Interview with Larry Buttram | Sound Authors Radio

November 28, 2008

Dr. Kent: Welcome to Sound Authors. Today is August 1st, it’s finally August. Larry Buttram, author of The Third Generation; Stephanie Chandler, author of The Authors Guide to Building an Online Platform: Leveraging the Internet to Sell More Books. My third guest is Yolanda Renee, author of Murder, Madness and Love and my last guest as always is a musician. His name is Andrew Calhoun, contemporary folk singer. My first guest is Larry Buttram, the author of The Third Generation. Welcome to the show.

Larry Buttram: Well thank you Dr. Kent, I appreciate you letting me be on.

Dr. Kent: Tell me a little bit about The Third Generation.

Larry Buttram: It’s the third in my I call it the false witness trilogy, I’ve got two other novels – False Witness and Honor Thy Sister and The Third Generation is the last in the trilogy. The books track the lives of a white family and a black family in Tennessee and you see how their lives are thrown together over a shooting incident so you track each generation and how their lives are intertwined.

The Third Generation is kind of ironic because it’s the third story in the trilogy but it builds with the younger girl in the family and she’s a freshman at the University of Tennessee and she uncovers something by accident that puts her life in jeopardy. Something actually happened decades before that puts her life in jeopardy. So you follow her life and see what happens with that.

Dr. Kent: This is the third book in a trilogy. What inspired you to do a trilogy?

Larry Buttram: Well I grew up in east Tennessee, not far from where the stories are set. I grew up in the 50s and 60s and I’ve been writing my whole life since I was 12 years old. When I retired from AT&T I just had the vision of a young boy walking down a dusty country road back in the early 60s and I thought what would happen if he was alone and two strangers picked him up and he was white and the strangers were black. They gave him a ride and then a deputy sheriff stops them and starts harassing the two guys and one of the strangers kills the deputy and they get away and never get caught.

So I sort of envisioned this scene, I don’t know it just came to me and then the rest of the book sort of built on that. For 25 years you see what happens to the families over that shooting incident and how it impacts them.

Dr. Kent: What’s your process of writing? I always like to ask fiction authors what’s your process of sitting down and creating characters. Do they play around in your life? Do you wake up in the morning and you know what your character is doing that day? How do you do that?

Larry Buttram: You know, that’s an interesting character. My characters, I mean the book is fiction but there is factual information behind the scenes. Information and what’s going on in the background is factual. But the characters, I spend a lot of time developing them and I don’t know if this will make sense, but they sort of take on a life of their own. I live with them. Actually when I was writing False Witness, the first one, there would actually be times when I would forget that Ethan; Ethan Ward is the main character and I would forget that he wasn’t real.

One time I even thought, well I’ll ask Ethan what he thinks about that and I stopped and said, “Wait, he’s not a real person you know!” But so yeah, I’d go to bed at night thinking about them and in the morning I think about this. You sort of get, at least for me, I get obsessed when I’m writing a book and the people are just real and once you develop them, I think they take on a life of their own. You know there are things they would do and things they won’t do and the story sort of takes on a life of it own. Does that make sense at all?

Dr. Kent: Let’s say how does the book compare to your own life? Do you find that things that have happened to you come out in your books?

Larry Buttram: It certainly might. My mother passed away last year, she was 95 years old and up until the very end her mind was probably better than mine but when she read the book she said oh, I’m sorry I know that little boy in the book was you and I’m sorry about all the things you went through.” I said, “Mom, the boy in the book wasn’t me.”

There’s things that I saw and I realize there’s things I put in the book of things I’ve seen in my life I guess it was a better version of me but I really didn’t think too much about it until she said, “Well I know this happened and that happened and so on.” So I guess there are some of my own feelings and emotions put into the book but at the same time I tried to be objective. The main hero in the book Ethan was probably a lot better person than I was, especially with all the things that he went through.

Dr. Kent: Tell me a little about False Witness and Honor Thy Sister because of course this is the third in a series. Folks I assume have to start with the beginning? How does that work.

Larry Buttram: Well you don’t have to. When you do a trilogy and one of the things I struggled with and I talked with a lot of other writers. You don’t know if people are going to pick up the first, the second or the third. Obviously I think if you’re just beginning False Witness I still sell a lot more of that one than the other one, but each book although they’re a trilogy, they give you some background information about what happened before but not so much that you would ruin it.

I have had people pick up Honor Thy Sister and not the first. We didn’t mention it but Honor Thy Sister is a story of two women that are sisters and one of the women was sort of evil and the other was a school teacher and prim and proper. When the sister moved back home bad things started to happen in the family and she wanted to know if her sister was behind it or was an innocent victim but that’s the second story. But yeah, to answer your question I don’t think you necessarily have to read them in order but I think for most people its better to start with the first.

