An Interview with Robert W. Walker

Welcome to Mysterious Writers, Rob. It's a pleasure to have you visit here. Please tell us when and why you became interested in writing?

I began with a love for reading. As early as fourth grade, I began chasing footnotes in history textbooks, going to the library to explore whatever I found in a footnote. I began writing fiction in the night and figured what the heck, I will watch a TV drama and write it up as my story. So my first story ever was 'stolen' but I did have to fill in the narrative and the details. The assignment won me so much 'acclaim' from my teacher that it was read aloud by her, and it was the first time I thought, 'Hey, maybe I could make some hay with this writing stuff.' Then I began writing poetry and songs just to attract girls. That worked only to a limit, but it did have some effect! In my junior year of high school, while living under my aunt's and uncle's roof in Georgia, I began work on my first novel, determined to write a sequel to Mark Twain's classic title The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which I'd read after Tom Sawyer, and so I wanted a sequel that I decided to write--Daniel Webster Jackson and the Wrong-way Railroad. I completed it during my senior year at Wells High School, Chicago, having returned home to mom and dad and siblings. That book taught me the value of researching as the Underground Railroad was the biggest mystery of its day, and the manuscript won me a full-ride scholarship and a campus job at Northwestern University. 

Where did you conduct your research? And how did you choose your genres?

In my early days, there was nothing better than browsing the library stacks for my research. I began as an author of historical novels, Salem witchcraft was the first footnote in a book that caught my eye, and I did, off and on, over ten years of writing and researching my three-volume title Children of Salem--Love Amid the Witch Trials (1692 Puritan New England). I had previously written several other historicals for young adult audiences, and I had expected to do historicals and nothing else. However, the boom in publishing in the early 80s was a chase for a publisher to find another Stephen King, so horror was a genre that, at the time, in great demand. I went for it, and I wound up doing horror and have continued, primarily with my Blood Screams Series of ten titles, writing originally under the pen name Geoffrey Caine. From horror, I transitioned into police and crime novels at the suggestion of none other than Dean R. Koontz, this after establishing a correspondence with the #2 bestselling suspense and horror author in the nation after King. I still write historical and alternate historicals like my Titanic 2012 and my Bismarck 2013, and trust me, I still utilize research for just about every book I write. I still love a real library, but I do use Google these days as well. But who can beat the solace of a library?  

How did you go about getting published?

I have written and published (thanks in great part to the freedom of Indie Publishing of ebooks and audibles) 82 titles, something no one accomplishes with today's legacy/traditional publishing. I'm juggling something like a separate series in any number of genres. Still doing historicals like The Red Path, still doing horror as in Vampire Babies, and still doing crime novels with my 'Edge' to be a writer, it was due to having been so inspired by my reading of all things Twain, and it blew my mind that he was so very versatile, and I said to myself, "If I am going to be a writer, I want to be as versatile in more than one genre as Mark Twain proved himself to be versatile! 

How do you select your themes? 

I select my themes and topics or rather they select me, as my mind is always like an antennae for the weird, the strange, the odd, the bizarro! If I see or stumble onto something remarkable in science, in history, in human nature, I will pounce upon it and ask myself when can I turn that into workable fiction, purposeful fiction, useful fiction that while a pretense, proves a truth. This practice began with the Underground Railroad, which was flat until I took the attitude that hold on, this was the greatest mystery of the day in 1850 Missouri. Once I made the historical a Mystorical, it clicked. I’ve been doing that ever since. But I will say, so many ideas bombard me that I hear the voices of wanna-be characters shouting, "Take me! Take me! Take my story next!" I may never get to all the voices in my head...Ha! 

The same teacher in high school who got my manuscript into the hands of an NU recruiting counselor was an actress in her youth and was teaching acting classes at the school, Ms Evelyn Page. She inspired me and also urged me to be sure to find a paying job like teaching if I was going into writing fiction as a career, warning that I'd starve otherwise! I went into teaching also when I tried my hand at giving an off-the-cuff speech before a packed room of fellow students, and I was thrilled at the idea that I held that audience in my hands for that duration of time. It was a group calling themselves Future Teachers of America. I was not a member but..I was never a joiner, certainly not football or ROTC. So, once at NU, I majored in English education with plans to teach English in a high school somewhere. I wound up instead teaching freshman English, research writing, creative writing, and literature at the college level. 

Who inspired you to write? 

Mark Twain inspired my beginnings as a writer in doing first a single scene in loving imitation of the man's style. Creating my own story using Twain's 'voice' as my guide, and thus my first long work, a novel of 200 pages was accomplished after I did well with that first scene. The hands on work itself taught me that the next and the next scene grows organically out of the one that came before, episodic in nature. But I had also read all of Alexander Dumas, Steinbeck, Faulkner, Hawthorne, Melville, and of course more modern authors like Harper Lee, Shirley Jackson, Robert Bloch, Richard Matheson, William Peter Blatty, and too numerous to mention but I have to say Rod Serling. I was and continue to be fascinated with the super-natural elements and anything unusual, and I love an O'Henry twist of an end. 

Advice to young writers? 

To give useful, purposeful advice to young writers, I'd urge them to get hold of Jerome Stern's Making Shapely Fiction, which I used in my creative writing classes, and maybe too get hold of a copy of my class between covers in ebook or on audible: Dead On Writing, the how-to for the dysfunctional writer in us all. The first book opens your eyes to using archetypal forms, shapes that exist like the 'coming of age' or the 'boy meets girl' or the 'heroic journey' shape and how a writer should not run from these established forms but rather plug into them. Successful authors plug into what has worked since the writing of the Bible. 

As to my class, I've had many a student go on to publishing. But even if a young person ignores these two titles, s/he should do this: write a mystery, as this form more than any other genre forces out of you a plot, and without a plot, a story is unfinished. Myself, if I write a mystery it will have a romance going on as well, and if I write a romance, it will carry the water for the mystery within it. Even a good western or historical like my Annie's War has a romance going on. 

I understand that you have an editing service. 

As to my editing service, it sometimes gets me through the rough summers when I do not have classes to teach and thus like most musicians or sculptors, I do not have a steady income. I do what I can to entice people to avail themselves of my editorial services, but most either do not feel they need a good scrubbing and book autopsy as I call it, or they simply cannot afford a professional editor. Frankly, many a New York editor working freelance charge outrageously crazy prices. Many fledgling writers are fearful of getting bad advice or once getting chapters back, that their 'baby' will have been murdered! I ask for their first 30 pages,  then go over it for $90 and at that point we mutually part ways or we mutually agree to do the entire novel. That works well for both sides, and often, once I have done that first 30, I urge the author to extrapolate the 'repeating' problems and edit in/out the rest of the book on his or her own, and many take that out, but many want the full autopsy after seeing those first 30. 

I want to sincerely thank you, Jean Henry Mead, for your questions and I feel quite, absolutely honored to be interviewed by you on a platform that has interviewed one of my great heroes--Elmore Leonard. 

-- Robert W. Walker http://www.robertwalkerbooks.com