Robert Inman

Novelist, screenwriter and playwright Robert Inman is a native of Elba, Alabama where he began his writing career in junior high school with his hometown weekly newspaper. He left a 31-year career in television journalism in 1996 to devote full time to creative writing.

My Q&A with the author:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

Place has always played a significant role in my storytelling. To a great extent, the setting of the story becomes a character. It influences who the human characters are, why they are where they are, and how they – and the place – interact.

The title Villages goes to the heart of the story. There are two villages: One is a war-blasted town in the Middle East where my central character, 21-year-old Jonas Boulware, is badly wounded performing a heroic act as a combat medic. Then there is the village of Copernicus, the small southern town where Jonas grew up, and to which he returns, altered in body and spirit, to try to get his life back together. Both places have a profound impact on his life, both before and after his traumatic war experience.

In the first draft of the novel, I simply titled it “Copernicus.” But it became clear that Copernicus was only half of the story. So, Villages. The title may be only a hint at the story at first, but it becomes clear quickly what those places are all about.

What’s in a name?

I collect names. I’m always coming across names that interest me, and I tuck them away in my memory until the moment they might suit a character I’m dealing with in a story. There’s nothing particularly unusual about the character names in Villages, but to me, in the writing process, they just seemed to fit. Perhaps the most unusual name is “Lyric.” She’s a down-on-her-luck folksinger who’s passing through Copernicus. Jonas takes her in and falls in love with her. Since I’m also a songwriter, “Lyric” seems just right.

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your novel?

I wasn’t your typical teenage reader. I had the great advantage of a wonderful librarian in the small southern town where I grew up. She took a special interest in me, and plied me with books that were, to put it mildly, a stretch. She had me reading Faulkner and Hemingway when I was 12 years old, and through my teenage years she introduced me to as much truly fine literature as her little library could offer. If my teenage reader self picked up Villages, I think he’d feel at home with it.

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

Over the course of writing six novels, it has worked both ways. My first, Home Fires Burning, grew out of a short story I wrote in graduate school, and I knew from the beginning what the ending would be. It was then a matter of re-inventing the characters and story and getting to that point I already knew. Other work has proceeded from a beginning I imagined, and the job there is to go visit the characters every possible chance and see where they’re leading you.

With Villages, I turned everything on its head. The first draft began with a scene from combat. But as I rewrote, it became clear that that scene belonged at the end of the book. The arc of the story is Jonas’s quest to deal with ghosts from his past, and it’s not until the end that he truly knows who those ghosts are.

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

I believe there is something of me in every character I imagine – otherwise, I couldn’t write their story in an authentic way. As a writer, I’m the product of everything I’ve seen, every word I’ve heard, every place I’ve been, every person I’ve known, every idea I’ve had, including the disturbing ones. The challenge is to let them be their own people, to say and do and think things that surprise me, baffle me, delight me, make me cringe.

Jonas, in Villages, is in many ways most like me – the small-town raising, the dysfunctional family, the need to take care of people. He’s made me laugh, cry, reflect, and feel deep pain and genuine hope.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

First of all, I come from a large, rowdy storytelling southern family. A lot of what I heard around them was truth, but a lot of it was just plain made up. And that was the fun part. They – and my mother reading to me from the time I could hold my head up – gave me the gift of imagination.

Also, I’m a visual person. I had a lengthy career in television journalism, working with both words and pictures to tell stories. And I’ve been able to channel that visual sense into a good career in screenwriting and playwriting. I have to see a scene before I can write it. And then the challenge is to flesh out the scene with a few good words, just enough to trigger the reader’s imagination. If a thousand people read my story, I’ve really written a thousand stories. I trust my readers, and that’s the magic part.

Visit Robert Inman's website.

The Page 69 Test: Villages.

My Book, The Movie: Villages.

--Marshal Zeringue