Introducing...Ron Carlson

I have been writing since my school days. My fifth grade teacher, Mrs. Thornton, allowed me to put on skits with my friends which I wrote under the heavy influence of monster movies, tarzan movies, and a sense of real wonder about the world. I continued writing in college at the University of Utah and I began to see that writing would be an adventure itself. By this I mean, I had thought that writing fiction would be a clear and organized endeavor. I didn’t know what I know now, after ten books, that writing fiction is about going into the unknown each time. We start with what we know and we write from there toward what we don’t know, into the dark, building each sentence carefully so we can believe it and find out – if we stay in the room – what our stories are. In Five Skies you can see me building a world in those first forty pages, process by process. I was so glad to see Ronnie finally get that tent up –with a little help. In the book I worked forward scene by scene, and then, maybe a dozen times, I stopped and made decisions about the direction I might go next. I wanted to make each step in the book a firm and credible step. More soon. April 30, 2009. Ron Carlson