I Want To Write For History, Not

You Also Had In Detroit That Summer, An Early Variation Of Ferguson. A Black Prostitute Was Shot In The Back By Police. And All Of The Efforts That A Very Progressive Police Chief And Mayor Of That Period Had Put Into Trying To Restore Race Relations Started To Fall Apart Again, And You Could See That Unraveling For Several Years Until The Riots Or Rebellion Of 1967.

I Want My Books To Last, To Stand The Test Of Time, And To Do That I Focus On The Forces That Shape The Subject - The Cultural And Sociological Geography - To Capture Them In A Way That Will Explain Them No Matter What They Are Doing.

It's Hard To Know Exactly How People Develop The Characters They Do. There Could Be People From Humble Beginnings That Turn Into Jerks. Some Characteristics Are Just Part Of That Special Soul Of That Human Being.

Detroit Was An Exaggeration Of What Was Going On Across The Country. You Could See The Divisions, Even Within The Civil Rights Movement Of That Period. At The Same Time That Martin Luther King Was Talking About His Dream, Malcolm X Gave His Most Famous Address In Detroit During That Same Period, "the Message To The Grass Roots," Dismissing The Notion Of Integration.

I Look For Two Things When I Am About To Launch Into A Book. First, There Has To Be A Dramatic Arc To The Story Itself That Will Carry Me, And The Reader, From Beginning To End. Second, The Story Has To Weave Through Larger Themes That Can Illuminate The World Of The Subject.