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.