Russ Hall's Blog: The Path Most Definitely Taken

Good writing often transports you to a separate reality. While in the comfort of your reading chair you can travel to faraway places, face dangers while your fireplace crackles, and have bullets whiz past your head with little risk at all . . . unless you knock over the glass beside you while ducking.

I love books that take me to places I’ve not been. Colin Cotterill’s Dr. Siri Paiboun books sweep me off to Laos in the 1970s. John Burdett’s SonchaiJitpleecheep series takes me to Bankok darkest night streets.Tarquin’s Hall’s Vish Puri books fill my nose with the scents of Delhi. And Georges Simenon’s Maigret books show me the seamy side of Paris.

I also like books that return me to places I have been, and make me feel that I’m really there. James Lee Burke puts me on the streets of New Orleans. Robert B. Parker and Dennis Lehane share Boston as you rarely see it. Randy Wayne White and James Hall show off the greenest, dankest corners of Florida.

Texas is a place I wanted to share. When I got to Texas from New York City it was nothing like I expected. Where I thought I’d see deserts and cacti I encountered the green rolling hills and limestone cliffs of Texas Hill Country. Those Saguaro cactuses that you often see on books set in Texas are a product of that same misconception. There isn’t a native Saguaro cactus in the state. You have to go to Arizona for that, or a New York publisher.
Using Texas as a setting was a chance to both set the record straight and show off the interesting aspects of the place in the context of crime novels that drag the reader from the seamiest corners to the loftiest heights. From the brightly lit city of Austin to the backwoods rural neighborhoods where you can still find gun racks on the back windows of trucks. There is much to see, hear, smell, and taste in Texas, and it is, for many readers, that someplace else that is faraway and a fresh experience. The important part is how much to share as a backdrop for lively action and complex characters.

Stephen King put it well in his book, On Writing, A Memoir of the Craft, when he said, “Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but must finish in the reader’s.” Not too little. Not too much. Just enough detail for the reader to see and feel in his or her head so the story becomes part of the reader’s experience and discovery.

That said, Texas has a lot to offer as a setting for gritty tales. In A Turtle Roars in Texas I draw on the yin and yang of miles of highways for year-round travel by good bikers, but room for bad biker gangs too. There is an organic farm and there are the nearby drug cartels in Mexico. There are beautiful hills and dales in the hill country, but there are prickly stickers and sharp edges on many plants, the reason cowboys wore chaps.

There are folks with a fierce sense of the Southern code of honor as well as plenty of people who come from a rough and tumble background. There are strings of man-made lakes and the mention of the many caves in the state may come up.

A reader can enjoy the beauty and splendor of all Texas has to offer as well as getting a taste of the harsh realities of the drug territory battles happening right under that pretty surface. Life can sneak up and be mean to an individual in a place like that.

So, retired sheriff’s department detective Al Quinn, who is old enough some think him a turtle, may be fishing one day and fighting for his life and the lives of those he loves the next. All in a setting as big as Texas.

