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Jeffrey Ricker is a writer, editor, and graphic designer in St. Louis and a graduate of the University of Missouri School of Journalism.  He is the author of short stories such as “New Normal” and his brand new novel, Detours, from Bold Strokes Books.  

Hi, Jeffrey!   This is your first novel, I think.  How does it feel to have it published?   Tell us what you’d like the readers to know about Detours.  

Hi, Gavin! Yes, Detours is my first novel. When people ask me what it’s about, I tell them it’s a road trip with a love story surrounded by a ghost story. It’s about how things never turn out the way you planned them, and yet somehow they manage to turn out the way they should. Several characters in Detours, especially Joel, the narrator, deal with varying concepts of what home is, and I don’t think for any of them that it turns out to be what they expected.

It’s kind of funny, the feelings I’ve had around this book getting published. The process is such a long one, it’s variously felt real and unreal as time’s gone on. Last week, though, I got a box of advance copies in the mail, and that’s when I thought, “Wow, this is really happening, isn’t it?”

What in your background do you think led you to have an interest in writing fiction? 

You’d have to ask my therapist. (Kidding!) Actually, that’s an easy one: stories. I’ve always loved hearing stories, reading stories, and making up stories. I guess the choice was either write stories or grow up to be a pathological liar.

I was a fairly quiet kid and didn’t have a lot of friends growing up. I read a lot. I also watched a lot of TV, but I remember going through a lot of books. I went through an Agatha Christie phase where I read as many of her books as possible. I also read a lot of science fiction series, that sort of thing. Writing stories was an extension of that and a way of populating the stage in my head.

The main character’s mother (who is a ghost in the story) in Detours is fascinating, and not really like anyone I’ve met in fiction before.  Do you draw a lot from people in your life or, if it’s okay to ask, what process do you use when it comes to developing characters?

I can’t say that I have a definitive process for coming up with characters. Often it starts as a voice, or a line of dialogue. I follow that initial hunch until I start getting a feel for them, and then I’ll usually pause and write a character sketch, some important biographical information for them, and any other details.

With Rachel, the narrator’s mother, she took on a whole new life (or afterlife, as the case may be) in the third revision of the book. I moved her death from the end of the novel to the beginning, and suddenly I saw the form of the story as it should have been, and how it actually ended up.

I don’t know where she came from, really. I’m just glad she did.

When it comes to creating characters, I don’t draw a lot from people in my life directly; Rachel is not like my own mother, for example, who doesn’t smoke and would never be caught dead in peach, I don’t think. I think character is often an unconscious distillation of various traits we observe in different people that take on a certain form in one particular individual on the page.

Wow, that sounded pretentious. Okay! Let’s dial that back a notch. Characters are like spaghetti: you throw bits of personality at the page and see what sticks. At least, that’s what I do.

Travel is a great device for storytelling, especially cross-country adventures.  What kind of research (on the road or on the internet, etc.) did you have to do for the travel aspects?  What kind of role does travel play in your own life? 

This was one case where I went with “write what you know.” First, I love to travel. Second, I grew up in a military family (my dad was a Marine), so we moved a lot. I wanted to get setting right, which is why almost all of the locations in Detours are places I’ve visited or lived. Portland, Maine is where my family is originally from, but I haven’t been back there in about ten years. While I would have loved to go and visit for purposes of getting the details just right, time and finances just wouldn’t allow it. (Hello, I work for a not-for-profit.) Sometimes, Google Earth can come in handy if you’re trying to remember what’s on a particular street corner near the Western Promenade in Portland.

I saw your story “The Trouble with Billy” in the LGBT YA anthology, Speaking Out, got a great review in Kirkus, and both “The New Normal” and “At the End of the Leash” in the romance anthology Fool For Love were awesome.  What do you feel is the difference in the skill set one needs to write an effective short story compared with what’s needed to write an effective novel?   

You could have knocked me over with a feather when I read the review for Speaking Out, but I think that’s a credit to the fantastic job Steve Berman did in collecting those stories together.

As for the difference between short fiction and novels, it’s kind of like the difference between a sprint and distance running. A short story is a concentrated distillation of all the things that go into any kind of storytelling—character, setting, plot, you name it—all the things that you can explore in a novel in greater depth. Or to put it as a travel metaphor, a short story is a weekend out of town and a novel is a two-week vacation.

Since Detours was my first novel (well, the first one I completed that I thought was worthy of public consumption), it felt a bit like on-the-job training, learning by doing: I was learning how to write a novel by writing a novel. It was a long education. It took me eight years, off and on, to finish it.

Which writers or books can you list as some of your favorites or as some that have had the biggest influence on you?

Every time I think about this question, I feel the urge to get up and look at my bookshelves to remind me of what I’ve read and what I own. Writers I love? F. Scott Fitzgerald (I know it’s practically a cliché, but The Great Gatsby is my favorite novel bar none), Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, Michael Cunningham, C.J. Cherryh, Robert Heinlein, Charles Baxter, Haruki Murakami (“The Elephant Vanishes” is one of my favorite short stories ever). I love J.K. Rowling; I think she’s amazingly creative.

The writers who inspire or influence me more directly are the ones with whom I’m friends or am acquainted: Greg Herren (my editor), Rob Byrnes, ‘Nathan Burgoine, Timothy Lambert, Becky Cochrane, Alex Chee, the people in my writing group. They and a lot of others are the people who have provided encouragement along the way or are people I talk to about what I’m writing, what they’re writing, and get and give feedback. Writing is often a very solitary practice, and these are the people who make it less so for me.

A mutual friend of ours I won’t identify said jokingly I needed to ask you, “Why are you so in-your-face about dogs?”  To be a bit more serious, Neil Plakcy recently said that getting a dog has had a big impact on what and how he writes.  What effect, if any, do animals have on your writing? 

Gee, I can’t imagine which friend that might be (*cough* ‘Nathan *cough*).

Here’s the thing: everything I know about love I’ve learned from dogs and cats. At the same time, they’ve broken my heart more completely and painfully than any human ever could. They come into your life and spend a joy-filled decade—two, if you’re lucky—and then they go away. They’ve had an effect on my writing because they’ve had an effect on my life. I don’t really think that I trust people who don’t have pets or don’t like animals.

A question out of nowhere:  A genie appears and grants you one wish.  What would you choose (and, of course, why)? 

Oh gods, that’s easy: more time. I’d wish for that, definitely. There’s never enough.

Can you tell us about what you’re working on or what you’d like to work on the future?

Oh, absolutely. I’m working on my second novel, which is going to be a young-adult book with elements of fantasy. For people who read “The Trouble with Billy,” you’ll meet Jamie, Sarah, and Billy again in this book, although under some very different circumstances. I’m also working on several stories (a couple of which have to be finished and submitted, like, yesterday), and then there’s a third novel waiting in the drawer for revisions….

Thanks so much, Jeffrey!

My pleasure!

To learn more about Jeffrey Ricker and his fiction, please visit www.jeffrey-ricker.com