas Harris may have given this murdering drifter a medical/ psychiatric degree, had him love fine things, and listen to opera while he drank rare wines and dined on the finer cuts of corpse meat. I don’t know Thomas personally, but it may have been Robinson and not Ed Gein he modeled Dr. Lechter’s cannibalism on. It was very likely Mr. Gein that inspired the body-skin wearing tailor, Jame “Buffalo Bill” Gumb, in Silence of the Lambs.

There were also three boys killed in nearby Rosedale, MS, whose killer and mutilator was never caught. That happened before I moved there, but was something parents had in the backs of their minds when we guys wanted to go camping. Even small towns have these stories of mayhem and murder, and retribution and justice dealt by private citizens outside courtrooms. When Mrs. Ringold killed her doctor husband with a shotgun one night after he’d beaten her, he was acquitted because the lawyer told the all male jury that it had been an accidental shooting. When the prosecutor brought up the fact that she had shot him more than once using a pump shotgun, Mrs. Ringold’s attorney (who later became Governor) argued that as a woman she was unfamiliar with the workings of shotguns and in her confusion and fright and horror she had reflexively pumped the shotgun three times, hitting him all three times. Released, she moved away, but a lot of people sympathized with her.

When I was very young we lived in the Methodist parsonage in Starkville, Mississippi and it was located across the street from a funeral home and the hospital was located within a hundred yards of us. The mortician had two sons I made friends with, and their father also had the town’s ambulance for emergencies. When he would take the ambulance out, he would either bring a corpse or two back to the funeral home or to the emergency room for repairs. We would wait for the siren, if there were survivors, we’d rush to the hospital’s loading dock to see what he had on a gurney, and if there was no siren, we’d be waiting at the funeral home for the delivery there. I can’t tell you how many maimed and dead people I saw, or how many times we laid ourselves in the grass outside the basement windows of the embalming theater and watch through the window, a young and impressionable audience, as Mr. Barry did his work. More than once I had known the corpses he worked on. I don’t know if he saw us, but if he did he never ran us off. He also had a notorious drinking problem, and lost his business when he was driving intoxicated and wrecked the ambulance depositing a battered casket and its corpse in the middle of the highway outside Jackson.

All of these stories and things I witnessed helped forge my imagination and introduced me to violence, death, justice, tragedy, and the heartbreak associated with them. I wouldn’t change a thing about my formative years, because it all contributed to bending me into the writer I am. I also learned about human nature and the complexities of the social structure and how good people can participate in bad things, and do surprising things for complex reasons. I grew up in the Civil Rights era, but that is a different blog for another time, although it is related when it comes to witnessing human complexities and contradictions.

We become who we are based on our experiences and we bring ourselves into everything we write, and how we see everything. I write about evil and the battle when good brings right to the table. In my stories good always wins over evil, not matter the odds. But life is not always so cut and dried, and evil often triumphs, and evil people often win the day in real life, if rarely in fiction. Our readers don’t want to see evil win, but to see good people facing seemingly insurmountable odds and both triumphant, whole, and happy at the end of their trial or quest. Our readers don’t need to know what the experiences were that made us become storytellers who seem to know violence and evil. They just want us to use our imaginations and experiences to make this battle between sides seem real, and to leave them feeling hopeful that they too can surmount the odds against them and prevail. As long as I can do so, I’ll do my best to accomplish that and leave the readers entertained, satisfied and hopeful.

John Ramsey Miller

Last weekend Susan and I went to Fairfax, VA to visit good friends. We went to a casino with John and Joy Gilstrap. We played blackjack. I drank Scotch. Starting with a check for $25,000.00, I found a table and the four of us began gambling. I soon bored with wagering $1,000.00 a hand because I was winning more than I was losing, so I quickly moved to bets of two and then three thousand a hand, but soon went to $5,000.00 a hand. Somehow I lost most of the money in thirty minutes.

When I was down to my last three thousand, I went to the roulette wheel and started betting color, even or odd and some other combinations––never numbers. After I’d picked up fifteen thousand dollars, I went back to blackjack, and before I stopped I was betting 75,000.00 a hand and doubling up. When I finally stopped and cashed in, I’d won one-point-four million dollars. I handed the winnings over to Joy Gilstrap. I mean she did stake me to the original $25,000.00 and we were her guests. And we all won, I just won more because I have a devil-may-care attitude about money, especially money in the form of chips, backed not by cash, or gold, but by thin air.

While the casino was a country club ballroom in Arlington and the casino dealers were novices. My dealer had clearly never dealt Blackjack before and barely had a grasp on the rules. In fact he’d never before played poker. Sometimes he paid off nineteen when he’d won with a twenty-one. He paid any twenty-one double. He paid ties. He couldn’t count. In fact any pit boss sober enough to be breathing would have hit him over the head with a bottle. So it was no surprise that I won, my wife won, and John and Joy won as well.

Sometimes the deck is stacked against you, and sometimes you just can’t lose. Winning… well, there’s no feeling its match.

I wish I could write like I played Blackjack last weekend, but even without the gaming, spending time with people you enjoy and care about is what life ought to boil down to. This weekend I’m off to the Mississippi Delta to a wedding. I sure hope it’s half as much fun as gambling with a rotten dealer and good company, but I doubt it will be.

By John Ramsey Miller

We need our fans and readers because they buy our books and not just because without their purchases we’d be negatively impacted financially. A lot of authors say they only owe their readers the best book they can write and nothing else. To a lot of authors, a book sale is merely an arm’s length business transaction. Other authors go out of their way to get close to their fans, surrounding themselves with their readers at every opportunity. I know some authors who see their fan clubs as being their immediate family. And some authors will go out of their way to avoid having their fans be able to get in touch with them.

I appreciate my readers and the fans of my books. Fans are readers who read every book I write. I’d love to have a few million fans who couldn’t live without my next book. The majority of the e-mails I get from readers say they enjoyed one of my books, or are asking when a new book is coming out. I can and do answer every e-mail I get. I guess a lot of authors are afraid they’ll get so many e-mails they can’t address them all without spending hours doing so, that they make themselves very difficult to get in touch with.

See, I think being reasonably accessible to readers and fans is good for one’s career. I don’t see my readers as nuisances, instead as individuals worthy of my attention.

Web sites are sales tools, and they should promote authors, but the best ones do more than that. I think a writer’s web site should have a way for readers to contact the author. Not having that feature seems arrogant to me. I think some authors see being hard to get in touch with creates a mystique, but I don’t think it does. I always smile at the way some authors listed in the “members registries” of professional organizations have their agents phone number as the way to contact them, which I think is a waste of an agent’s time. I guess if you are making your agent enough money they might be happy to become your answering service. My agent would not be at all amused.

Every very, very, busy author I know has a private e-mail address and a business e-mail address. I have four e-mail addresses. One I’ve had for fifteen years and is my “private” box. I have one connected to my web site, which goes directly into my private site. I have another one for my corporation, Burning Rabbit, LLC., and I have a G-mail one for getting into this blog site. I check e-mails when I’m at the computer. I give anybody reading this blog permission to drop me an e-mail any time they like. It may take time to respond, if I’m busy, but I will reply.

I have a busy life aside from writing, and a wonderful family and good friends, dogs and chickens all of which require time. But I want my readers to be able to at least send me messages, to ask me questions related to my books or about writing in general.

Although I might not “owe” a reader anything beyond my book, I think communicating with the people who invest time and money in my stories, and go to the trouble to write me a note is the least I can do. Just don’t come to my house without e-mailing ahead, or better yet, calling. I’m in the book.