People coming early to writing often ask, “Where will I get my ideas? What will motivate me as I write?”
Slightly more experienced writers (and even they are always learning, if they’re good) may say that there is an easy answer, but it can tend to sound magical or mystic at first. I’m talking about the “creative experience.”
No matter what you write, whether story, novel, song, or poem, you’re going to eventually leave some of yourself on the page. It doesn’t matter how you start out, if you stay at your writing you will start putting things that you think about and that matter to you on the page. You’ll go back later and see that it is often the good stuff in the story, because you felt it and imbued it with emotion.
Now I like to start a story with a point of tension, one that lets characters have an arena to show the reader something about themselves. I have read about Mexican cartel violence in the news, getting more brutal and closer to where I live, and I worry about how a local drought may lead to heightened chances of huge wildfires, again happening closer to where I live. I feel emotional about these things, so I use them. They pop into the book because I’m thinking about them. They interest me, and they should interest readers.
Then I need to think about characters in this setting. I recently retired and really enjoy my solitary times alone. I’ve lived by myself for quite a while and am used to it, and uncomfortable out of it. So I ask myself, “How would I feel if that got disturbed? If someone, or even more than one person, were thrust into that space?” I feel an emotion about that, so I use it.
In the Al Quinn series, I get to draw on a setting I like, which is peaceful but could be threatened. I got to draw on personal characteristics. I do feed the deer that crowd around my front office window each morning, I do fish, and I play chess by myself (sad to admit that last one).
We all of us like to feel comfortable and protected, which is why there is nothing cozier than reading an action-filled book full of danger while sitting in a favorite chair at home. When something threatens us, when we are yanked out of our comfort zones, and when we are suddenly pulled into danger where we are way over our heads, we can feel strong emotions.
I try to use that in every way possible, the way I feel presented in a way with which the reader can resonate.
As you enter the process of writing your story, or poem for that matter, you may start with one sense of what you’re writing and find, as you draw more and more upon your experiences, values, interests, ambitions that you are weaving together characters who matter, a setting the helps drive your story, and raising issues about which you feel strongly.
In the process of writing, you will also know more and more about your characters and their dilemmas, and that will help the story stay engaging as you create complex people and situations.
I’m a believer that to some extent I have to become at least part of each character, understand how everything feels from his or her perspective. In my case, it’s easier to understand some of the issues and aspects of male characters. But stretching hard to understand how I would feel from the female point of view is invaluable in making dialogue that matters in every line.
This where the “trust me” part comes in. Go ahead and leap into that story with whatever germ it takes to get you going—something you heard in the media or at the hair salon. Then let your inner self loose as you write. Ride the creative experience by letting pieces of yourself happen on the page. Once you get used to it, the process won’t seem mysterious at all. It’s just how writing often works.

