Writing a book can be scary adventure, authors say at 2016 Southern Voices

Writing and publishing a book can be a scary adventure — in many ways.

Just ask the writers who spoke Saturday at the 2016 Southern Voices authors conference at the Hoover Public Library. They relayed numerous fears and obstacles they had to face along the way.

For some, it was working up the nerve to leave a steady job to pursue a writing career that may or may not produce a positive financial return.

Then, there is the amount of time it takes to research, write — and rewrite — a book, not to mention find someone who is willing to publish it.

Natalie Baszile, a California author with family ties in Louisiana, worked on her novel for 12 years before she finished it and got it published, she said.

And you never know, you just might get an unsolicited offer from a stranger who wants to give you firsthand perspective of what it’s like to commit murder.

Hear that story from North Carolina author Jamie Mason, who has written two psychological fiction thrillers:

Mason and Baszile were two of seven authors who shared the stories behind their stories Saturday with roughly 330 guests at the Hoover library.

Chasing a dream

Baszile talked about how she gave up a job in her father’s manufacturing business in California to pursue her dream of writing. She found a storyline tied to her family’s roots in southern Louisiana.

Her first and only novel so far, “Queen Sugar,” tells the story of an African-American woman from California who inherits an 800-acre sugarcane farm in rural Louisiana. The book delves into race relations from the African-American point of view.

Baszile didn’t know much about the South or sugarcane farming, but she was fascinated with the culture in southern Louisiana and spent 10 years researching and writing the book before she had it ready to send to an agent.

She sent it to five agents. She got no response from two, and the three others said they loved it but not enough to take it. She had devoted 10 years of her life to the book, was exhausted and didn’t think she could continue, but a trip to an artist colony in Chicago reinvigorated her, she said. She spent two more years revising the manuscript and finally got it accepted and published.

Ava DuVernay, the director of “Selma,” now is using the story for a series on Oprah Wynfrey’s TV network. They started filming last week, Baszile said.

She said her story is an example that people should never give up on their dreams. “I think it’s important to love the process and to love the journey,” she said.

Starting a new life

Laura Lane McNeal is a  former journalist and advertising representative who decided to start a new life as a novelist after Hurricane Katrina temporarily uprooted her family from New Orleans. When she returned to New Orleans, she took fiction writing classes at Loyola University and spent two years doing research for a political thriller. But when e-books came on the scene, publishers were reluctant to buy, especially mystery thrillers, she said.

She laid that story aside and started “Dollbaby,” a story of a young white girl coming of age in New Orleans in the 1960s. She worked eight hours a day to churn out the first draft in three months and spent another four months tweaking it and got five offers, she said.

“Dollbaby” was chosen as a 2015 Book Award finalist by the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance.

Success in the Wild West

Craig Johnson, a Wyoming rancher turned western mystery novelist, said he wrote the first two chapters of his first book and then let them sit in a drawer for 9 ½ years before finally coming back to them to finish the story. When he got through, he and his wife went to New York to pitch it to agents, and the book, “The Cold Dish,” got accepted by Viking Press, a division of Penguin Random House.

The publishers loved the story so much they wanted more like it before the first one ever came out, Johnson said. He complied and developed a whole series of books based on the main character, Sheriff Walt Longmire. The series then was developed into the “Longmire” TV show for the A&E Network and now is being aired and produced by Netflix.

Story ideas and research

Mason talked about how she got the idea for her first book, “Three Graves Full.” A friend recommended she find an intriguing headline in a newspaper and then write a story to go with the headline without reading the real story. So she did.

A headline that read “Landscapers find skull in mulch bed” led to her first creation, which tells the story of a mild-mannered man who has trouble living with the fact that he buried a man he murdered in his backyard. Additional trouble arises when two other bodies are discovered in his yard.

Numerous authors shared how detailed research helped them craft their fictional stories to make them believable.

Baszile immersed herself in Louisiana culture and learned how to do sugarcane farming herself.

Mark Pryor, an author who works as an assistant district attorney in Texas, once interviewed a man convicted of murder four days before his execution, which he said made for some very awkward conversation.

“He re-enacted the murder for me,” Pryor said. “He just didn’t get it. He just didn’t get that what he had done was wrong.”

