Spotlighting local author: Steven Womack

Some people possess a certain facet, a quality of their being, which makes them appear bigger than life. Sitting down with Steven Womack, critically acclaimed author, afforded me this feeling – for it was like encountering Einstein fused with Kerouac. Brilliant, blunt and fascinating, his natural state of Professor meets Storyteller makes him one genius of an author; while his affability makes him someone to envy.

Steven Womack

Over his career as a writer, Steven has published ten novels, been awarded the Edgar Allan Poe and Shamus awards and nominated for the Anthony Award. The New York Times has said of his novel Way Past Dead to be "a real hoot," and added that protagonist "Harry has something that cuts him apart from the rest of the herd."

Steven’s novels are quick-witted, character driven works. As he says, “I love to create quirky and odd characters who can come to life and take the story over.” He has an ease in creating his stories, and it’s hard to suspect that he does more than sit down, look at the keys on a board and will the magic out.

His talent has been shaped and directed. “For me as a writer, the pivotal moment in my work was back in the mid 80s when I took a screenwriting course, and I thought, I’ve watched a bunch of movies, how hard can it be to write one?”

Steven immediately realized that “is roughly the equivalent to walking into a cockpit and saying I’ve flown in a lot of airplanes, why don’t you let me fly this sucker?” Screenwriting is its own art form and in studying it he recognized film to be the “last expression of classical 3 act Greek dramatic structure.”

The extensive structure was what he lacked in his novels. He took his “love of characters and superimposed this kind of structure on top of it. What I had finally was a story that works.” Steven now teaches Screenwriting at Nashville’s Watkins College of Art & Film.

Steven defines how great storytelling unfolds. “What events you pick and the order to depict them to your audience is how the story is going to work.” Steven hopes his “characters are unique and funny and the readers enjoy them, but there is also a very focused and directed story at work.”

A pivotal moment for Steven occurred when he read Chris Vogler’s The Writers Journey. Vogler was a student of Joseph Campbell’s, who took “the structure of myth across cultures, nationality, and discovered it’s in the DNA – we all have same fears and anxieties that are universal. Mythic structure is how we express and deal with all of that stuff in story.”

He noticed that in movies the “steps of the journey - the same steps occur over and over. The genius of that seamless underlying structure but most audience members don’t even notice. How that writer has used that model paradigm to completely suck us in and take us over.”

So Steven applied this knowledge into his stories. “I outline my novels like a story or play. It doesn’t mean you can’t veer off from it, but they are very structured.” Discovering and applying this knowledge helped Steven get published.

His novel Murphy’s Fault had been turned down 22 times, but once he “began to understand how to compose structure over character and make them work together,” he revised the novel. It sold immediately.

Steven lived in New Orleans, having graduated from Tulane University, covering new Orleans politics when he wrote Murphy’s Fault. He says of New Orleans in the 70’s, during the political race…”what a world to play in.”

Robert Penn Warren’s novel All the King’s Men heavily influenced him, and he wanted to do an homage that compared with his experience as newspaper man in New Orleans.

All of Steven’s novels connect. The Jack Lynch series is a trilogy, while his Harry James Denton series, his most critically acclaimed, is six mysteries focused on the life of a Nashville P.I. Chain of Fools. The fourth novel in his Denton series hit the triple crown, being nominated for the Edgar, Shamus and Anthony award.

According to Steven, what he as an author needs most to find success is an “editor who is really willing to push his work.” Steven’s next goal in writing is simple. He’d like to have another book sale. His dream: “what every writer wants, which is to write a book that mostly by word of mouth becomes very successful.” It’s every author’s hope that his words will sell themselves, because the readers can’t help but talk about them.

Steven quotes William Goldman, referencing that the world of books is similar to the movie business, and “nobody knows anything.” It’s impossible to determine what makes a bestseller. So Steven continues to put his best effort out there, and with skills as sharp as his, one day he’s bound to come across ‘it’ and land that New York Times Bestseller.

How did he know he was a writer? Steven has always “been a reader and loved books.” It was the influence of an English teacher who turned him down the path. The teacher had the class read All the Kings Men, and Steven couldn’t put the novel down.

Once he finished reading it through, he sat down and re-read it again. Of the experience he found the “Great unheralded American novel of the 20^th century. It just hits its marks everywhere. The voice, the structure, it’s all there. I wanted to be like that, you know.”

Is there something that makes a writer a writer? “Most young writers start writing out of an urge for catharsis. I’ve met a lot of novelists. There are very few emotionally healthy writers.” You don’t have that vein to tap into.

“Most people start out as a form of self therapy and from mimicking from the writers they love, and if you keep going it goes beyond that.” He feels the best years of writing are “when you do nothing but writing.”

If you’re looking for the reason why he does what he does, he held a writers workshop in a TN state prison, and one of the inmates/students told him that he had figured out why we write. He said, “Writing is like heroin, it’s the greatest high in the world, but if you’re not careful it will kill you.”

Steven believes, “When you’re in that zone – it’s almost like you are channeling this stuff from some place else.” You lose track of time and your surroundings, forgetting to eat, sleep, to function outside of the story.

Advice:

“The ones who survive in this line of work are the ones who outlive everything that tries to stop them. Develop a thick skin and be so unbelievably determined.” Quoting Faulkner he says, “If anything can make you stop writing, let it.”

“You make art because you have to. If you quit you weren’t an artist to begin with. You write because you have to – because you’ll go crazy if you don’t.”

Steven is an artist. He’s an author, a professor and a believer in the world of literature. Whatever he’s doing, and for whatever reasons, readers can rejoice that he doesn’t stop. Hard at work on his next novel, he’s continuing to delight fans and bring new readers to his quirky, witty and enticing worlds.

Steven will be attenging Killer Nashville's 2009 writer conference this August. You can learn more about Killer Nashville at: www.killernashville.com/

For more on Steven Womack and his novels visit him at: http://www.womackbooks.com/