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So much of the focus of this book seems to be on finding one's way back home. Is this an updated version, in some sense, of the biblical story of the prodigal son?
First
of all,
I
appreciate
the
elevated
comparison.
I only
hope
Doxology
can carry
a fraction
of the
messages of
hope and
redemption
found in
the Holy
Bible.
Readers
will
experience
a certain
amount of
biblical
imagery in
this book,
not really
put
together in
any
particular
order. It
just
permeates
the story.
I’d
be flat-out
lying if
I said
I planned
it that
way. That’s
just the
story that
came out.
Not
quickly,
I’d
like to
add. I
worked and
worked to
craft this
story, for
over 3
years.
I
do see
the
similarities
between
Scooter’s
story, and
that of
the
prodigal
son. When
he returns
from a
long time
away, his
father even
refers to
him as
such.
However, in
the
biblical
story, a
father
gives his
younger son
a share
of what
he would
one day
inherit,
and the
son runs
away to
waste it
on wine,
women and
song, only
to return
when he
is dead
broke and
starving.
Scooter,
conversely,
leaves home
with
nothing and
doesn’t
really want
to return.
He likes
his new
life, as
undignified
as it
may appear.
But he
does have
similarities
to the
prodigal
son—he’s
lost,
aimless,
doesn’t
appreciate
what he
has. So
it’s
an updated
version of
the story,
I guess.
Your characters are very complex and become very real to the reader. How did you find them? Were they based on folks you know?
I guess I just found them in my head. I honestly have no idea where this story came from. All I had when I started was a mental picture of an older man and a younger man, uncle and nephew, waiting in line to get some food in the basement of a church. The nephew, in this picture, had just returned to his hometown for his father’s funeral, after many years away. The uncle was helping him find a piece of himself he thought he had left behind when he left that small town, and had never been back. Other than a couple of night classes at the local university, I have no training in writing. I just happened to have some time—I had sold a business and didn’t have to work too hard for awhile—and I started spending hours and hours and hours of it crafting the story in Doxology. No character is based on anyone I know, but some readers tell me they recognize someone from their family, their hometown.
One of the things I really liked about Doxology is you managed to give small glimpses of the underlying problems, creating an emotional connection for the reader, in spite of never really showing us what happened. It would seem that's a difficult thing to do; many authors never pull it off. Any tips for aspiring authors?
Well thank you for the compliment. The two most important ingredients I needed were time and discipline. Over the course of a dozen drafts, the book gained more and more depth, but it was important to me it not become too long. I ended up with an 80,000 word book but probably wrote 300,000. Who’s going to read a thousand page book by a guy they’ve never heard of? Shorter is often better, anyway, Writing a novel is like cooking a gumbo, it keeps getting further and further distilled, constantly thicker and richer, and like an especially long poem, you just keep getting rid of words you don’t really need. Lots of readers like to do the work of filling in all the blanks. Also, the greatest thing I did, and this doesn’t come free, is pay a professional editor to read for me during the development of the book. I strongly advise this. It costs money, yes, but the advice is a lot better than what you’ll get from your friends or from a reading group.
Are there more stories to be told with these characters? Specifically, do we ever find out if Scooter makes it back? Or is he simply used for contrast to show that some folks never get there.
Scooter would be a good subject for another novel. Whatever he looks like from the outside, he has made a place for himself, and is relatively happy there. It seems he never gets anywhere in his life, and maybe he doesn’t, but some people don’t. Still, it’s hard not to like him. I don’t have any plans to return to him, at this time. I am two drafts into novel number 2, and number 3 is boiling. I have a feeling Doxology will be the only story told about Jody, Vernon and Scooter. If so, I will miss them. But I won’t be surprised if some of the minor characters show up again. I had to cut one of the minor characters in the final draft (her name is Mawmaw), but she immediately made a place for herself in Miracle Run, my second book.
As I recall, the word doxology only appears once in the book near the end. Why did you choose that for the title?
A doxology is a short hymn of praise. I mentioned earlier that all I had when I started was the image of the two men waiting in line at the church. Actually, there is one more thing I had. A feeling. The feeling that permeated the story, from the earliest stages, was a sense of gratitude. I didn’t want to write a religious story per se, I just wanted to write a story about people who feel about life the way I do. They have struggled. They have loved and lost. Still, they recognize something much greater than they are, something well beyond understanding, is looking over them, and they are grateful. So the story wasn’t supposed to be about church or religion, it was supposed to be about people struggling through life, as we all do, and recognizing, at times begrudgingly, the presence of something greater.
