I was born in rural Shelby County, in East Texas, in the 1940s, a time of rigid segregation. Parking in my hometown of 715 people was segregated by race and I went to a separate school where books and desks were hand-me-downs from the town’s white school. The first new textbook I ever laid hands on was a physics textbook in high school when the school district included physics for the first time and had to buy a sufficient quantity for both schools.
After graduating from high school in 1962, too poor to attend college and refusing to accept the employment available to black people in East Texas at the time, I joined the United States Army to see the world that I’d been introduced to through crinkled pages of old National Geographic magazines.
In the ensuing fifty-plus years, I rose from the poverty of a small farming town to prosperity, from tending the pigs on our small farm to meeting with kings in their palaces and presidents in their state houses.
Thanks to the urging of my daughter, Denise Ray-Wickersham, I have finally put down stories from my life in written form—stories that I bored her and her brother with when they were growing up and her children with during the past few years.
I Believe I Can Touch the Sky: Stories From My Life is not your usual memoir. The focus is not really on me, but on the incidents and events that impacted on me in my life. Short and to the point, much like the novelettes I write, it is a series of stories that stretch back over seven decades. Stories about the famous and infamous, the well-known and the unknown. It is a story of the persistence and patience of a young boy who refused to accept that the pine-covered clay hills were all there was to the world, or that he was limited to what other people said he could do because of the color of his skin.
Available in hardcover, paperback, and Kindle version on Amazon. Get your copy today:
Check the following link for an interview I did for Dusty Saddle Publishing, an imprint of DS Productions. Tells all about how I got into writing and my writing techniques.
Today, we have an interview with Charles Ray. Charles has been writing fiction since his teens, and actually won a national short story writing contest sponsored by his Sunday school magazine. He has done articles, cartoons, reviews, and photography for a number of publications in Asia, Africa, and America. He writes in several genres: mystery, fantasy, urban fantasy, and humor, in addition to non-fiction. His favorite happens to be mystery. Charles is a very experienced author and has a lot to say about his work, so without further delay we present, an interview with Charles Ray.
Where did you get the idea for your characters? Was it based on any personal experience?
I had this idea for a story about a samurai who came to America and got involved in adventures with a cowboy. When I was asked to do a Western horror story, after running a number of plots through my mind, I had this epiphany. What if there was an isolated area—like the Dakota badlands—where a few dinosaurs had survived but were cut off from civilization, but an earthquake or some other natural disaster removed the barriers? Then, I thought, who would be most capable of dealing with these monsters? Well, what about a samurai who comes from a culture that believes in dragons? It wasn’t based on personal experience, but as how many of my characters and plots get started – I sit somewhere in a corner and start asking myself, what if(?) and then take the craziest question that comes to mind and start writing.
What got you interested in becoming an author?
When I was young, I was something of a recluse. I preferred books to dealing with people and spent a lot of time making up stories. When I was twelve or thirteen, my English teacher talked me into entering a Sunday school magazine short story contest, and my story won first place. Ever since, I’ve aspired to be an author. For years, from the early 1960s until 2008, I wrote newspaper and magazine articles, and the occasional poem for publication. My first book, which wasn’t even fiction, was published in 2008. I published my first fiction, a mystery, in 2010, independently because of the bad experience I had had with the publisher of my first two nonfiction books. I began branching out shortly afterwards and have done urban fantasy, traditional fantasy, and children’s books. I did some historical fiction that because of the period also qualified as Westerns, which led to doing a series on the Buffalo Soldiers and a series of books about Bass Reeves, one of the first African-American deputy U.S. marshals west of the Mississippi. That eventually became a focus on writing Westerns. I was, as I said before, asked to write a Western horror story, and since I had not done horror before took it on as a challenge.
When you start writing your story, do you plan to write it into a series of books or did you want to write just one?
Sometimes when I start a book I have it in mind to do a series, as was the case with my Caleb Johnson Mountain Man series. At other times, I only have the single story in mind. When I started ‘The Awakening of Dragons,’ that was the case, but as I neared the end, I saw the potential for at least one or two more stories with the same main character, so I ended it on a kind of cliff hanger. Not the unresolved issue kind of cliff hanger, but the kind where something happens that makes a reader wonder if there’s more to come.
What is the best cure for writer’s block?
Writing every day, even if it’s just impressions of the weather or making journal entries, is the way I avoid writer’s block. Another is to have more than one writing project going at a time. That way, when you’re having trouble coming up with that next bit of dialogue or narrative, or you can’t figure out what to do about a certain plot twist, you can move to a fresh story and work on it for a while. I find this often helps me get past problems with a story. The main thing, though, is to write, write, and write some more.
