In an ongoing series, we asked our authors various questions regarding their processes, and one of the most important is what inspires them to write. We asked this of our signed, Noir/Thriller author, and this is what he told us…
How do you do all that? It’s the very first question people ask me when I tell them what I do, both professionally and personally. Professionally, I own a small business and I sit on the Board of multiple organizations. In addition, prior to the Pandemic, I travelled thirty weeks of the year to facilitate business meetings. Personally, I am an author, an artist, and trying my very best to be a husband and a father. My answer is simple enough; frequently, I fail. Yet, somehow, I always manage to pick myself back up again and then try to be the very best that I can, at all of it. There’s no shame in admitting that you have failed, after all, you can’t measure progress unless you employ failure as a benchmark. And truth be told, that is the secret of life and, by extension, writing: admit that you will fail, but always get back up and then try again.
With the schedule that I have to keep, finding time to write is difficult. It may be three in the morning, or three in the afternoon, when I can finally sit down at my keyboard and start typing away the words of my latest story. Sometimes it may take days, or even weeks, before I can get back to that place in my life. But even when I can’t physically write, I’m always writing in my head. The ideas, the words, the directions of my story are constantly in motion. As a result, I am able sit down again and pick up where I left off without trying to recapture that particular moment in time.
People will sometimes ask, what is your inspiration? Ever since the beginning of time, mankind has wanted…no, demanded to tell a story. Some stories were created to explain the weather, other stories to explain the landscape around us, and still other stories served to elevate us from this thing that we call life. And in this regard, I suppose that I am no different than all the other story tellers that came before me. Life is my inspiration, it is my classroom, it is where I absorb the lessons of the everyday and then reimagine it to make unique stories told with a distinctive voice.
--Henry D. Trett