Ask the Author: Larry Nicholl
Answered Questions (6)
Larry Nicholl
My most recent book is Nadya: The Restoration of a Flying Tiger. It will come out in January. It is based on the experience I had as a nine or ten year old, when I went to my babysitter and a stranger was sitting on the sofa of the living room. I asked him why his face was so messed up. He replied that he had been a pilot in the Flying Tigers and had crashed a lot of times. The story I wrote starts with this experience. I soon realized that he was an alcoholic and had come home to die in his mother's house.
Larry Nicholl
I asked myself: What if, when I was sixteen and decided to leave the Texas Panhandle, I had decided to stay? Or what could have happened that would have prevented me from leaving. I began to imagine alternative lives for myself. Each of my stories is an alternative life for me--what could have been.
Larry Nicholl
I have a pile of manuscripts. I am choosing which ones are worth editing and publishing. Right now, I am working on rewriting a story about and Irish girl who can talk to a Confederate statue that is alive, in the sense that the spirit of the soldier is alive and in the statue. She talks with him about what happened to him in the War Between the States and why he is alive in the statue.
Larry Nicholl
Write about yourself. Don't try to imagine someone else's life. Think about your own life and your own experiences. Write a story based on what you have seen and felt. That's what I like about To Kill a Mockingbird: Harper Lee is Scout and is talking about herself growing up in her hometown in Alabama. My books are about me--growing up in the Texas Panhandle in the 40s, 50s, and 60s.
Larry Nicholl
I get to be a story teller. I know that people write for all sorts of reasons. I write to tell my stories. And I see my stories as parables, in the Biblical sense. Jesus was a lot of things, one of which was that He was a marvelous story teller. It was His way of teaching. And most of the time, He didn’t explain. He left it up to the listeners to decide what the story—the parable—meant. And so each person could take away something different for his or her life.
So I see my novels as long parables. And there is more than one point to each novel. Each reader, I hope, will find something that is meaningful for him or her to take away.
Jesus set his parables in the towns and countryside of where He grew up. I set my stories in the towns and countryside of where I grew up, which is the Panhandle of Texas. But if the story—the parable—is well told, it is universal, that is, it doesn’t matter where the reader grew up.
I’ve reached the age—my seventies—at which I hope I have something worth telling. I’ve seen a lot, done a lot, been a lot of places and met a lot of people. Hopefully, I have learned from all my experiences, and so I have something worth telling people. And my way of telling people is through my novels—my stories, which are actually parables.
So I see my novels as long parables. And there is more than one point to each novel. Each reader, I hope, will find something that is meaningful for him or her to take away.
Jesus set his parables in the towns and countryside of where He grew up. I set my stories in the towns and countryside of where I grew up, which is the Panhandle of Texas. But if the story—the parable—is well told, it is universal, that is, it doesn’t matter where the reader grew up.
I’ve reached the age—my seventies—at which I hope I have something worth telling. I’ve seen a lot, done a lot, been a lot of places and met a lot of people. Hopefully, I have learned from all my experiences, and so I have something worth telling people. And my way of telling people is through my novels—my stories, which are actually parables.
Larry Nicholl
I sit down and start writing about whatever. Once I start writing, the block goes away. I think of something funny or different that just happened to me and write about it. Or I start thinking about clichés. For example, "everybody and his mother." I try to imagine what that means. I get the picture of everybody standing around with his or her mother behind her. When I ask a question, all the mothers start answering first, not letting the person answer me. I laugh and get over my writer's block.
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