What do you do to pass the time when you’re not writing? Do these hobbies influence your writing in any way?
I have a full menu of things to do. I spend time with my grandchildren, who also provide me inspiration for some of my stories or for the weekly column I write for a newspaper in the Philippines. I keep a camera with me wherever I go, and take tons of photos, some of which I have used in my nonfiction books, and I like painting and drawing. I was once an editorial cartoonist for a newspaper in North Carolina and did covers and cartoons for magazines in the 1970s. Both photography and art give me ideas for stories. For example, I love photographing butterflies and the sight of two butterflies fighting in midair gave me the idea for a couple of stories I’ve done. Nature photography is my favorite and is the inspiration for a short story I’m currently writing for a special volume planned soon where I merge a love of nature with the life of a mountain man to try and show what motivates a person to become a mountain man in the first place.
Do you ever get tired of writing in the same genre?
Since I don’t write in just one genre, that problem never arises. I only write in the genres that I read, too. For example, I tried reading a romance novel once and couldn’t get past the third page, so I have never even tried to write in that genre.
Would you ever be opposed to turning one of your books into a movie if a studio were to ask you?
Are you kidding? I would love to have not just one, but some of my books turned into movies. That way I could reach an even bigger audience.
Do you mix any commentary about the world into your books, like the state of the world, commentary on capitalism, politics, etc.?
Not explicitly. I do have a thing about bullying, and many of my books will include a bully who gets his comeuppance, but I never lecture; I just show the bullying, show people getting tired of it and how they deal with it. I figure that people who hate bullies as much as I do will get the message and any bullies who accidentally happen to pick up that particular book will pretty quickly stop reading. I do try to show a diversity in characters—gender, ethnicity, and the like—and show how a wide variety of people have played a part in history, but again I never preach or lecture. I try to be historically accurate, but do not let that stand in the way of telling a good story. As an example, I once wrote a story about a ten-year-old and his family moving west. It wasn’t a bestseller but did enjoy modest sales. One reviewer, though, hated it because she didn’t think a ten-year-old could do some of the things I had my main character doing. The problem with her thinking was she was basing it on what kids can do today, rather than a time when you had to take on adult responsibilities early in life.
If you were to leave any of your novels open-ended, do you like hearing fan feedback on what they think either the ending means or what happened after the ending? Or would you prefer they just take the story as it is?
Other than leaving teasers at the end of the mysteries, and now the horror novels, I don’t really leave stories open-ended. Having said that, I have no objections to a fan giving me ideas for what happens next. I once did a short story based on a prompt and posted it on a short story site. A few readers expressed dismay that I had killed my main character at the end of the story and one pleaded with me to figure a way to resurrect him. As it turned out, I had ended the story with a shotgun blast through a door behind which the character was standing, so it was an easy matter to have the door absorb most of the pellets and him just getting a few just under the skin. Painful but not fatal. That resulted in a series of ten short stories that were the most widely read on that site until it went out of business. I don’t do too many short stories anymore, except for the occasional anthology. They’re much harder to write than a novel, but when it’s done right can be quite satisfying.
What’s next for you? Do you have a new book in the works or any other projects you’d like people to know of and get excited about?
I plan to do a few more Western horrors, have, in fact, already written a second—different character and plot—and I’m concentrating on my two most popular characters for a while. I wrapped up two series, at least for a while. Last year I did a mystery with a new private detective, a young version of a long-running series and a kind of follow-on that served to wrap up the original series. I’m toying with the idea of doing a few more with this new character and seeing where it goes. Other than that, for the next year at least, I will be focusing on expanding my popular characters.
I would like to thank Charles for taking the time to conduct this interview. We greatly appreciate the time taken out of his busy schedule talk with us and we hope that this was an interesting look into one of our many esteemed authors. Thank you for reading, and thank you again, Charles, for doing this interview.
Below is a link from Nick Wale’s ‘Novel Ideas’, talking about my two recent Mountain Man books, which have made it up into Amazon’s Top 10 Western Novels for much of the past week or two.
Good fiction needs a good plot and needs to be written
in an active voice that pulls the reader into the story. But, even more
importantly, it needs characters that readers can identify with—and, not always
in a positive way. The good guys need to be someone the reader can sympathize
with and cheer for, and the villains need to be . . . villainous.
But, just creating the stereotypical hero or villain
is not enough. Your good guy has to have faults if he or she is to be
believable—not many of us are Mother Theresa—and, even the evilest villain was
once a bouncing baby, probably loved by his or her mother.
So, how do you go about creating fully-formed, three
dimensional characters that your reader can believe in? You might try what I do – go against type.
How do you do this? Allow me to explain.
