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Questions and Answers
William Rawlings, Jr.
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Note: Some of the following Questions and Answers are excerpted from the Southern Scribe and Books & Authors interviews. The original interviews are available through the links to the left.
Where do you get
your ideas?
From my long and checkered life. Actually, a lot of
what I put in my books are little snippets of my own reality strung
together to make a plot. I do a lot of my “writing” lying in bed between
2 and
4 a.m.
What is your writing schedule?
How do you write your book? I tend to write intensively, often for days
at a time while taking minimal breaks. That’s the way I have always
worked, and I find it most productive for me.
I have a private office with good reference materials and internet
access as my hideaway writing
spot.
You are a classic Southern Gentleman -- that is, you
hold land that has been a part of your family for generations, work in
the professional arena and do research. You support your community in
civic organizations and historic preservation while finding time to
pursue your whims, and you are well read. Is it a role you were born to
play?
You are most kind to describe me as such. In all honesty, I think that
my life has evolved as it has more out of chance than design. During my
educational years I thought for the longest time that I’d go into
academic medicine. That would have involved my living in a city
somewhere and devoting my time and energy to a single field of pursuit.
I’d applied and been accepted for a Cardiology fellowship at Johns
Hopkins. But something changed—I’m not sure when or where—and I decided
to move back home to live and work near my family and friends. One of
the reasons that I’m involved in so many things is that there is a lot
to do here. We have a good community and I enjoy being an active part of
it. Perhaps I was destined to become what I am today; I don’t really
know. Suffice it to say that I’m quite happy with my life and if I had
it to all over again, I’d do the same thing with even greater
enthusiasm.
What was it about Sandersville, Georgia, that
made you want to settle in a small town instead of a major city?
I know this may sound a bit strange, but it’s hard for to me understand
why any sentient human being, given the option, would want to live in
most major American cities. Admittedly there are advantages in terms of
proximity to educational and cultural centers as well as shopping, major
sports arenas and the like. But to my mind these benefits are more than
offset by what I refer to as day-to-day quality of life issues like
crime, pollution, traffic and political corruption. The thought of
living cheek on jowl in a mass produced housing development populated by
transient neighbors is anathema to me.
To answer your question more directly, I live in Sandersville because it
is my home. It is where my parents and grandparents for generations
before me have lived. It is where I was born, and no doubt will be where
I die. Here I feel that I am a contributing member of the community.
Here I have a degree of freedom to work, grow, earn and learn that would
be impossible in a larger more hierarchal environment. If I had settled
in a city, my life would have been far different, and far less
rewarding.
I live with my wife Beth and our two girls on a fairly large farm on the
edge of town. If I could sit down and image the sort of place that I’d
like to raise a family, I couldn’t create a better one. Our house is in
the country, but the girls go to a great school and are being brought up
in what I hope is a wholesome environment. With that said, we’re
certainly not culturally deprived. Atlanta and Savannah are each
two hours away. From Atlanta, we’re an overnight flight from Europe or
South America. I like to think that my family, like so many others,
lives in a small town out of choice, not necessity.
Do you have any hobbies? What are they? How do
they enhance your writing?
I
travel a lot. I've been to Europe more than thirty times and Central and
South America more than twenty. I speak passable-if not fluent-Spanish.
I spent a couple of weeks in Chile, Argentina and Costa Rica earlier
this year, and I've got several more trips planned for the fall. Also, I
usually have a construction project going. Most recently I built some
loft apartments in an old Masonic Hall on Sandersville's City Square. I
collect Orient Export Porcelains. How do my hobbies enhance my writing?
I get the details right.
You
are extremely well traveled. Are you an adventure traveler?
I’d definitely have described myself at one time as an adventure
traveler, but a little bit of age plus a wife and two children have kept
my wanderlust in check—somewhat—in recent years. In my thirties I spent
a lot of time in the mountains and jungles of South America. I still
manage to get down that way a couple of times a year, but usually for
much tamer pursuits.
Describe a favorite moment while traveling.
A favorite traveling moment? There’ve been so many! They range from
sewing up piranha bites in the Amazon jungle to swilling cheap vodka on
the top of a rocky crag in the midst of the Mongolian steppes to eating
fried rat at a restaurant in rural Bolivia. Travel for me is like that
dog riding in the back of a pickup truck with his face in the wind and
his tongue hanging out. He’s assaulted with sights, sounds and smells of
things new, exciting and different. It’s a big world out there and I
regret that in my lifetime I can see only a tiny part of it.
Describe a moment
that changed your life.
A moment that changed my life? That, too, is very difficult to answer.
Once, when I was in my late thirties and things were not going well for
me I spent several weeks hiking through jungle in southern Venezuela,
climbing up a near-impossible 10,000 foot high mountain just to see what
was at the top, and then hiking out again. It was one of those times in
your life when you’ve got to make some tough decisions and know that
things will not go smoothly, no matter what. After that self-imposed
ordeal I came back with a new attitude, ready to face anything, and with
the moral courage to do what needed to be done.
Who
gave you the love of reading? How are you carrying on this tradition
with your children?
I think it was my grandmother who stressed the importance of reading.
She read to me before I was able to read myself, and then encouraged me
as I got older. She had that Victorian mindset that “every good home
should have a library” and that I should be well versed in “good”
literature. Perhaps that sounds a bit strange in that my fall more in
the popular fiction genre, but what I write, and what I read for
recreation are often times quite different. As to passing on my love of
reading to my girls, when I built my home several years ago I included a
very nice library in the plans. They have a great selection of
literature in front of them ranging from popular fiction to classical
works. I try to encourage them to be curious and reward them for new
found knowledge. I’m just going to make them wait until they’re a shade
older to read one of my novels.
Who
were your earliest influences and why?
Two people influenced my interest in things literary. One was my
grandmother, who read to me from the time I was a very young child up
until well after I could read on my on. She had a degree from Wesleyan,
a woman's college in Macon. She believed in “classical” education and
had a working knowledge of Greek and Latin. She taught me to love books.
The other person was my mother's brother Jesse. He was a brilliant man,
and valued knowledge for knowledge's sake. He taught me curiosity.
Between the two, I grew up valuing a broad and detailed view of the
world. As for writing, I had never seriously considered it before I
wrote the manuscript for The
Lazard Legacy.
But with thatsaid, let me make it clear that if I had not had the
literary and academic background that was such an integral part of my
childhood, I never could have considered writing at all.
Why
do you write?
That is a hard question to answer. I'd like to give some simple and
trite response and say that it's fun, or that I enjoy the notoriety that
it has brought, or that I'm making lots of money at it. All of those
answers would be patently wrong. I think I write because I enjoy telling
stories. I like to be able to package emotions—joy, fear, sorrow,
happiness, what have you—in words and then see those same feelings
reproduced in the mind of the reader. I enjoy creating a fictional
environment and the fictional characters that inhabit it. And it's a
challenge—it's very difficult to write successful fiction.
Who are your favorite
writers and why?
I read all sorts of authors, from contemporary suspense fiction to
history. If you wanted to pin me down as to my most favorite authors,
they'd be far, far different from anything I'd write. I really like the
works of Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa, to name a
couple. The earlier works of V.S. Naipaul are superb. And sometimes I
get a beer, lay by the pool and read Stuart Woods. Much depends on my
mood.
