Out 'N About - Scott Pratt

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uthor Scott Pratt has written himself a true friend.

Part autobiographical and part alter ego, attorney Joe Dillard is the central character in Pratt’s popular series of novels that commenced with An Innocent Client.

Reasonable Fear, the fourth book in the Dillard series, is now available at Amazon.com – both in trade paperback and for the Kindle™ electronic reader – and locally at Mr. K’s on North Roan Street in Johnson City.

Dillard has been good to Pratt, as the author now basks in the warm success of well over 100,000 books sold worldwide in five languages, award nominations and enthusiastic praise from reviewers and fellow writers.

Though it is only a few weeks into the release cycle, already hundreds of readers are buying the new book and Pratt says it is very gratifying to know that there are so many people who want to spend their time with his stories and characters.

“That is a feeling so special that it is hard to describe. To know there are people who want to read what you write, and who enjoy what you’ve created. Sometimes you catch yourself being surprised all over again, and happily so,” Pratt said.

The Dillard series highlights the trials and battles, both personal and professional, of an East Tennessee attorney who struggles to maintain his equilibrium and decency as he confronts the insidious corrosion of greed, graft and indifference on his beloved legal profession.

Pratt’s many years as an attorney prove an invaluable asset, and his cleverly crafted characters frame the stage for a rarely seen, in-depth look at the American legal system.

The story “I wanted to write a story that explores the fine line between legal and right and take it to an extreme. That theme has become a recurring part of my work. It’s something I don’t consciously think of when I begin a novel, but I seem to want to explore it because it keeps coming up,” (Continued on Page Two)

Pratt said.

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“A judge once accused me of having a problem with authority, but that’s not really true. I have a problem with people who abuse authority. I have a problem with how authority is created, who it goes to, and how they handle it.

“There are vain, foul and jealous people, and just because someone has been elected or appointed to a position of power, it doesn’t also follow that they are necessarily going to become good because of it.

“Now, on the other side of that, if you look at the law, the tenants of the law, all the way back to its origins, and the Ten Commandments, for example, you find ‘thou shall not kill.’ Well, yeah you can, under certain circumstances. Which lends itself to interpretation. And that takes you to who is doing the interpreting, and how they see the absolutes and the nuances of the law.

‘It takes a whole lot of think“In Reasonable Fear, I take a very tightly bound set of circumstances which are imposed upon the lead character, Joe Dillard, who I think is a very good person. And he is confronted with the terrible quandary of whether he must technically break the law.

“This leads to a lot of questions that really don’t have pat answers, and that’s what occupies my mind for the hundreds of hours while I write a story.

“From the president of the United States to a clerk in the county courthouse, authority figures have or create their own little fiefdom. It is their choice whether to treat people kindly and fairly, or indifferently and rudely. It comes down to personal choices.

ing and you have to be willing to tear out blocks of text when they don’t work. The beginning and the end of a novel are not all that difficult, but the middle requires a great deal of patience, and plain old determination, to put literally hundreds of hours into creating a story.’

Scott Pratt

author of ‘Reasonable Fear’

“Dillard doesn’t really know what he is. He thinks he does. His goals are fairly simple and conventional, almost innocent. He wants to love and be loved. He wants to take care of his family. He wants to spend his life doing something that is ‘good.’

“He’s chosen law, which, when you think about it, is about as complex as it gets. If you look at the history of ‘law and order,’ you find a long, long list of atrocities committed by humans who thought they were doing the ‘right’ thing.

“The most prominent examples that come to my mind are the trial and murder of Jesus by the Romans and and the burning of Joan of Arc by the French priests. It wasn’t that long ago that owning a slave was legal in this country. Hanging a slave was legal.

(Continued on Page THREE)

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“So that’s the backdrop on the canvas on which I try to paint Joe Dillard and these stories. The other characters that come into play are a mixture of people I’ve met, people I’ve read about, people I’ve imagined. I try to make all of the characters interesting in one way or another. I have a sort of warped sense of humor, a bit on the black side, and I think a lot of my minor characters reflect that.”

The writer Pratt’s favorite books are To Kill a Mockingbird, Huckleberry Finn and Catcher in the Rye. “All of them are fairly simple stories told economically. The authors don’t use a a lot of adjectives and they use even fewer adverbs. They get to the point, and once the point is made, they go on to something else.

“I love Mark Twain’s quote: ‘Regarding adjectives: when it doubt, leave it out.’ I like Elmore Leonard’s philosophy that says writers of fiction should leave out the parts that people tend to skip.

“I read a great deal of fiction, and find myself put off more and more by contrived plots and violence. For the most part, I like and am amused by people, and I’ve found the majority of people I’ve met to honest and quirky. Quirky is fun. It makes good entertainment, and Johnson City author Scott Pratt at a recent book signing.

