12 Questions for a Writer: Wes Browne

Wes Browne is an author, a lawyer, and a pizza man. He writes good books about people who do bad things. See what he has to say about it.

1.    Who are you, what have you written, and why?

I’ve practiced law in Appalachian Kentucky for the past twenty-five years—mostly criminal law, but I’ve done a little bit of everything. My family and I also fell into the pizza business twelve years ago, and I still help with that.

My debut novel, Hillbilly Hustle, was loosely inspired by the history of our pizza shop—a previous owner sold pot there. It was published by West Virginia University Press on March 1^, 2020, which was a trying time to launch a book.

I started writing They All Fall the Same before Hillbilly Hustle came out. I finished it while I was working from home during the pandemic. It takes place in some of the same rural Kentucky counties as Hillbilly Hustle, but it’s a standalone story. Both books are crime fiction but They All Fall the Same is significantly darker.

I know some writers aren’t really big on sports but that’s not me. I played three sports in high school and went on to play football at a Division III college. I picked up lacrosse from my kids later in life and I still coach and play that now. I also like to sneak off and play poker any chance I get.

2.    What is it that draws you to writing?

I was a pretty bad student as a kid. The only subject I threw myself into was creative writing. My fourth-grade teacher assigned us a five-hundred-word story and I wrote five thousand. I got something from it I didn’t get from anything else. I took every writing class I could from then on.

I wanted to be a professional writer but was persuaded to go to law school because it was more practical. Even so, I wrote my first novel manuscript during the summer between my first and second year of law school. That began a string of books I couldn’t get published. I didn’t ultimately publish until I was forty-six, and I didn’t sign with an agent until I was forty-eight.

3.    What is the hardest part of life as a writer? What is the best part?

Every writer with a day job has to set aside time to write, but I don’t find it all that difficult because I prioritize my free time for it. After spending time with my family, writing is second in line for my downtime. What I find more challenging is the business of publishing. You can’t control it and the industry is unforgiving. In fact, it seems to get more challenging all the time. There’s so much good work that never sees the light of day and a lot of pretty lousy stuff gets a big push, so that’s frustrating. I try not to stress about that and just do my thing and hope it finds readers.

That kind of leads into the best part for me. My favorite part is reading, being read by, and hanging out with other writers. I look for any opportunity to spend time with people who love what I love. A big swath of my close friends are writers. There’s nothing that feels better than writing something they admire. That’s the biggest buzz in the whole thing.

4.   What advice do you have for aspiring authors/editors?

Martial your patience and do the work. I empathize with writers who are hoping to make some money in this gig because it’s hard as hell. I can understand a lack of patience when you’re trying to eat. But for all but a miraculous few it takes time to get really good. It’s hard to get there without a day job.

I see people undone and devastated because they can’t find publishing success as soon as they want. Some of them deserve more sooner, but the fact is, some don’t. There are levels of ability and success. I’m not nearly at the top. I hope to go higher, but who knows? I see a lot of people on level two or three falling into despondency because they want to skip straight to level eight because they think they’re already at level seven. Get some honest writing friends who’ll tell you the truth.

Short stories are hard as hell to write, but I know expert short story writers who can’t quite hold a novel together. It takes time to learn to do that and it’s a different skill. There are also some great novelists whose short stories are subpar. The issue there is short stories win admirers but novels make stars. It’s not fair but it’s fact.     

5.    Everyone hates this question, but I persist in asking it: what is your favorite book and why?

Seems like a reasonable question to me. It’s hard to pick just one, but I’m going to say The Risk Pool by Richard Russo. Russo is among my favorite few writers and that’s my favorite of his books. He’s a master of parsing the complexities of human relationships and he does it with consistent wit and depth.

Without giving too much away, he brings together a son and his somewhat disreputable father who his mother has alienated him from his entire life, and explores the way they build a relationship. Although I primarily write crime, Russo’s tendency to write third person with a lot of voice and his manner of exploring difficult characters and making them empathetic and redemptive are both qualities I try to emulate. I don’t think I really thought much about it until I answered this question, but They All Fall the Same owes some debts to Russo.

6.   You are an attorney and a pizza man, tell us about the process you undertook to write/edit They All Fall the Same while living real life.

I’m not able to schedule writing time like some people with day jobs do because my schedule is really irregular, but I’m opportunistic. I prioritize making time to write. Sometimes I’ll catch a nap during the day so I can stay up late to write after things quiet down and my family is asleep. Then I get up in the morning and edit what I wrote before getting on with my day. Mainly, I have to take advantage of what I can get.

Writing during the pandemic was different because the time was there. My court was online. I wrote with my camera off while waiting for my cases to be called. Some days I wrote trying to fight back depression about the whole situation. I initially took it hard that Hillbilly Hustle got a little lost, but eventually I got over it. People dealt with much worse, so that put it in perspective. Writing They All Fall the Same gave me purpose.

