A Word on Words; 0873; Steve Womack

it's been a word on we're delving into the world of books and their authors tonight steve womack talks about your host for word on words mr john sigg and publisher of the tennessean and editorial director of usa today cleaning ladies and gentlemen once again welcome a new offer that's m i guess those evenings you can walk out of it is they have a year to live and the book is called murphy's fault that's the cover stories inside that car and it is a fascinating tale and a mystery as it says on the cover happen again by saying it did remind me and some ways

and some very positive way another book or a long long time ago a book that is now classic american literature you know melissa all again and there's a surprise you know not all that's been one of the books that have the biggest influence on me as a writer since i was a teenager well robert penn warren was a writer and a class one cell and for me it's great complement to you do have to say to you that the backyard and make it had i make that comparison but it is a two things above earth all setting second thing about it is historical you've created here a storyteller who has

a thought it a lot of volatile idealist a cynic and there are times when i get up and there are times when i have some faith that he will recapture his sense of goodness for lack of the word and well you said that that's what i was trying to do and yet very much it i didn't say mourns what to call this book a mystery but i never really started to write in history what i wanted to do was to to present a portrait of a failed it a lot some it was in fact depressed alcoholic as well but who had an undying search for the truth and desire to find out the truth about the people we love and i wanted to write this book more as an aussie then a mystery but if i want a columnist respond you sob la la lots of books it's

not forget not the kids a message about that i mean i think it's an awful good girl throw around but in some ways assad and in some ways it's a it's not the kids because i think that there is a there is a first novel but i think there is a maturity about the writing that there that's impressive to me and i don't really i come on this program an off the books a couple times but i'm truly and impressed with what we've done here the young in this so far and law he sets out to ruin him and i doubt it was going to go what he can sets out not to run he is assigned by his employer the only old

an eccentric power boss financier and in new orleans to have to find something to blackmail the sky with buddy does he never really believes until well into the story but there's anything out there and to the very end he presented a long hallway out in some of the old man says someone ever by an and he saw friends his father in law in the solar threat to reese says will get it and the best things you do is come to his senses compromise don't push me into doing what i don't want to exactly says if there's anything out there all fine i'll find it so he is up he he knows that he's going to get part of the reason i think legitimately can be called a mystery is because it was there and the cause of the vices he employed and also a lucky head

in in finding that i have think of an awful lot of journalists who've gone public relations when i when i read your were your tell me how you came to write this book well i was a journalist to get into public relations is not autobiographical that was like no it's not autobiographical but i was living in new in new orleans i had i just graduated two interacted underground were there and i stayed in the city and i and i love new orleans and i wanted to write i have been writing in fact this is my second novel it's just the first published and there've been three or four others since then but i was working for the third daily in new orleans there's the times picayune the state side and then there was also this obscure daily that nobody ever heard of which published mostly business and financial news and had a small tuesday and so i kind of hung around on the fringes of that that whole group of politics and power and new ones that which is which has a long tradition

of stinging ants that that makes our own local stuff will pretend i am so i kind of heard lots of stories and or i soaked up a lot of atmosphere in our lives from the feeling of how business is done down there and i was fascinated by fascinated by the power and the corruption and the things in the story are picked up in the things that they could be done down there if you knew the right people have electronic connections and most fascinating i started the book and couldn't seem to get rolling with it so i left the newspaper i i i i resigned my job in order to write the book which i have done as pattern my whole adult life of having a job making enough money to survive for wild including a job and writing until around a monday and i'm going back to work and scott this was the first lead and that pattern was written in nineteen seventy nineteen seventy five nineteen seventy six rejected many many times i'm probably twenty five times will public this poem is about his to explore

