In high school Ralph always wanted to write fiction. However, he had great difficulty in coming up with ideas and the development of the few ideas he was able to generate. His mother, who had started out as an English teacher, said that was due primarily to his lack of life experience.
In his sophomore year of college he took his first class in acting. Not only had the acting bug already bitten, but it allowed him a much greater insight into the way author’s write.
An actor has to fully understand the character he/she is creating. To do that the actor not only must pay attention to the words the author has his/her character say, but also what other characters are saying about his/her character. The combination of those two pieces of information, along with any character descriptions the author gives, provides the actor with the food to feed his/her performance. Ralph found that by applying that knowledge to general reading he was able to more easily understand anything he read.
During his senior year in college, he started his first novel. He really liked the creative process; however, he found it was extremely time-consuming, so he stopped. Over the years, he not only lost that first uncompleted rough draft, which was handwritten in spiral notebooks (computers are so much easier); he can now no longer recall much of what it was about.
After college, he went directly into the Army for two years, with one year in Viet Nam.
Upon completion of military service, he started teaching high school Speech, Drama and Debate/Forensics. Near the end of his fourth year in education, the teachers went on strike. He did not like the idea of going on strike and how the striking teachers treated those who crossed the line, so he resigned.
He held a variety of jobs for the next 3 ½ years. Then he decided to go back into education and happily stayed with it for 32 more years.
In the early spring of 2008, he was considering retiring. Heart problems had made him give up coaching his high school’s Chess team in 2007 and that took away part of his enjoyment of education. His wife told him that she did not want him to sit at home and vegetate. She wanted him to have a plan of how to spend his time - other than sitting in his recliner watching the western channel all day..
He had already written four non-fiction books (three on Chess and one on Education), but none were published. So he decided to return to writing fiction. During the 2008-2009 school year he came up with storylines/subplots for the first two books in the Johnny Ringo – Bounty Hunter series and the first two books in the Crazy Runner – Trailblazer series.
He retired from education in May 2009 and began writing fiction full-time. Because of his theatrical background (undergraduate major in Theatre and directing over 100 plays for high school and community theatre productions) he had studied the manner in which many playrights develop a storyline and that aided him greatly in his writing.
He usually writes from two to four hours each morning, Monday through Friday. He leaves the weekends free to spend with his wife.
His completing process is that on the same day he finishes the last chapter in a book he would apply for the copyright online. He would then set the book aside for at least two weeks, while he started on the next book or did something else. After the two weeks off, he would begin reading it again for the purpose of editing.
The main problem he has with the editing process is that when editing, he is more worried about story continuity, character development and missing minor story elements than he is with the actual editing for grammar and punctuation.
He also quickly found the importance of “backwriting”; which is going back and entering little things that make what is happening now make sense or at least gives the character the background to have certain information or talents. For Johnny Ringo – 1881 and Crazy Runner – 1751 he found it was extremely important to go back to the first book in each series and add things to make the character’s knowledge and experience match what they were going to need to be able to accomplish later.
He keeps a separate file he calls “Characters & Storylines” for each series. Whenever he would think of something for a storyline/subplot, he will add it to the list in that file. When he would finish with one storyline/subplot and was ready to begin another, he would just pick one from the list that he believed was an appropriate way to proceed from the just completed storyline. Whenever he would use a character’s name, he would list that name along with a description of the character and their relationship to any other character, so it would be easier for him to insert that character into another book in the series and also not to accidentally use the same name twice in a series. This file kept him from ever having "writers block".
Each storyline/subplot is a separate section within a book. Sometimes a storyline/subplot will only take one chapter and other times a storyline will take ten chapters, but most of them are three to six chapters – which he felt were just right for an hour long television show, which you will find explained in the information about Johnny Ringo – Bounty Hunter: 1880.
Since the mid-1990s Ralph's favorite saying has been, "Every day is a good day, but some days are better". That statement appears in the first volume of each of his series.