Pryor said at times he wanted to jump across the table and kill the man himself, but he kept himself together.

Pryor has written five Hugo Marston mysteries, which follow the U.S. embassy’s chief of security as he solves crimes on the streets of Paris. Of course, he went to Paris for his research, he said. People these days can go on Google Earth to get descriptions of routes from Point A to Point B in Paris, but you can’t see the girl riding her bicycle down the street with her hair flowing in the wind and a suitcase on wheels rolling behind her, he said. Those kinds of details require actual visits, he said.

Collaboration

Tom Franklin, an Alabama native who now is a professor in the English department at the University of Mississippi, said a friend shared with him an unusual research aid — old Sears catalogs. He was able to use an 1890s Sears catalog to get accurate descriptions, pictures and costs of items from that time period. He found one online for only $7, he said. “They’re shockingly easy to find.”

His wife, Beth Ann Fennelly, is his boss in the English department at Ole Miss and also is an author. She has written mostly poetry and nonfiction but collaborated on a fiction book with him.

The book, “The Tilted World,” tells the tale of two federal agents who come to Mississippi on the brink of the flood of 1927, which Fennelly said was the biggest natural disaster the United States had ever seen.

The agents find a baby boy abandoned in the middle of a crime scene and find a home for him with a woman they don’t know is the biggest bootlegger in the county. It’s a tale of murder, moonshine and unexpected love.

Fennelly said they did a lot of research on the flood but found human elements for their story in women’s journals that were in the archives of a flood museum.

Writing the novel together was a different but wonderful experience, they said. Franklin specialized in the crime and flood stories, and she brought in more of the human elements, such as the romance, she said. They each planned to write half the book, but Fennelly finished her half much more quickly, so she helped write half of Franklin’s part, too.

Writing together was a very intimate experience, Franklin said. They frequently wrote in the same office, facing each other with “dueling laptops” and knees almost touching, he said.

Fact checking

Several authors on Saturday talked about getting help to fact-check their stories.

Franklin said he has someone at Jacksonville State University who reads his material. One of his books was based in Clarke County, Alabama, in the 1890s, and he had a lot of trees in the story, but the fact-checker let him know that Clarke County was mostly cotton fields, not trees, in the 1890s. He also had someone killing an armadillo in the story and didn’t realize there were no armadillos in Alabama in the 1890s, he said.

Mason has a friend who spent 30 years as a homicide detective read her material before it is published to make sure police investigations seem authentic. She also called a septic tank company to get an accurate estimate of how long it would take one person to dig a 7-foot-deep, 3-foot-by-3-foot hole (grave) with a shovel, though she didn’t mention the grave part.

Audience reaction

Bob Henger, a resident of Vestavia Hills, said the entire authors conference was good, but he especially enjoyed Johnson and Baszile. Johnson has such a unique background and a lot of humor, and Baszile was so well-spoken, he said. And they both are great storytellers, he said.

Henger also enjoyed listening to the husband-wife team of Franklin and Fennelly. Henger and his wife, Jan, both work as docents at the Birmingham Museum of Art and could relate to their stories about working together, he said.

Tanier Dutton, a Carbon Hill resident who aspires to be a writer and is taking classes at Bevill State Community College, came to Saturday’s conference at the recommendation of some of his English instructors.

“I felt like I got a lot of great advice in the writing process — the amount of time and effort that goes into it,” Dutton said.

He also noticed that all the authors had loved ones helping them and that their first novels are really a big undertaking, he said.

Bonnie Payne, a Hoover resident, said her husband has been to all 24 Southern Voices conferences and she has been to most of them. In recent years, they brought their daughter, and this year their 15-year-old granddaughter came.

The 15-year-old, Emery Little, said the most interesting part of the day was Mason’s story about the man who offered to give her the first-hand perspective of a murderer. “I kind of got chills,” Little said.

She also liked when the authors talked to each other on stage. Mason and Pryor, who already knew each other, had really good chemistry and fed off one another well, she said.

Payne said the conference gets better every year. “They were all really, really good.”

Franklin said writing a novel is like trying to make crop circles with rusty scissors at midnight.

“It’s a terrifying process but is very rewarding and enriching once you get to the other side,” he said.