Fact or Fiction?

Let there be no doubt, I love writing fiction. The freedom to be creative is wonderful, and writing fiction, for me, truly is fun. Reader response to my four Vanilla Heart novels had been extremely rewarding.

But I value my non-fiction work, as well. Two of my most important books are A Race at Bay and G-2: Intelligence for Patton. The former, published by the Southern Illinois University Press, is housed in more than a thousand libraries around the world. It also has been reissued in a paperback edition titled Editorializing “the Indian Problem.”

G-2 is a work of military history on which I was collaborator with Gen. Oscar Koch. Published in 1971, it has become a standard reference for military historians and is still in print. It originally was published by The Army Times, and now is in paperback as a Schiffer Military History series book.

As much as I would like to be at work on my next novel, I felt compelled to write another non-fiction book. Not just any non-fiction book, but one that is dear to my heart. I’m at work on a biographical memoir about Gen. Koch, my friend and collaborator, who is truly one of the unsung heroes of World War II. His recognition is long overdue.

Yes, there is great satisfaction is seeing this work develop. But fun? Not really. In non-fiction writing, I often find that two or three hours of research leads to no more than one or two paragraphs of finished copy. Slow going, to be sure.

So–fact or fiction? Take your choice. Both have their place, for the writer as well as the reader. I feel extremely fortunate to have had generous reader response to both.

 

Nature’s Gifts

My short story, “Equinox,” which featured Plato, the cat modeled on our Eddie, first appeared in an anthology titled Nature’s Gifts. The book was edited by Smoky Trudeau and published by Vanilla Heart Publishing in 2010 as a collection of poetry and prose “celebrating nature and our natural world.” A portion of the profits went to The Nature Conservancy.

Eddie frequently reminds me of the forms nature’s gifts can take. He is among the most generous creatures on earth, and tries every day to get close to nature to hunt for gifts for his human friends. His gifts have included a baby bird and a rather large baby rabbit, both delivered lovingly and completely unhurt. He clearly takes great pride in giving them in this condition, as if he understands that we prefer them this way.

And then there are the mice. Unfortunately, mice seem to be out and about primarily at night. Because he can’t deliver them to us then and must leave them on the front step, and because they refuse to play by his rules and stay where he puts them, well–you get the picture.

Last week he did find a mouse during the day. Since no one was at hand to see him coming and open the door, though, he had to deposit it on the step as usual. When he got inside a bit later, he took me back to the door and insisted that I follow him out. A large sycamore leaf had blown on top of and nearly hidden the mouse, still warm but no longer alive. Eddie had to point it out a second time before I saw it.

Now here’s where the story becomes a bit tough. I hate to see an animal killed, even a field mouse, yet I knew I must show my gratitude for Eddie’s gift. I gingerly picked up the little body by the tail and pretended to admire it, thanking Eddie profusely. His priceless reaction–rolling and preening and rubbing against my legs in pure pleasure–put things into perspective.

In nature, values differ. Eddie is eager to share what is valuable to him. It is up to me to accept nature the way it is, making the best compromises I can. I hope the mouse wasn’t a mother, with a nest of babies somewhere, but it was a beautiful gift. I’m grateful for it–as I am for all of nature’s gifts.

Creating characters in fiction

Fiction is rarely successful if it lacks interesting, believable characters. For writers like me, who write “real world” stories, this means that our characters need to be people readers can identify with–characters who remind them of someone they know. The simplest way to accomplish this is to base characters on actual people, even if they are individuals we’ve merely observed from a distance.

I rarely base my characters on single individuals. Rather, most are composites. This means they are made up of elements from two or more people, say, physical characteristics from one person and personality traits from another. I really don’t want them to be identifiable so that no one is offended!

Now, though, I must admit to an exception to this self-imposed standard. One of my favorite new characters is based on a single man. And I think he would be pleased.

For Blood on the Roses, I needed a Southern FBI agent. He should represent the best of the 1950s South, yet understand those from a similar background who were less enlightened. The perfect model: my wife’s great uncle, Uncle Frank.

Agent Charlie Monroe is as much like Uncle Frank as I could make him within the constraints of the story. Uncle Frank was a true Southern gentleman, always polite, genteel of manner, erudite, distinguished in appearance. He held an influential position in government in Columbia, South Carolina. (His recommendation was enough to get me two very good summer jobs when I was a college student in the 1950s, when such opportunities were hard to come by.) He loved to tell stories. Although I took creative liberty when I added Agent Monroe’s word games, these don’t seem at all out of place. Uncle Frank might have told such stories.