now and success stories but also the problems that often encounter and one major problem is getting published as you say this book was rejected twenty five times at least at least ask that a good year and have tried to get published and it i was trying to have an agent i couldn't find an agent either and finally i got an agent to read it who said in effect this manuscript is on publishing and he's a very prominent agent in new york city that i paid to read the manuscript and and he said basically you got some talent you could write keep going but put this from a white forget about it and i didn't ever put in a drawer for about twelve thirteen years and i got an agent several years ago and then three years ago and i was afraid that he was gonna drop is a client because he couldn't place the novel that i wrote that i've written another novel so i kind of got more peaceful and literally ran into the word processor and cleaned it up and six which later wiesel go figure in us murphy is a

villain as one one person thought once a semester i'd simply say it's not out of iraq in a sense but whose murphy is he a composite vehicle invention he's is there somebody you knew now he's a composite and a total invention of all kinds of different things and people i saw i had so well people ask me since the vote came out if in fact murphy was faith hamas and the book was written in nineteen seventy five nineteen seventy six when i was living in the war's i know do anybody up your was it so you know there's no there's no comparisons to our contemporary politics here an unintended well i don't live you know i don't think tennessee politics comes close to matching louisiana politics an actual borrowing come close to matching what goes on in new orleans it's it's a delight for a writer

the other life around and as our book also was in the chair and say you know who needs a needs a nation than anything in this world politics and real life is better just funny arch just observe virginia and i find this in the murphy at no i don't find work a redeeming qualities this lawn here and he's a bad guy that real slog on and i think if i had intended for maybe that was a mistake for him to to create him in that fashion but my aim and writing that book was to force the narrator to toe literally the limits of civilized behavior and wanted to to put this guy in a situation where he would do things that you never dreamed you could do and the only way to do that was to confront him with something that was pretty much total evil you know if he had been on a more important part of the main character the narrator is life

personally that i would have built in moore the human side the murky because you know as a city as his wife and children and somebody loves him somewhere your shot me about his ambition in army he really really hello and all and it's somewhat out of proportion for it to his native intelligence not very smart in addition the bad guys not exactly right and and so i don't know i don't know a bad guys have that sort of that sort of ability to reach so far beyond a limited grasp well he had a lot of good people working for them including the narrators father in law janice herbert who is a very brilliant brilliant and they're very capable man who made one very bad mistake as one day

then the state of life and too many people as i say murphy has a really no sense of humor which were dialing separates him with there really a great political characters and knowing when i share of you just mentioned your uncle and his lab constantly employee at what he says and how and how he says it and some politicians in louisiana i think pabst riffing into parliament alliances of other of a long but i think it would send me now for all the problems and for all that will leo legacy of the legality of a shadow to him and he still could be a very funny man and i met him when i was a newspaper reporter down there we used to have a nickname for we called the silver zipper fruit for lots of different reasons and but he i met him once and i'd been assigned to cover a meeting on friday night and i didn't want to do it

i just out i've worked all week about why the night off but i had to go just for a pair of sneakers and blue jeans and a shirt right make a few notes and get out as quickly as i could and it turned out to be a formal dinner for him and when i met him with the press pool us in october five known you were going to be here i'd put on a suit he threw his arm around his his son you know pretty good for a reporter a really funny stuff and murphy is a road with no redeeming qualities in leicester i am her head office here who have been in new orleans our lives in this the environment is not conducive to running our first first they were fleeing dollar of jesse's do it the great kentucky center

through the rule sets a move not only fire fiction a tremendous a wonderful poem she came up the after finishing her first novel and said that she'd struggled through that gm not the heat but the environment was oppressive but what is so that's that's pretty much the reason that i left new orleans i was writing down there at the time i was down near the oil bloom was just starting which preceded the law last year and it was a difficult city for me to make a living and because i was a writer and reporter at the time and a few more states and times picayune you you did make an uncommon women and all and if you work in the tourist industry for the port it was very good the problem with me was that is too many distractions it's a wonderful city i love it that that's the best the best food the best party of the most fun things to do it you can

