Christy Award Fiction Finalist Havin' Fun With Life
by Randall Murphree
June 9, 2005
(AgapePress) - Charles Martin's passion plays well, even over the telephone. This interview reveals his thoughts on several things: Life and laughter -- he loves both and laughs a lot. His wife -- nearly everything important begins with "Christy and I " His three sons -- coaching T-ball is better than the World Series. His writing -- it's how he makes sense of life. His readers -- he keeps a scrapbook of their letters.The Jacksonville, Florida, novelist's first title, The Dead Don't Dance, is a finalist for a Christy Award for excellence in Christian fiction. The winner will be revealed in July. The down-to-earth Martin talks in stream-of-consciousness fashion, answering questions before they have a chance to be asked, laughin' and talkin' and jumpin' from subject to subject -- and, yes, leavin' the g off every time. And almost makin' one think, "This guy's just havin' too much fun!"
Read Randall Murphree's review of The Dead Don't Dance
Q: When did you first know that you wanted to write novels?
A: When I was 15, I started realizing that the way I made sense of stuff, of my life, was writing short stories.
By the time I finished high school, I had 10 or 12 really polished short stories. At least, I thought they were polished. I'd show them to family members, and pretty soon I got up enough gumption to send one to the Saturday Evening Post. When I was in college, I tried the New Yorker and I never got published anywhere. Ever. All my queries, all my short stories -- nothing ever got published.
Q: With all that polish?
A: (With a hearty laugh at himself): I thought they were polished! I didn't have a lot of encouragement to keep writing, at least from a professional standpoint. I had one teacher in college, a doctoral student teaching one of my writing classes. I wrote a story about my uncle who had passed away.
When I got it back from her, it didn't have a grade on it, but it looked like somebody had put it in the shower. She cried on it. When I asked her about my grade -- I was kind of worried about the class -- she said, "I can't grade that. We don't put grades on stuff like that."
I said, "Am I going to pass your class?"
And she said, "Yeah, you're going to pass my class."
That was one of the first times that I knew my stuff touched people outside my family. I just kept working on my stories. I was afraid to say I wanted to be a writer, because how are you going to make a living at that? There's not a roadmap for doing this.
And I wanted to get married. Christy was a year behind me in school, and I needed to save money to buy a ring. So I moved to Atlanta and started waiting tables at Houston's Restaurant.
Q: What was the genesis of The Dead Don't Dance?
A: Fast forward three or four years. I'd finished my masters [at Regent University]. They'd taken me in the doctoral program which was a wonder of wonders. I was driving to work one morning at UPS where I worked the morning pre-load. I had to be at work at three in the morning, and would get off about nine, come home and study, and go to class at night.
I was driving through a tunnel and a scene flashed across my mind about a guy standing in a ditch. There was a car next to him, and it was upside down. And I knew that he knew there were some people in it, and they were somehow close to him, but I didn't know who was in it. That was the first scene that I saw in The Dead Don't Dance.
I started making notes that morning on the way to work. Over the next year -- that was probably 1996 -- I kept making notes on scenes. I finished my dissertation in 1999, and I quickly finished my novel after that. That was the first time I'd kind of had a full story that long come to mind.
Q: To what extent are your characters patterned after real people?
A: All of my characters are certainly a composite of people I know, have met or can dream up. Let's take for instance, Bryce. Everybody wants to know where Bryce comes from. There is one fellow in this world, who I have yet to identify, who I love dearly, who is the genesis for Bryce. He's also very different [from Bryce]. This guy doesn't even drink, so that's one obvious difference.
Q: Tell me about a favorite response from a reader.
A: I got an e-mail the other day from a guy I had met in our church. He asked, "You write?"
I said, "Yeah." He found my book and read it. And he wrote me an e-mail and told me his story. He said, "Charles, what I didn't tell you [when we met] was that I'm a recovering crack addict. I've been clean six years. It took three tours in prison to straighten me out. I love to read. I read all the time."
He went on to talk about how much he liked my book. That e-mail went in my scrapbook. It struck me that while that guy was in prison, I was writing The Dead Don't Dance. He made my day; he made my week.
Read Part 2 of this interview with Charles Martin
(to be posted on June 10, 2005)
Randall Murphree, a regular contributor to AgapePress, is editor of AFA Journal, a monthly publication of the American Family Association.