Uncle Frank was a wise man. Had he been in the position Agent Charlie Monroe was in, I think he would have shown the same understanding of the dangers of racism and other forms of discrimination: “It’s easy to condemn. But prejudice is an unpastured dragon . . .  Let it loose, nurture it with a little ignorance and fear, and pretty soon it’s in all the dark places and if we’re not careful we’ll all be devoured in its ugly flame.”

I wish Uncle Frank was still around. I’d love to sit down with him and discuss Agent Charlie Monroe and Blood on the Roses.

Why we “share” a cat

When people read my brief bio on the back cover of a book, the first question they usually ask is: “What’s the story behind sharing a cat with your neighbors?” As the bio says, it’s a long story. I’ll try to make it short and sweet.

On a pleasant afternoon a few years ago, our neighbor, Janice, went for a walk. Somewhere along the way she met a beautiful orange tabby cat and he followed her back to her house. It turned out that he was a stray, looking for a home, although he clearly had been taken care of earlier in his life. He had been neutered and was people-friendly almost to a fault.  She learned that he’d been homeless over at least one winter, surviving through the kindness of a neighborhood man who had let him into his garage on the coldest nights and fed him on occasion but had not taken him in.

The cat–still little more than a kitten–promptly made his case for adopting Janice as his human. She had an elderly cat (who looked much like him) and knew that bringing in a new pet would not sit well. But this charming stranger chose to stick around, demonstrating a persistence we all would come to admire. He would leave her yard only to visit with me when he could catch me outdoors, gardening or whatever. He soon permitted me to become a friend, too. But I couldn’t take him in, either; my wife has a vicious allergy to cats.

After a couple of weeks, as if by divine intervention, Janice’s aged cat passed on to feline heaven. That signaled to her that perhaps she was meant to take in the new guy–he eventually was named Eddie–and he readily agreed. Except that he still thought he should spend time with me whenever he could.

Today, my wife suffers her cat allergies in silence, says she would die before she gives him up, because Eddie presumes to share his time with us on an alm9st equal basis. His preferred routine is to spend his days with us and go “home” at night to Janice. It is as if we are the grandparents living next door. He still turns to me in time of trouble and if he and I have a falling out it is like a lovers’ quarrel!

So I’d like you to read my short story, “Equinox,” <http://tinyurl.com/3hfvr8z> in which the hero just happens to be an orange tabby cat named Plato, aka Mr. Magnificent. Can you guess who was my model for Plato?

And by the way, if I have to pick a favorite among my own novels and short stories, I think “Equinox” is it. And also by the way, Plato–sorry, I mean Eddie–is asleep in a chair close by as I write this. Have I told you he is magnificent?

The “Other” Robert Hays

Ever “Google” yourself? Of course you have. We all do.

My problem is, when I run a Google search on my name I  get lots of sites dedicated to that other Robert Hays. You know, the movie guy. He sure has lots of fans!

Now don’t get me wrong. I like Robert Hays, the actor. I’ve always thought he doesn’t get enough credit for his acting skills. “Airplane” was not a masterpiece of cinema. A little bit funny the first time, maybe, but probably not the kind of movie that actors want to be remembered for. And Robert Hays is. Remembered for “Airplane,” I mean. Whether he wants it that way or not.

Robert Hays, the actor, is a good-looking fellow and has a nice screen presence. He seems like the kind of man you’d enjoy having as a next-door neighbor. I have no way of knowing, but it’s hard to imagine him behaving like an egotistical slob just because he’s a movie star. I see him more like the character he played in the “Homeward Bound” movies. A nice guy.

Like the rest of us, Robert is aging. It seems he’s almost old enough to draw Social Security. But hey, how many men that age still look as good as he does?

Although he doesn’t know it, the other Robert Hays gives me a nice hand up from time to time. How? Well, if I run a Google search on one of my novel titles I will inevitably turn up information on my books on a few sites dedicated to the actor. Search engines don’t know one Robert Hays from another. I wonder how many of his fans really think he wrote Circles in the Water, The Life and Death of Lizzie Morris, The Baby River Angel, and Blood on the Roses. Talented actors who also are talented writers aren’t unheard of, you know.

A recent reviewer strongly suggested that my new novel, Blood on the Roses, should be made into a movie. If some producer chooses to undertake it, I hope he or she will find a role for the other Robert Hays although off hand I don’t think of a character in that book that he’d be a good candidate for. Well, maybe one of the FBI agents.

But I sort of like the idea of Robert, the actor, playing the part of Mayor Johnny White in The Baby River Angel. Yes–I can see him standing before the citizens of Cambria in that town meeting and taking control, leading the movement to hide Baby Angel until her parents are found and keep her from getting lost in the impersonal child welfare system. A good man, Mayor Johnny White.

