Good, Old-Fashioned Storytelling Propels Homer Hickam to the Top

Homer Hickam, author of the November/December Book Sense 76 Top Ten novel The Keeper's Son (Thomas Dunne), said he knows what people are most interested in reading about: "Other people."

It was his own interest in other people -- specifically, his father -- that turned Hickam into a keen reader and a budding writer at a precocious age.

"My dad was a great intellectual," said the 60-year-old Hickam, who now lives in Huntsville, Alabama, but who grew up in the small town of Coalwood, West Virginia. "He'd have several Book of the Month Club selections going all the time.... And since my dad was a bit distant -- like most of the men who came out of World War II and the Depression -- I was curious as to what he was thinking. One way to find that out was to simply read the books that he had just read. Even in the third grade, I was picking up books, after my dad had finished them.... My favorite writer, then and now, was John Steinbeck, because he was my dad's favorite.... It's interesting that I've been accused of having a style somewhat similar to Steinbeck's."

That style began showing itself at an early age. "In the third grade," Hickam recalled, "my teacher told me that some day I'd make my living as a writer, and she encouraged me to start writing short stories. And she mimeographed them and passed them all around the Coalwood School, even up into the junior high school. So I had a fan base, even then."

In the years to come, that fan base would grow to national proportions and give Hickam several bestselling books.

But before all that, Homer Hickam said, "I got kind of diverted, in that I started to want to work for NASA." A talented teenaged rocket-builder, he did (after earning a degree and serving in Vietnam) become employed as an engineer at the national space agency -- where he stayed for almost 20 years. "I loved what I did over there," said Hickam. "But during that entire time I continued to write. I always thought that some day I would write a bestseller and carve out a career as a writer."

When Hickam retired from engineering, he wrote his first book, Torpedo Junction (Naval Institute Press, 1989; Dell mass market), a nonfiction account of the little-known onslaught of the American East Coast throughout 1942 by German U-boats, which sank over 400 Allied ships.

"It was deliberately kept secret," said Hickam of that wartime campaign. "It was right after Pearl Harbor, and we were getting bloody noses all over the world.... The Roosevelt administration made a decision to put a Top Secret stamp on all that. It was fairly obvious to the people living along the coast, but they only saw little pieces of it at the time -- pools of oil, and bodies, and wrecked lifeboats -- so even the people along the shore were not aware of the true catastrophic nature of this battle that was going on."

Once his book was published, Hickam continued to write freelance articles for a variety of magazines. "I'd always wanted to write a book about growing up in Coalwood," he said, "but I didn't think anybody would care. So I thought, well you know, maybe that'll be the last book I ever write, and I'll just wait until then. But I was writing for Smithsonian Air & Space Magazine around 1994 and was asked by the editor to give her 2,000 words overnight; she needed a filler. I couldn't think of what to write about ... and I looked over on my desk, and there sat a rocket model that I had built in high school. I told the editor, 'You know, I could write you a story about when I was a boy and I built rockets in this little coal town where I grew up: Coalwood, West Virginia.' And I have to tell you, she was completely, utterly underwhelmed with this idea. But I wrote it -- and she adored it. And when it was published, my phone started ringing -- from Hollywood, who wanted to make a movie just based on the article; and from New York publishers, who demanded that I write a book about it."

The result was Rocket Boys (Delacorte/Delta), a book that went to the top of the New York Times list. "Gosh," said Hickam, "I guess it's almost up to two million copies sold now. It has been translated into eight languages. They made the movie October Sky about it. It is studied in over 400 schools across the country.... It's been an absolute phenomenon."

The author followed that success with two more Coalwood books from Delacorte/Dell, The Coalwood Way and Sky of Stone, works he refers to as "novoirs" or novel/memoirs ("I did use composite characters"). And he wrote a techno-thriller in the Tom Clancy vein, Back to the Moon (Dell), of which he said, "That did very well, but I didn't want to get to be known as a techno-thriller writer."

After mining more Coalwood material for an inspirational post-September 11 book, We Are Not Afraid (Health Communications), Hickam said, "I needed to move away from it, if my career was going to continue. I wanted to write fiction, in a different setting."

The setting and the situations he chose were the ones he'd used for his original nonfiction book, Torpedo Junction: the Outer Banks of North Carolina, in 1942. "I thought, Gee, I've got 20 years of research that I did.... I love the Outer Banks, a wonderful romantic area. And I could create some wonderful characters. And they proved so wonderful that St. Martin's has asked me to make this into a series."

With The Keeper's Son now out, Hickam is well into the writing of the next book in what he said will be at least a trilogy. When that book's done, he plans to start right in on the next.

"I love to write," Hickam said with happy emphasis. "I absolutely adore writing. That is my life." And what he writes is the same sort of thing he grew up loving to read.

"I'm a bit of a throwback: I believe in old-fashioned storytelling.... That's what I believe people really want, ultimately: a good story. It's not a lot of fancy writing they want, although I'm certainly willing to spin a good phrase and a metaphor or two. But I go right back to what I learned in the third grade: people are interested in other people.... It's not plot that matters (although you certainly want to come up with a good one). What you want to do is to create characters that are interesting and fun to read about, and make you want to turn the page and see what happened to them." -- Tom Nolan