When I first moved to Austin, TX, from New York City. I found the people friendlier on the face of it than those I’d left behind in Manhattan, but also different. I’d been an editor sent to Texas by Harper & Row (now HarperCollins) to do some rite-of-passage sales work. But it wasn’t long before I called New York and told them, “I’m not coming back, y’all.” I loved Texas and still live here. I started right away letting a little twang and drawl show in my voice and I worked that into my writing as well.
It was that initial splash into the cold water of the differences that turned me into something of an anthropologist, observing and comparing the stark differences between the cultures, and later using that sort of thrill of newness to color the settings of novels. I wanted to share that early excitement with readers.
The setting of a book needs to support and help drive the action and character development of a novel. With Texas the choice of backdrop is vast, from the flat desert Southwest in the state, to the mountains of Big Bend, to the tall piney woods of Eastern Texas ranging from Nacogdoches to Houston, to the flat cotton fields of the panhandle, to the rolling, curvy hill country near Austin where the novel To Hell and Gone in Texas takes place. But it is the people who spice and flavor any setting.
As a newbie to Texas, I drove around with my eyes open and my jaw at times dropped. From the liberal pocket of Austin I had only to drive in any direction in those days to start seeing pickup trucks with gun racks in the back windows. The law said it was okay then to have an open container in a vehicle and many considered it a right to have a beer in one hand while driving.
Whole Foods then was a hippy-dippy communal grocery on South Lamar where everyone wore tie-dyed shirts and I didn’t see a bra for the first five years. How those times have changed! And the festivals were bold mixes of people, like those who celebrated chili cook-offs. But no one dared to use beans in a contest. In fact, that’s how you could insult someone. “I’ll bet that low-life puts beans in his chili.” And, yes, it was “he,” since only men could be the cooks in such contests.
At times it was hard to sort through what were normal customs and what were not. On a trip to San Angelo once I stopped at a convenience store in the middle of bumfart nowhere and a guy came out of the store drinking from a can of cold gravy. Turns out, that was not normal. Though warm biscuits and gravy is an everyday breakfast. Chicken-fried steaks were ubiquitous as well. But at the Texas State Fair there were deep-frying Snickers bars, cotton candy, and all manner of things, And folks, that’s just not right no matter what state.
An aspect I grew to like was that, when driving on a country two-lane road, the driver of an oncoming truck would wave, and I would wave back. Now, how nice is that? If the vehicle in your lane, say an old truck or tractor, was going slow, the driver would almost always pull over onto the shoulder to let you past. Then you were supposed to wave and he would wave back. If you just wanted to go slower and look at all the wildflowers, and Spring is a surprising circus of them, then you can pull over and trade waves—common courtesy then, but now easing out of fashion with the newcomers.
People were so darn friendly it made me giddy at first. While looking around on Austin’s 6th Street one morning (that’s the city’s version of New Orleans’s Bourbon Street) I saw a big old boy getting out of his pickup truck. The interesting bit was that on the back of his belt it said: Jim Bob.” Imagine going about with a name label like that, as if life was a constant convention. When he turned around I said, “Jim Bob, how’ve you been?”
He looked at me closely as he shook my hand and said, “Fine. Fine.” He was thinking, no doubt, that he didn’t know me from Adam’s house cat, but maybe he’d been drunk when we met. I knew his name, after all.
“How’s the family?” I asked, since just about everybody has one.
“Fine. Fine.”
This went on for a spell until he pried himself loose and went about his day, still shaking his head.
The range of characters varied, ripe picking for a writer. The brakes went out on my car once out in the middle of nowhere, which is easier to find than you think in a state this big. I drifted into the parking lot of an unpainted building that turned out to be a mechanic’s shop. I asked the fellow who came out if he could fix the car, and he said that reckoned he might could do just that. “Might could” is common speech, as is “fixin’ to go yonder.” As he spoke, though, I found myself hypnotized by the fact that he had only one tooth in his head. It was a solitary top front tooth that was green and had eroded in the middle until it had a waist. I could NOT take my eyes off that tooth. I tried to make myself, the way you do if someone’s showing too much cleavage, but I wasn’t strong enough. I stared and stared, thinking all the time, “Do NOT say anything about the tooth. Don’t say, ‘That’s the tooth of it’ or anything of the like.” I was mesmerized. Then I began to think of a pimento cheese sandwich on white bread with one bite out of it, and the bite mark showing the imprint of that lone tooth. I tell you, it about killed me to keep my mouth shut. And I haven’t used this fellow in any book I’ve written yet.
Texans also have fussy ways about how town names are pronounced. If you don’t catch on, they have phrases like, “It’s Burnet, dern it, learn it.” Carol Burnet had best never visit. And the town of Tow is pronounced to rhyme with “now.” I don’t know what they’ll do if they ever get a tow truck. There is much to be learned from the way people pronounce the simple word “oil.” You can detect geographical origin within the state as times depending on whether you hear: “earl,” “ol,” or “oh-well.” I’m told the young ladies of Dallas are encouraged to ask suitors, “Does your daddy have any oh-well on his spread.” (Spread means property or ranch, and ranch is not the dressing.) I’m not sure if that Dallas yarn is true or apocryphal, like the saying, “Contrary to popular belief, armadillos aren’t born dead beside the road.”
The other aspects useful to an anthropologist of an author are the physical ones. As I said, anyone thinking of Texas as being flat as a fritter everywhere is due for a surprise. Anyone hoping to see a saguaro cactus is in for another surprise. There isn’t a single native one in the state, though I have yet to learn of a New York publisher that hasn’t put one on the cover of a book set in Texas. Another surprise is that there is only one natural lake in Texas and it shares the border with Louisiana. ALL other lakes are man-made. And we have droughts, and I have put those to good use in books.
The critters round out the spice one can sprinkle into a book. From hand-sized furry brown tarantulas, scorpions, fire ants, mountain lions, to coyotes there are many colorful natives to choose from. I once got out of the car near a bridge over a long wash where I had actually seen some water. Seeing water in a West Texas river is not common. That’s why they are called washes or draws and only get business during floods when the rare rain hits the hard ground. I almost stepped on a squashed armadillo while getting out. It had been run over so many times it was the size of a manhole cover and no thicker than a dime and was going to have to be buried in a pizza box. Down closer to the water I wove through mesquite trees, mostly dead, and went past huge stands of prickly pear cactus covered in yellow blooms. I heard a rattle, and stopped. I thought, “Rattlesnake!” I looked down. The noise came from an enormous grasshopper. I’m talking biblical pestilence big. I took a couple more steps, and heard a rattle. I looked down. Rattlesnake! Its head was three inches from my shoe. The next thing I recall I was back at the car, already in the driver’s seat, may have even stepped on the squashed armadillo on the way in, or flown over the top of it. When I got my breath back to normal I drove away from there, returning a wave from an oncoming truck as I did.
The tool box is full of colorful details from a state like Texas, or any state. The trick is having fresh eyes and savoring everything the way a reader might.