So what do you say, Robert Hays, the actor? Sound like something you’d like to get your teeth into? Just askin’ . . .

“The Help,” revisited

It took me a while to get to it, but last week I finished The Help, Kathryn Stockett’s best-selling novel. It left me with mixed feelings.

You probably know about The Help. It is set in Stockett’s home town of Jackson, Mississippi, in the 1960s. I think Stockett makes an honest and serious effort to portray the lives of African-American maids–she calls them “colored,” an accurate throwback to the time–and to an extent she is successful. There is no question that the black women who worked in white households often became attached to the families they served, especially the children. And there is no doubt that some of the white women they worked for looked down on them while others treated them with respect.

The author clearly wants to give the maids a voice. She accomplishes this by using them as narrators, and this is effective. I take issue with her attempt at dialect, and the first “sho nuff” turned me off. Did they speak this way? Perhaps. We all use slang in conversation that we wouldn’t commit to writing.

My greater issue with The Help is that it contains little if any angst. Terrible things happened to black people in Mississippi and elsewhere in the Deep South in the 1960s. Stockett gives this short shrift–just enough mention to show that the women she writes about are aware of these things. But we get little indication of how they felt about them. The Help is more like a women-of-the-club story in which we are to find satisfaction in the maids pulling off a nasty little joke on the worst of the white women they work for.

Let me admit here that I may be prejudiced, myself, in viewing Stockett’s work. I first experienced racial segregation as official policy when the Army sent me to Fort Jackson, South Carolina, in 1956. I was a young draftee who’d lived a rather sheltered life in the Midwest. What I saw black men subjected to left me with a much more cynical view than that offered by The Help. My view comes through in Blood on the Roses, which is in many ways antithetical to The Help. 

You can find a more comprehensive treatment of my experiences in the South in the 1950s in a newspaper article published in May. Please go to

http://www.scribd.com/doc/61229465/Race-Relations-Appreciating-Progress

Having said all this, I should make clear that I find value in The Help, not only as a fascinating read but also as a contribution to our understanding of an ugly period in American history. Kathryn Stockett’s book and the movie based on it may be imperfect, but I’m sure they portray a way of life many of her readers knew nothing about. I applaud her for that.

 

On Being a Writer

It seems to me that I’ve been writing all my life. I started writing short stories in the second grade and my teacher praised them–all the incentive a second grader needs.

Okay, since the second grade I’ve done a few other things. I’ve done farm labor and oil-field construction, I served in the U.S. Army, I was a newspaper reporter–still my most satisfying job–a public relations writer, a magazine editor, a university professor and administrator. For one short stint, I even managed a successful primary political campaign for a congressional candidate.

As an academic, I wrote non-fiction. My most successful book is G-2: Intelligence for Patton, a collaboration with Gen. Oscar Koch which is still in print after 40 years and has become a standard reference for military historians. Another book, A Race at Bay: New York Times Editorials on “the Indian Problem,” 1850-1900, is listed in more than a thousand libraries around the world. That is immensely satisfying.

I enjoy writing fiction because it allows me the freedom missing from non-fiction writing. I can create characters and settings of my own choosing, tell my story through them. As a life-long journalist, of course, I’m destined to remain a realist. Even in The Baby River Angel, which has a touch of the paranormal, my characters are real people doing what real people do. And I’m sorry to say that my newest work, Blood on the Roses, also is about real people–including some of the worst (along with some of the best). But this is my world.

Welcome to it.

 

Home

Welcome to the Website of author Robert Hays.

Robert has been a newspaper reporter, public relations writer, magazine editor, and university professor and administrator. A native of Illinois, he taught in Texas and Missouri and retired in 2008 from a long journalism teaching career at the University of Illinois. He served in the U.S. Army and holds three degrees, including an interdisciplinary Ph.D., from Southern Illinois University. He has spent a great deal of time in South Carolina, the home state of his wife, Mary, and has been active in the South Carolina Writers Workshop.

His publications include academic journal and popular periodical articles and eight books, one released in paperback under a new title. His four most recent books are novels: Circles in the Water, The Life and Death of Lizzie Morris (nominated for the 2009 Pushcart Prize), The Baby River Angel, and Blood on the Roses. All Robert’s novels are published by Vanilla Heart Publishing.

Robert and Mary live in Champaign, Illinois. They have two sons and a grandson and share (long story!) a cat named Eddie with the family next door.

To learn more about Robert’s books, click on the tabs, above. You can read the first four chapters of his novels for free on Book Buzzr by clicking on the widgets to the right.