I enjoy it. I hope other people do, too.”

Now in his 50s, Pratt says he feels he’s “finally found a niche.

“I’ve just finished my fifth novel. If you’d told me 20 or 30 years ago that I’d write novels, I would have told you that you’re crazy. I didn’t believe I’d have the patience for it.

“But I’ve learned that I have more patience than I realized, and I think my niche is to entertain. I’d like to think I enlighten at the same time, but that part of it is subjective. Some people like my work and some people don’t. I can’t control that. What I can do is try to keep writing stories that I like, and hope that other folks like them.”

Pratt says it’s very much a learning process.

“You get an idea in your mind for how you want everything to turn out. Then you have to have the patience to go back and set everything up so that it turns out the way you want it, but that (Continued on Page FOUR)

4 it’s not contrived.

“It takes a whole lot of thinking and you have to be willing to tear out blocks of text when they don’t work. The beginning and the end of a novel are not all that difficult, but the middle requires a great deal of patience, and plain old determination, to put literally hundreds of hours into creating a story.

“You have to make all of these decisisons along the way. You learn that the decisions you make early on in the novel impact what happens later and, if you make the wrong decisions, it costs you a lot of wasted time.

“I think that discourages a lot of writers. It can be very frustrating. But it can also be very rewarding when the story finally comes together.”

Pratt says he will never forget the moment that he held a bound copy of his first novel. “It’s really something, a remarkable moment. I think I’m more mature about it now – there’s a ‘been there, done that’ element to it. But there is a great deal of satisfaction holding a bound novel that has my name on it.

“It’s similar to any profession. When you plead a case in a courtroom for the first time, when a doctor conducts his first operation, when a performer sings onstage for the first time. You’d have to be pretty unfeeling not to be moved by that.

“And the more you learn about it, the more confident you become, but also the more you want to learn about it. I have more confidence now about my ability to construct a novel and tell a story in a certain way. I’m always looking for certain devices, and working to be better at it.”

The trsfrt Pratt says he reads “a lot more than I used to. But I read very selectively now, differently than I used to.

“I don’t read for pleasure now, though I get a lot of pleasure out of it. I read to learn. I don’t know that it’s necessary to read a great deal when writing. In fact, other writers say they won’t read when they’re writing. And there’s an obvious danger in that is, especially when you read something you really like, you can wind up parroting the style.

“But, over time, I have evolved into my own style. I have developed confidence and I feel I have learned how to craft and how to pace a good story, and the character development that is so important to it.

“The downside is that it’s harder to read now. I find myself harder to please, and having less patience for something not done well. I’m guess I’ve become much more critical.

“I don’t read my genre. Most of what I read is classical literature. A lot of Twain. Rather than read something that is bad, I’ll reread something that is good.

“Economy of words is not a problem for me. The average in the trade is 90,000 words and I have trouble getting that many. Usually I get to 70, maybe 80,000 words. I don’t like contrivances, coincidences, and I don’t like to preach. When you avoid those things, it’s difficult to get (Continued on Page FIVE)

5 a lot of words.

“My favorite books are told through the eyes of young, innocent protagonists that are forming opinions about the world. The authors don’t seem to take themselves that seriously. They’re deadly serious about what they’re doing, but they’re not heavy-handed with it.

“There are a whole lot of good things about people, too, and there are so many writers, who explore that in different ways, some of them better than others.

“I have my prejudices and biases, and I’m sure they come through in my work, though I try to avoid too much of that. But also things that I value, and I know that comes through in the characters too.”

The printing Self-publishing is fast becoming an accepted, even favored method for authors to deliver their creations to the reading public.

“It’s a David versus Goliath story, to be sure, with David having no arms to fire the slingshot,” Pratt says with a laugh. “He might figure out how to fire it with his toes, but the odds are against him.

“I think the changes in the industry have ebbed. What publishers have done is lower the price of hardbacks for popular authors but raised the price of Kindle books. If you want to buy a bestselling author on Kindle, it’ll cost you $12.99 – that seems to be the price they’ve settled on over the past couple of years.

“There are no productions costs and negligible distribution costs. The big publishing houses have figured it out. They’re still making their money, and they will continue to do so.”

Pratt says it is all too easy to get caught up in publishing minutia but “the important thing is, and will remain, creating a good story with believable characters. Then trust your readers, and have faith in them.”

Happily, the writer’s craftsmanship is in full flower. He has already completed the preliminary draft of another stand-alone novel, and plans to write another in the Dillard series.

(For more information about Reasonable Fear and the Joe Dillard series of novels, and to order a copy, visit Pratt’s website: www.scottprattfiction.com or www.amazon.com; or e-mail the author: scott@scottprattfiction.com)