Dr. Kent: Now you’re from Virginia. Did you grow up in Virginia also?

Larry Buttram: No I grew up in east Tennessee. I moved here in the late 60s. I used to work for the FBI and I delivered mail to J. Edgar Hoover and a lot of people don’t even know who he was anymore, but yeah I’ve been here but I grew up in a small, very rural area in east Tennessee in the country in a different time. We didn’t have paved roads back where I lived and no running water, no electricity until I was older. So it was a lot different back then unlike the way my kids and grandkids live today.

Dr. Kent: What do your kids and grandkids think of your new career as a writer?

Larry Buttram: Well my grandson Brady is eight years old and he sends me emails. He said, “I want to know if you’re famous. You must be famous since you’re on the radio.” I said, “Well I’m not very famous.” But he decided that he’s writing a book now and he’s finished three chapters of Aunt Bear and Chipmunk on the Loose. Hopefully someday he’ll be a better writer than me probably.

Dr. Kent: Very cool. So when it comes to supporting your book, do you do some readings, things like that?

Larry Buttram: Yeah I had a writers group and one of the people in there said to be a great writer you have to read 10,000 books first. Well I don’t agree with that, I think that’s a ridiculous statement to be honest with you but I do understand the philosophy. I mean, who’s going to read 10,000 books in their life? But I read a lot of different writers, the old classics.

I’ve been reading since I was ten or 11 years old and love to read and love to write. I think it helps you when you read other peoples work and see how they do things. I’m reading a book now by Randy Singer, I just finished another Virginia writer and I think he’s as good as John Grisham, just a fantastic writer. But yeah I think you have to do that if you’re a writer to keep up with the things that are going on and pick up things from other writers.

Dr. Kent: Here’s a question. You talked about John Grisham. He’s certainly not from Tennessee. I always like in southern writers, you’ve got your Faulkner and folks like that. Do you feel that you have a different style being a southerner? What’s your take on that?

Larry Buttram: That’s a tough question. Obviously I think no matter who you are I think your writing will reflect your background somewhat. If you’re from the old days from Russia or Christian, I mean there’s so much research you can do and I do a lot of research for my books until I finish them but I can point out some things that I was familiar with in growing up. I think that does affect your writing style and how you look at things. I do believe that.

Dr. Kent: Tell me a little about this book. Again from False Witness and Honor Thy Sister, through The Third Generation. How does the story develop and is this the last book in the series?

Larry Buttram: I think I’ve taken this series as far as I can. I got a note from a lady from Tennessee who said she just finished it and didn’t know how she could go on knowing there wasn’t going to be anymore stories about the Edward family. I thought about doing a fourth one but to be honest with you I couldn’t come up with another story. It ended; it covered 25 years of their lives and I see, oh what are some of the movies out? Lucky Twelve or Lucky Eight or something and I think you take success and you just try to take it too far. Most people don’t know when to quit. This is really as far as I can take these stories.

So what I’m doing now is something totally different and I sort of stumbled onto it. I’m doing a fictional history book that is set in the pre-civil war era. It’s about a guy that freed more slaves than anyone in history and I think he’s truly one of the greatest unknown Americans. He was filthy rich and freed 500 slaves. His family turned against him and the courts; he had death threats and everything but he did it because he knew it was evil. So I’m working on that now. It’s fictional, but its half fact and it’s a lot of research.

Dr. Kent: That sounds like fun. And you also have a book called The Greatest Gift, which are short stories?

Larry Buttram: Actually that was the first book I wrote years ago and I put it away and never did anything with it. I just had a book of short stories and it deals with people in all different difficult life situations, like loss of a loved one or marital problems, financial problems. And it looks at what the bible says how you’re supposed to handle these things. I done it 30 years ago and when I had some success with my other books and my wife said I should release this one and I actually have had more publicity from that one believe it or not. I’ve been on TV a number of times across the country discussing my book of short stories. So people seem to like them, I’ve gotten pretty good feedback so far.

Dr. Kent: It’s been a real pleasure chatting about Larry Buttram about his book The Third Generation and the other books in his series. Thank you so much for being on the show.

Larry Buttram: I appreciate it. People can get them at any major book store or go to my website which is larrybuttram.com.

Dr. Kent: Will do; larrybuttram.com and there’s some great information on there as well. The First Generation, it’s a book the first two are False Witness and Honor Thy Sister and then of course the Greatest Gift and we’ll look for your next book.

Larry Buttram: I sure appreciate you having me on here.

Dr. Kent: I’m going to come back in one minute with my next guest Stephanie Chandler, author of The Authors Guide to Building an Online Platform. Come on back for that.

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