By JULIE CARLE
BG Independent News
When author Robin Yocum tells audiences about his writing process, he talks about his launch point, “that idea or one little nugget of information that maybe I can wrap a book around it.”
For a boy who grew up in the Ohio River Valley where he couldn’t see more than a quarter mile in one direction and an eighth of a mile in the other direction because of the valley, Bowling Green was his launch point.
“I came up to Bowling Green and was amazed. You could see forever,” Yocum said during recent presentations at the Bowling Green Kiwanis Club and the Wood County District Public Library.
“I’ve always felt like everything I’ve had in my professional life was the result of the foundation I got at Bowling Green, but without (former BGSU football coach) Don Nehlen, there would be no Bowling Green,” he said.
College was a necessity if he was to avoid working in a steel mill, according to his steel worker father and his Grandmother Yocum. His father arranged for his high school-aged son to tour the steel mill. “I think he did it especially to say, ‘If you don’t go to college this is what the rest of your life is.’ It had a pretty resounding impact on me. This is not where I want to be,” Yocum admitted.
With five children in the family living on a steelworker’s salary, they never missed any meals, but there wasn’t a lot of money. He knew he would need help to afford college in the mid-1970s. “I got a call from Bowling Green State University football coach Don Nehlen. He said, ‘I don’tknow if you are good enough to play here, but if you walk on and make the team, I will give you a scholarship.’ Holy cow! That was the best offer I had, so I jumped on it. I made the team, got the scholarship and got my bachelor’s degree in journalism.
“I’ve always been very grateful to Nehlen and Bowling Green State University. I loved the school and the town, and I always enjoy coming back every chance I get,” Yocum said.
The invitation to talk in Bowling Green this time came from Kiwanian and former BG Mayor Richard Edwards, who was BGSU vice president for external affairs in the late 1970s and Yocum’s instructor for his final journalism/public relations course at BGSU.
They reconnected when Yocum worked for the Columbus Dispatch as a crime and investigative reporter and Edwards worked at the Center of Science and Industry.
His book-writing career started with two non-fiction books based on notes he kept from his investigative and crime reporting days. The first, “Insured for Murder,” was co-written with Dispatch colleague Catherine Candisky in 1993. In 2004, he wrote “Dead Before Deadline.”
“Favorite Sons” in 2011 was his first foray into fiction, and it was liberating.
“As a reporter you are always writing about other people and what they do. I wanted to start with a blank sheet of paper and my ideas, my imagination, my words, and create something from nothing. That’s been my prime motivator for all these years,” Yocum said.
After writing “Favorite Sons,” he had an idea for a sequel because the story ends before readers know whether the book’s narrator Hutchinson Van Buren is elected to be the Ohio Attorney General.
“I started writing the sequel. I knew how it ended. I liked what I planned out, but I got about 20,000 words into it and I put it away. I wasn’t excited about it. I couldn’t get any traction with the sequel, and I couldn’t figure out why,” Yocum said.
The words sat untouched for several years before he retrieved them from the stacks of notes and papers that he never throws away. He pulled out the start of the sequel and realized why he had stalled out. The prologue was set in Columbus where Van Buren’s election had taken place.
Compared to the industrial, blue collar backdrop of where Yocum grew up, Columbus was very sterile.
“Once I moved the action back to the Ohio Valley, the book really picked up steam and I was able to write it and be excited about it. It was quite a lesson that as a writer you should write what you know. My other books have been successful because they are set down in the valley. I
don’t think I will be straying far from the area,” Yocum said.
The sequel is his latest book, “The Sacrifice of Lester Yates,” which was a finalist for the 2021 Dashiell Hammett Prize for literary excellence in crime writing. Yocum has published eight books and has several more written that he hopes to publish soon.
Talking about his latest book and the usual steps he takes to write a book, Yocum said he spends a couple of weeks thinking about the book and generating ideas.
“I won’t put any words on page one until I know what’s on the last page. By then I feel like I can draw the road map to get there as long as I know where there is. If I don’t know how it ends, I feel like I’m just spinning my wheels,” he explained.
He called himself “a very checklist kind of guy” to help stay focused. He strives to write a minimum of 500 words a day. At that pace, he can write a book in eight months.
“For people who want to be writers, I tell them, the first 10,000 words are pretty easy because you are excited about the new book. The last 10,000 words are pretty easy because you can see light at the end of the tunnel. It’s those 90,000 words in the middle that are a grind.”
While he likes all of his books and prefers not to rank them in any order, “The Essay” (2012) has a special place in his heart. About a young boy who grew up on the wrong side of the tracks and won an essay contest, the book was Yocum’s first attempt at writing in first person. It is a practice he continues to use in most of his books.
“When I sat down to write that book—the first paragraph: ‘It was never easy being the class dirty-neck, the derisive term used for those of us unfortunate enough to have grown up along Red Dog Road, a dead end strip of gravel and mud buried deep in the bowels of Appalachian Ohio.’ —as soon as those words came off my fingers it was as if Jimmy Lee Hickam took up residence in my head and would not stop talking. It wasn’t so much writing as it was taking dictation.”
Finishing the first book was his biggest accomplishment to date. “It convinced me that I had the. discipline to sit down and write a book. It may not have been very good, but I finished it. That gave me the confidence that I could do this. From there, I could write another one and see if I could make it better and move on from there.”
Yocum has successfully moved on from his Bowling Green launch point, and while he may not know the story’s ending, he said, “I love what I do now. It’s nice to have that avenue to be creative.”