When I started my Al Pennyback mystery series, I made the character a military veteran who left the army after the death of his wife and son in an auto accident, and became a private investigator in the Washington, DC area. I wanted, however, to create a character who defied commonly accepted stereotypes. In order to do that, I made him a former special operations soldier, skilled in the use of all kinds of weapons, but who, because of an incident during his career, had decided that he would never use a firearm again if he could avoid it. So, now, you have a PI who is former military, an expert in martial arts, who refuses to carry a weapon. He uses his martial arts skills and wits to deal with bad guys. I did this with some trepidation, because in most of the fiction I’ve read, former Green Berets almost always use a weapon at some point in the story. I stuck to my guns, though (pun intended) and made a point of mentioning his dislike for firearms in every story (I saved the back story on why this was the case until the fifth or sixth book in the series).
I knew I’d found a winning formula when a colleague
from my military days contacted me by email and informed me that he’d become a
fan of my character, despite his opposition to guns because he had so many
other good traits, e.g., loyalty to friends, diligence in his work, and his
persistence in getting justice for the underdog. When he read the book in which
I’d included the back story, he contacted me again to let me know that he now
understood my characters aversion to firearms, and it made perfect sense. This
particular reader is, I happen to know, an NRA member with strong views on the
right to own firearms, and for him to agree with the way I’d created an
anti-gun character, was all the validation I needed to know that I’d created a
character that readers could get behind.
I do it in other stories as well. I’ve had the angelic
looking, good as gold on the outside character who is actually a selfish
psychopath, the rough looking, rough talking character who is a closet
intellectual with a heart of gold, and so on.
The benefit of going against type is that it gives you
characters who are like real people. You have heroes who sometimes do bad
things for selfish reasons, and villains who are kind to their parents and like
puppies.
So, get started on creating that memorable character
for your fiction. You’ll find that your readers will thank you for it.
When
you’re just starting out as a writer, it’s normal to make mistakes. Some of us
are lucky, and we only have a few bloopers in our early manuscripts, while
others struggle with loads of glitches. In my early years as a writer, I had
more than my fair share.
I
recently started doing assessing and proofreading of new manuscript submissions
for a small publisher in New Zealand, and reading some of the work of
first-time authors has reminded me of the things that one can do wrong when
writing. So, for all you new writers out there, struggling to get that first
novel in shape for submission to a publisher, or for indie publishing,
following are the ten most frequently encountered, and most irritable problems
I find in the work of beginning writers. They’re not in any particular order,
such as frequency, seriousness, or degree of irritability, but I suppose that
since I found them in this order in my notes from three recent jobs says
something about the frequency with which they occur. I hope you’ll find this useful as you prepare
your own magnum opus.
Too many
characters.
Life is full of people, but when you people your novel with too many named and
identified characters it creates confusion. The reader is often left wondering
who from the expansive list of characters is important, and who is just a
walk-on, like ‘the security guard’ in the credits at the end of a film. It’s a
good practice, in fact, to use this cinematic technique for characters who are
included basically for filler to show that your imaginary world is populated.
Another thing that crops up from time to time when there are too many
characters is that some will have similar names, further adding to the
confusion.
Inconsistency in
identifying characters. Have you ever read a story where a character was
‘Jonathan’ at the first introduction, but became ‘Mr. Jacobs,’ or ‘Jon’ later I
the book? Not only have I found this, but in one manuscript I read, the main
character was identified with three different names on the same page. My advice
here; pick a name (for the narrative, because different other characters might
refer to him or her by different names—although, I recommend even keeping this
to a minimum) for your characters, and use it consistently throughout your
manuscript.
Too much detail. In most cases
this is data dumping. The author has to tell us everything there is to know
about every character, object, or place in the story. Don’t do it! When I’m
reading for pleasure, and encounter this, I stop reading, and I’m pretty sure
most readers do the same. As an editor, I’m often forced to endure it just to
be able to evaluate the entire manuscript, but I can assure you that it does
not endear me to that writer.
Too much
information.
This is data dumping. In this case,
the author has turned up tons of information about whatever, and feels
compelled to share it with readers. Like overly detailed descriptions, please
restrain yourself. This interrupts the flow of the story, and will turn the
reader off, who is very likely to stop turning pages.
Misuse of a
thesaurus.
Before you scream, pull out your hair, and stop reading, let me say that I
basically have nothing against use of a thesaurus to improve and expand your
vocabulary. As a matter of fact, on occasion, I will use it to find a word that
better expresses the intent of a sentence than the one that first came to me.
