I am a former newspaper reporter, repo man, and U.S. Navy veteran.
I wrote news stories for a local community newspaper. Typically, I would cover municipal meetings: school boards, town councils, or the county board. When the meetings were lively, the articles were easy to write, I just quoted the agitated participants. It’s amazing how excited people get about fence ordinances or pet leashing laws. But sometimes the topics were pretty dull. That’s where I learned how to find the story in even the most technical topics. There is always a story to be told.
As a repo man, my job wasn’t to take customer’s cars, but to find people behind on their payments who weren’t answering their phones and convince them to pay. Most of the time that involved talking to them to find out what was going on in their lives so I could act as almost a free credit counselor. These conversations really helped me to understand how peoples’ minds work under stress and how the choices they make or fail to make can affect their future.
Of course, some people were assholes, and I took their cars. And, yes, legally stealing cars is just as awesome as you think it is.
I probably grew the most as a person during my four years in the Navy. The service put me in challenging situations time and time again, teaching me to find strength within myself to endure privation, complete tasks successfully, and control my emotions. It also exposed me to a fantastic gallery of human beings from every corner of America and beyond. As a writer, I collect people, mannerisms, and psychology and all of that began with the real characters of the U.S. Navy.
There was this one really incompetent Lieutenant who picked his nose…
There is no better teacher for a writer than life, living it and observing along the way, even failure and heartbreak. The key to compelling fiction is getting your readers emotionally involved with your characters and you can’t do that unless you are emotionally invested in the world around you.