7.    What did you learn in the process, both substantively and personally, and what surprised you?

Writing once you’re published feels different. I still struggled with self-doubt, but I had something to lean on this time around. Whenever I’d fall into the familiar pattern of thinking I’m just no damn good, I’d remember the professional reviews of Hillbilly Hustle were positive. I specify “professional” because we all get savaged in reader reviews here and there.

I decided I didn’t want to go through the publishing process without an agent again, but I’d been trying to get one for over twenty years, so I wasn’t expecting it to be easy. I signed with Alice Speilburg—which also boosted my confidence—and she found me a good home with Crooked Lane Books. Even with an agent, everything in publishing is so slow. A book I started writing in 2019 and finished in 2020 isn’t coming out until 2025.

What surprised me the most was the turns this project took creatively. I initially had the idea that the entire narrative would take place over the course of a week. That week became just the first third of the book. The pandemic changed things completely. The initial time setting was 2019, which was when I started writing it. I finished it in late 2020, which is where the book goes as well. While I tried not to lean too hard into the details of the pandemic, I used some of those conditions to my advantage.

Another surprising turn was how much the book wound up centered around the protagonist’s relationships with women. The opening chapter is from the point of view of a character named Whitney. I tried it from Burl Spoon’s point of view but it didn’t work. She and Burl’s wife, Colleen, both have point of view chapters later in the book as well. Then there’s Burl’s daughter, DeeDee, and her daughter, Chelsea, whom Burl and Colleen raise. Burl essentially relives his lost relationship with DeeDee through her child. As Burl’s fortunes plummet, it’s women who sustain his humanity.   

8.   What do you want people to take away from They All Fall the Same?

You know how people say there’s good in everyone? I don’t necessarily think that’s true, but my experience is it’s usually true. I’ve represented people who have done some pretty awful things. There was at least some humanity in the hearts of most of them. I give hints as to why some of my characters are the way they are, but most people who turn easily to violence, who turn easily to crime, were at some point conditioned to it. We’re all the products of our lived experiences. Does who we are at some point become immutable? I don’t think it does. I think that’s especially true when someone goes through a catastrophic life event. There are very few people alive who don’t have the potential to become someone better.

9.   You are an attorney with a lot of experience on both sides of the criminal court. I was a felony prosecutor for a minute and found a lot more nuance to criminal justice than I expected when I thought I wanted to wear a white hat and swing the fiery sword of justice. None of the main characters in They All Fall the Same are entirely sympathetic, nor are they wholly unsympathetic. Was that a conscious decision or an organic development? Is there a message there?

It was a conscious decision. What developed organically was some of the shading. Burl and his organization end up at war with a sod-growing, heroin-dealing family from a neighboring county, the Begleys. Their patriarch is Clovis Begley, a man of little conscience but strong family convictions. Neither he nor Burl is what you’d term a good person, but at one point I had some beta readers on the fence about who they were pulling for in the family war. I knew then that I had to reveal a little more of Burl’s hidden decency and reveal more of Clovis’s depravity.

If there’s any message, it’s that even the worst people are usually loved by someone, and love someone. It’s not always pretty, or in some cases even justified, but it’s so. One character in the book, Holt Peters, doesn’t exhibit a single positive trait, but even his mother loves him.

10.         Burl Spoon is on a somewhat narrow redemption arc. There are moments when you can see him choose to escalate violence and moments when he chooses restraint. I felt that made him more complex, and the book better for it. Were you ever tempted to go for the relentless bad guy who is unaffected by emotion? Please describe his development from initial concept to manuscript acceptance.

I was never tempted. First, I think someone who’s completely unaffected by emotion is pretty rare, and secondly, I don’t think they’re very interesting as central characters. Burl was the clear antagonist in Hillbilly Hustle, but what I consistently heard was that he was people’s favorite because he was nuanced. I enjoyed writing him, but I had no interest in writing a sequel. I decided to start from scratch with him as an anti-hero. I guess I’d compare it to the Joker movie in that Burl in They All Fall the Same exists with little relation to my first book.

When the book opens, he’s in a position of power and control, but he gets to that perch because he’s ruthless and cares primarily for himself. He’s capable of love, but the love he gives is entirely on his terms. What happens to someone like him when events start to fall outside of his sphere of control? What happens when his loved ones grow tired of being under his thumb? In short, what happens to someone like Burl when he starts to fall?

11. Why should anyone read They All Fall the Same?

My buddy, Mark Westmoreland, has described it as Winter’s Bone told from Tear Drop’s perspective. That’s hyperbole for sure, but I like the idea.

What I can say is that the pace stays fast, there’s no shortage of action, and I worked hard to make every character complex, every setting rich, every line of dialogue genuine, and every plot twist unexpected. Whatever people think of the book, I don’t think they’ll be bored.

12. What have I not asked that I should have?

My second favorite book.