Dennis Lehane's terrific story, THE DROP, arrives in bookstores and movie theaters this week. Pick up the novel (based on Dennis's short story, "Animal Rescue") and go check out the motion picture, starring Tom Hardy, Noomi Rapace, and James Galdolfini (in his final role). Dennis wrote the screenplay, which details "a robbery gone awry and an investigation that digs deep into the neighborhood's past where friends, families, and foes all work together to make a living -- no matter the cost." I loved the original short story and was lucky enough to get my hands on a preview copy of the novel. I'll be first in line this weekend to see the film. Great stuff as always from the master, Dennis Lehane. 

With all this activity this week for Lehane fans, it seems like the perfect time to revisit the Q&A Dennis did with me a while back. He talks about fiction and the creative life, and gives some words of wisdom that hang over my own writing desk (because I chickened out on getting them as a tattoo). Go here to read the Q&A. And get in on THE DROP this week!

I first met Ron Giles some twenty-five years ago, when our corporate career paths crossed at QVC, a then-fledgling shopping channel/electronic retailer. Part of the founding class of QVC, Ron was an entrepreneurial television veteran, whose many innovations are still used today by programs selling products on TV. Working with Ron during those years, I always appreciated his leadership, gentlemanly demeanor, and creativity. He was a kindred spirit. 

After he retired from television, Ron turned his attention to a new frontier: writing for print. His first effort, On Harrisonville Avenue, was an amusing memoir about his own youth in a mill town on the Ohio River. His first novel, Cottonwood Pass, delved into the world of suspense and global politics with a story set in Colorado. I particularly enjoyed the imagination behind his third book, Great Heats, historic fiction set 1,000 years ago among the mounds and earthworks of what is now Southern Ohio. 

Ron's most recent novel, Locusts and Wild Honey, is a captivating novel of interwoven short stories, featuring a ghost, a witch, and a curse that follows generations of the Porter family. Something wicked this way comes and Ron handles it all with skill and insight.

Finally, I'm thrilled to learn that Ron's short story, "The Friday Night Dance," will be included in Every River on Earth: Writing from Appalachian Ohio. Edited by Neil Carpathios, this anthology of poetry and stories features the work of forty Ohio writers, including Donald Ray Pollock. Watch for it in January 2015. (Another Ron Giles short story, "The Prey," is featured in Chester County Fiction, the well-received anthology from Oermead Press.)

A teacher and historian. A television veteran and interactive-TV pioneer. A singer and member of The Hymn Society. A writer. Ron Giles brings his talents and interests to his fiction. And I'm so glad he took the time to visit the blog today with this fascinating Q&A about the creative life.

Hi Ron, thanks for being here. Tell us: when did you know you wanted to be a writer?
The decision to try writing a book came to me late in life—in 2007. Retirement had been forced on me in 2001 with the 9/11 attacks. After that tragedy, corporations retrenched and became conservative with their spending, not using Television Consultants as they once had. With no work on the horizon, my wife and I began traveling in the US, and while in Northern California, I picked up a John Steinbeck novella, Cannery Row, at the Monterrey Airport. Steinbeck’s writing had spoken to me as a college student and years later, I fell gladly and comfortably back into his characterizations, descriptions, and dialogue woven around a good story.

While reading Cannery Row, at age 65, I decided to try my hand at writing a book.

I make the book distinction because during my 35-year television career, I had written many intros/outros, commercials and public service announcements—short form, compact communications—and with our church program, "Hymns and Their Stories"—I was writing three-minute histories of a hymn’s creation—but I had never, on my own, set out to write something with characters and a plot that takes place over days, weeks, or years. I brushed up on the principles of writing and took a Great Courses study from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, sat down and began. The book was to be a murder mystery, set in my hometown during the 1950s. The planning, flexibility, and fluidity necessary to manage writing such a plot quickly revealed itself and I threw that idea away and settled instead on writing a memoir set in 1955 when I was thirteen.

Who or what inspired you as a kid or teenager? 
I found the life of Christ an engrossing and inspiring story then and still do today. The rapid move from being acclaimed as the Messiah to being executed in a horrible way was tragic. Yet the grace with which Christ faced the inevitable was stirring and admirable. I still marvel at it.

As a twelve year old, when I began reading literature, I started with Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles. I was reading it over an RC Cola at the local restaurant hangout, when a town character, Doug, approached me and asked if I had read any American authors. After thinking about it, and answering negatively, he led me outside to his car, a 1948 Hudson, in which some people believed he lived, sleeping on the front seat, because the back seat was taken with his “library” as he called it – hundreds of books, organized in some way that only he understood, with cardboard boxes stacked on top of each other, bulging with paperbacks and hard covers . He reached a long arm in and pulled out a hardback edition of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. “Read this,” he commanded. “It will change your life.” I finished the Hardy novel and then read Twain. The clash of the Victorian style with Twain’s vernacular and profane style was glorious, and, Doug was right—the racial and social attitudes confronted by Huck rattled the teenage world I was sure that I understood, until then.

What creative work most recently inspired you?
I recently finished Absence of Mind by Marilynne Robinson—a 130-page exploration of the conflict between science and religion. A novelist with a Pulitzer Prize and a Hemingway Award, she shines her considerable intellect and vocabulary on the place of “mind” in a biological being.

In moments of self-doubt, how do you push through?
Doubt about the path that I have started down, or having written myself into a corner, or not having any words come to me are all things that happen to me. To get out of this, I force myself to write, even though my instinct is to keep my hands away from a keyboard. I might (probably will) throw away what I write during this time, but the act of writing focuses me on what I should be doing, even though the words might be wrong or I spend too many words “telling” the story rather than using dialog to advance the plot.

Have you ever abandoned a creative project?
I have a “whodunit” puzzler synopsis that I set down on two or three pages of paper and then stopped because I had not completely graphed out the twists and turns of the plot; I have never rekindled the desire to return and pick it back up. It involved the discovery of four Homo sapiens skeletons in a lava tube located among the Deccan Traps of India and the suspicious deaths of each explorer on the team who made the discovery. Hmmmm.

Which of your works comes closest to the way you heard/saw it in your head?
My third book, Great Heats, was pretty much how I envisioned it. I had grown up in an area of Ohio where the Adena/Hopewell people from the pre-historic period of this continent left evidence of their life and their art. In my hometown today is a horseshoe-shaped mound that they built 2000 years ago. The rims of the Horseshoe Mound are eight feet high and it is 75 feet long at the “U.” In all the years while growing up that I saw the mounds and their ceremonial pipes, I only saw objects. But one day in 2008, while visiting the Hopewell National Park (it used to be called “Mound City”) in Chillicothe, Ohio, I asked myself about the lives of the people that built the mounds and fashioned the ceremonial objects —their triumphs, their joys, their adversities. It wasn’t long afterwards that an outline emerged.

What was the best creative advice you ever received?