imagine it's hard to get work done well that's what i've heard again in yemen ali al and they're all those who have the five wrote his years now and it's a great city to be inspired by oh boy ages huge huge so many stories and so many wonderful things and so much history and so much heritage and it's really i mean it's an odd city it's not an american city others in your points out one magazine this month about the decline of new orleans with york boston and the eroding middle class on and they talked about how new orleans was the kind of place where you could just fade into it and have a great time but it's a hard it's it's a third world city they call it they call it the greatest third world city in the world and i think there's something to that it's not all like any other place other visions did you plot this book if we wrote it i mean did you have a beginning a million and if you know where you're going you knew

what year publishes openly call a mystery within the development you also hear how it was in the song i knew i knew well starting from and i knew where i was going and i had a rough idea the direction i dont ally and books i get started in them and then i'll let the characters tell me weren't going sometimes you have to rain and then you get sidetracked but no i basically a lot of the stuff that's in their courses book was re written major rewrite a eighty nine times i've got a file drawer at home full of different versions of murphy's fall i get the book the first draft of the book is very different from the final draft examines public short selling come from she was someone a portrait and at the way writers filter things she's not an exact portrait of someone i knew down there who was a secretary and was very much a kind of

for lack of a better term girl fry that she could come take care of anything and she was very smart and very capable and a little cocky about how little kind of odd and her approach to things house fascinated by or she wasn't a girlfriend or a close friend or family or anything like that to somebody it i saw it work periodically and she somebody you could follow with anybody could follow it one way to cure my editors say martin's tormentor is the curtain basically in the draft number seven and got bad as sally and jack from riding off into the sunset after it's over and my they're just had no you can't do that there's not enough is not enough banks to there's not enough there's not enough pain and suffering that this guy has to go through to do the horrible things he does it in the book you got a given you got against loss you got a given

something to seek revenge or an and i would too far in the next draft ahead are killed often pregnant that she was pregnant with their child and ended my age again that's a no no that's too much that somebody somewhere too far that had to cut back his well let me ask about that i think was right you think you know to avoid and thats what hurts is a pharmacist say unreal too far too much you will know the banks think that i i am just want to receive and inserted the right is a new videos at a bad lawyer play on some gut mistrustful of editors most here you're a seventh re write ins and this person is saying to you don't do this do that at two ways to go one way come so furious so irritated by

with another suggestion that the seven rewrites that you say hello and it's not that they believe the la is just out of frustration say at this point i'll do their thing and do it but you did it and then you came back and she said no no i mean i know i'm in limbo and lose that much had died and unless told us don't get the job killing and was going to work so the whoa whoa whoa whoa what was three i did both ive design and i screamed and yelled and can kick the cab and ran my head and the door and yelled and screamed and said to hell with it and then after about that isis innocent then i wrote it did rely on it on a first novelist and likely all writers you're right have ego but our first novels to the awards on how

much i wanted sue book in print i wasn't willing to do anything and there were a few things suggestions i got that i did run a lot as of now that doesn't work for me like well oh boy some of the stuff that whole strain of the ire of the book as the eye was ghetto and on the whole scheme of using the ghetto as as a cash machine that the drug sales being more important than the renovation my i didn't buy that and then she said i don't believe that somebody could make that much money off of in a five and ten dollar drug sales so i did what i have thought i should do which was researching i went to my prison writing class and i asked colin guys are my prison class and they said oh listen those five and ten dollar drug sales of twenty five figures a day seven days a week and that's where it gets so i wrote her and i said you know the consensus at the tennessee state prison is right you're right and you're right

and your commitment to to teaching which is a real commitment consoling words taken but before i do that and they take you to last line that is the next to last one book in which this follow it all this it has become so they become one for the provincial idealistic this makes this makes the one great discovery that has me that he is a survivor hear everything else aside a life worth living hope is worth having and they're things so there are things worth doing and now you know you told me earlier the head of a very well themselves urban