What some writers do, especially beginning writers, is use the thesaurus to
change ‘common’ words to more ‘sophisticated’ ones in the mistaken belief that
this makes their writing more ‘sophisticated.’ Their writing is peppered with
pompous, grandiloquent terms that make it sound fake. Purple pose of the ilk,
‘He descended the stairs with magnificent importunity,’ instead of ‘he ran
quickly down the stairs,’ will not impress most readers. Use the thesaurus
sparingly, or even better, stop using it for a while.
Head hopping. Have you ever
read a story in which two or more characters are in a scene and you can never
tell from which characters’ point of view the story is being told because the
writer moves from one’s viewpoint to another? This is called head hopping. In
fiction, you want your readers to identify with your character, preferably your
main character, and get into your story. When you move from the thoughts or
feelings of one character to another within the same scene, you evict the
reader from the story in a state of confusion. Advice here: stick to one
character’s viewpoint within a scene—actually, I prefer to give each character
his or her own chapter—and have a clear demarcation when you wish to switch to
another character. I’ve read manuscripts where the writer moved through the
heads of three different characters on the same page, and in one really
egregious case, between two characters in the same paragraph. Some writers do
this and try to cover it by saying they’re writing in third person omniscient.
But they use the character’s voices when they do it, rather than the omniscient
god/narrator, knocking the pins from under that alibi right away.
Verb aspect
shifts. Some
writers make changes in aspect without being aware of the subtle difference in
meaning this can cause. For example, in unmotivated shifts between the simple
past and past perfective forms of verbs, such as ‘I worked as a writer for
twenty years,’ as compared to ‘I have worked as a writer for twenty years.’ Do
you see the subtle difference in meaning between these two sentences? The first
implies that you no longer work as a writer, while the second means that you’re
still writing. If that’s what you mean to say, fine, but if the rest of your
passage implies that you’re still writing, you will have lost your reader.
Improper verb
tense shifts.
A problem that I’ve encountered in a number of manuscripts that I’ve reviewed
is the tendency of many writers to begin a story or passage in past tense, and
suddenly shift to present tense, as in ‘the building was on Sixth Street, the
entrance, however, is on Fourth Street.’ This is a trite example, but if you
read it carefully, you can see how this can jar a reader. Especially if it
happens more than once, as I’ve often encountered. Here’s another example that
is in a book I recommend to the participants in my professional writing
workshop: ‘Last week I was walking along a street when this man walks up to me
and says . . .’. I know that many people speak like this, but in writing it’s
considered an error, unless it’s a character speaking.
Noun modifier
order.
When describing a person, place, or thing and you wish to show more than one
trait, it’s important to list them in a logical order. Here’s an example that I
encountered in a manuscript: ‘The blond, German, tall man.’ This sounds silly,
I know, but I’ve seen this and worse, especially when the writer stacks
modifiers, that is, uses three or more nouns to describe an object, person or
place. First, it’s a good idea to limit such modifiers, or adjectives, to no
more than three, but if you feel it absolutely essential, the following order
should be used:
Determiners and
post-determiners –
articles, numerals and other limiters
Observation/opinion
–
limiter adjectives such as perfect,
interesting, etc.
Age – adjectives
denoting age (e.g. young, ten-year-old)
Shape – adjectives such as
round, swollen, shrunken.
Color – self-evident. (e.g. black, tan, pale)
Origin – source (e.g. German, extraterrestrial)
Material – what something is
made of (e.g. wool, metallic)
Qualifier/Purpose
– this
is a final limiter which sometimes forms a compound noun, such as rocking chair or book cover
Using the above list, the example sentence
would then be correctly written, ‘the tall, blonde, German man.’ This one was
easy, and I imagine most of you figured out the correct answer before even reading
the list. Keep it in mind, though, as you write, and you can avoid this all too
common glitch.
Overuse of similes. This is one that really bugs me,
both as an editor and a reader. Similes are a good way to liven up your
writing. Take the following examples. She
was happy as compared to She was like
a cloud on a warm summer day. See the difference? Now, what do you think of
the following? She was like a cloud on a
warm summer day, flitting like a butterfly from flower to flower, her voice
like the babbling of a crystal stream. Okay, I just made that up, but I
think you get the picture. Too many similes make your writing seem contrived,
and the two comparisons, each fine on its own, are a bit over the top. Curb the
compulsion to make so many comparisons, and for heaven’s sake, don’t do it in
one sentence.
These
are not the only mistakes beginning writers make, but they’re the ones that
drive me crazy. As an editor, I spend countless hours annotating them in
manuscripts and searching for ways to convince the writer to delete them
without bruising an ego or sounding too critical. As a reader, when I encounter
them in a book, that book goes into my donation pile.
I
hope this bit of advice from someone who has not only suffered them countless
times, but who—a confession here—has committed them in my own early writing
career, will help you to make your writing a joy to your editors and a source
of endless entertainment for your readers.
