Member Spotlight: Robert Frederick Inman

Why is writing important to you and why do you think it’s an important medium for the world? Writing and storyteller are an essential part of who I am. Writing is how we organize our lives, preserve our past, nurture our myths and legends, and share ourselves with our communities. The world would be a sadder place without our stories.

What are your tried and tested remedies to cure writer’s block? I’ve never had writer’s block, and that’s because my stories all start with a central character that I can believe in. I put that character in a particular time and place, surround them with other characters, and give them a dilemma. Then it’s time to let them go to become themselves and follow at a respective distance to see what happens.

What is your favorite time to write? I’m a morning writer, the time when I’m freshest. But I’ve been known to rise in the middle of the night and write down an idea that’s occurred to me from the darkness.

What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever received and would like to impart to other writers? My fiction teacher in graduate school, Barry Hannah, said the way you write is to apply the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair. You just do the work, making that first scary and challenging effort to imagine a story, knowing that it won’t be right at the start. But then comes the fun part — making it better.

What excites you most about being a writer in today’s age? The older I get, the more I want to tell my stories, to leave something of my essence in print and pass along what I’ve learned about the world and humanity. There are more avenues than ever to do that, and that excites me.

Robert Inman’s Villages is out now with Livingston Press.