and in the anger and the frustration that the changes had you feel about that as a sort of cap on a mystery story and how the asian feel about any other fine i think because it has to have a change for you what you say is right and i that's the thing i hope that people will get out of this book has been called a dark book and your book has a little bit but on the other hand if you read it as it as carefully as you obviously haven't made that what you get out of it is that at the end of the book the good guys really do wear the only thing is that when i had a much greater cost than i ever imagined i have to pay and that's the one thing that the narrator comes out of this work is that yet the good guys won but across a lot more than they did a lot of pain and a lot of last but at the end he's a survivor and despite a rather smarmy business he's in his principles and his integrity are intact back into baca and i think

it is he i think he lost his way early on comedy doherty lost among them when i mean me he was as you say he was and that anything and everything that served a day a sort of indolent end in unproductive life has basically depressed alcoholic and now tell me about your teaching all i need i started teaching at the state prison are a couple years ago and basically i tried i did it tonight i called up bacik at the prison school and arranged her to get in there to teach a class because i felt like this was about the time it's over peaceful are writing was going really well really well and i i felt really for the first time in my whole career very fortunate that things are we're really moving well an iconic on some kind of cormac were or something want to put something back and when to give something back and i started doing this of course what happened is

sometimes happens in life i knew more of them than i do at a main that it's opened up a whole new world of experience and end up an understanding for me that that i never dreamed of and going behind the prison walls and getting to know the people there is there david is the prison book here i don't know not now maybe someday maybe someday i have an awful lot more lab in other body your head and i'm a lot more like what's your what's your age and actually we just got an offer for a sequel to or peaceful or that area and i'm the star of the sequel and the movie has rapidly zone he has a chance to survive in ways we never knew yes just out the same armed common thing there while you know and how you reacted here is thought book with a beginning a middle and end our bottom line

is now a resume louder and now is both come back and that we'll use a survivor muslims a loveless retaken actually what i do is at the beginning of the second book he's going through i guess what you call common with the weight stress syndrome that that he's at the end of the book he does going to drive off an end and then takes off for awhile and when he comes back he's at ease can fry with a possible with that with the challenge of putting his life back together he has no jobs and little money he comes back to to new orleans and opens up but essentially an independent public relations firm ernst and gets involved in something else this vessel be more traditional mystery and i know there's some talk about making jack which a series character i don't i don't know if i was going to do without one of bucolic red carpet with the laredo late slips a house coordinating so varied very very rich now will leave the next

volume the sequel and villains published and he backed the night before to talk about to talk about about the next chapter of life of survival but i just have to ask you it must a man terribly frustrating to bills that long period and publish is that written a second novel and really have written several i'm taking it that and i think i'm hearing you say yes and song are rejected but others have been rejected all a new nation that whole issue of ego was a dozen shrill it's a humbling experience i'm yeah it's a little you know you can wonder sometimes why you keep going i've got one that one novel that on that show anybody and there's more peaceful and there've been three other since then completed another half a dozen that got maybe

i'm maybe hundred two hundred pages into a car and died on the vine i've got one novel thats seven hundred and fifty pages long and has been re written five or six times and has been rejected by almost thirty publishers nice it's tough many of our viewers are going to say oh how strange thought they don't realize that many many writers go through this all this says something about the real commitment of truly talented writer it's a new and it's got our men you again stoplight i appreciate the compliment sometimes wondered how much talent i do have that i do have determination and i don't any choice i just don't any choice wasn't me when i'm not writing and not involved in something i'm miserable and and i have gone extended period where i'm not writing and because of that involved in making a living that up until three years ago i had a corporate job and i was and i was and book publishing arm in and pretty and production end i just it felt like i

wasn't one doing the stuff was important to me and a new id bills up enough to where it'd make you crazy in any of this you know makes you crazy its cow like being pregnant you know the stories come and grow when you until they have to come and cut out for lack of other word steve womack author of the fight for fans but i guess the word on words featuring jon say controller this program was produced in studios of the bbc in television man