Writer Interview with Bob Rich

1.  Have you always been a writer?

The first thing you need to realize about me is that I have no sense of humor. I regularly demonstrate that other people do, because they laugh at me.

In that vein, I distinctly remember being an unfertilized ovum, and selecting the little spermie that most closely resembled a pen.

One of my addictions as a youngster was distance running. I spent endless hours loping along, and while my feet raced, my mind cooked up thoughts in the background. This is how I completed my university assignments. At home, all I needed to do was to write them down. Often, though, the background thinking was about something trivial like the meaning of life, or how to solve the world’s problems. At other times it was a story of some kind. I never thought to share these monologues with anyone—who on earth would be interested? But many of them turned out to be the seeds of award-winning stories and essays, decades later.

2.  When did you realize that maybe writing was actually a "thing" you could do, get published and even sell?

In 1980 for nonfiction, 1986 for fiction.

3.  What was your first sale as a writer and how did it feel to sell your work?

In 1980, I was busy making adobe bricks for the house I was building when a delegation of teenagers kidnapped me. They were playing a boys vs. girls soccer game and needed one more male. Who was I to argue? Off I went, muddy boots and all. Let me advise you, don’t do this unless you want a torn cartilage in the knee, which is not all that pleasant.

In hospital, I was bored witless, so borrowed the office typewriter and dashed off a description of my revolutionary new way of making adobe bricks. Sent it off a marvelous magazine, which sadly died of its publisher’s advancing age only last year. I got paid for the article and was invited to contribute further articles. This resulted in a byline column for 40-odd years.

In 1984, I sent off a letter to the magazine’s publisher, suggesting the two of us collaborate on a book about building. Checked my post office box—and there was a letter from him with the same suggestion.

The result was The Earth Garden Building Book: Design and build your own house, which went through four editions. It went out of print in February, 2018, and even now I get emails from people who want to buy a copy. It inspired and instructed hundreds of thousands of people who dared to build their own instead of hiring Experts.

In 1986, I was a nursing student, and because I lived in a relatively remote location, needed to stay in a nurses’ home. My choice was to make a fool of myself chasing gorgeous 18-year-olds or doing something useful with my spare time. So, I wrote a short story and sent it off to a contest. It won second prize, and was published. That gave me a buzz that has lasted 37 years so far.

4.  How has writing helped you in other areas of life besides being something you could earn money from?

One of the five occupations I have retired from is psychotherapy. The most important tool for that is empathy, the second most important is keen and accurate observation of people. I’ll give you three guesses for the two most important tools for writing fiction. Writing and therapy feed off each other, the cannibalistic monsters.

Also, writing turned me into an editor. In 2000 I submitted a book to a publisher that was in fact a writers’ cooperative. We were asked to review each other’s books. I read one, and as well as the public review, emailed the author a complete line edit, and suggestions for improvement. It so happened that he was the main editor’s husband, and she immediately got me onto the editing team. Editing is one of the occupations I have not yet retired from.

5.  What was your biggest accomplishment as a writer?

Writing the biography of a woman who achieved the impossible and survived the unsurvivable several times. Thanks to her intelligence, creativity and ruthlessness, she survived the hell of the Second World War, then built a million-dollar export business behind the Iron Curtain. The man she loved tore her beloved son from her, then she protected his dignity for decades while he suffered early-onset dementia as a kind of war injury.

This book has won me four awards. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever written. You see, she was my mother, and I was that son. The book is Anikó: The stranger who loved me

6.  Who has inspired you the most in the writing field?

I have been an inveterate reader for all my life. By 17, I’d read all the books in the school library and the local library, yes even the encyclopedias, the Bible, Shakespeare’s complete works, and suchlike delights. So, I could give you an immense list here. However, my most important writing teachers are the people who live within my computer.

Here is an interesting point: Moses, the Buddha, Socrates, and Jesus didn’t write anything and yet their words have made them known and admired while there were humans on this planet. Less well known is that they were all reincarnations of the same Spirit. I know because the current incarnation lives within my computer, eagerly waiting to save us from Earth’s sixth extinction event, which is in full flight.

Not only have I studied the inspiring non-writings of these sages, but also of others with a similar bent like Confucius, Emmanuel Kant, Mohammed, Deganawida, who was the Peacemaker of the Iroquois confederacy, and more recent teachers like Pope Francis, the Dalai Lama, Mother Teresa, Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, and Greta Thunberg.

All my writing, and indeed everything I do, is being an obedient student of these teachers.

All the same, I make sure to be entertaining. Preach at people, and they run away. Lecture at them, and they fall asleep. Get them involved in a story, and you can make a difference. Even my nonfiction includes lots of stories. Some are disguised real-life examples to illustrate a point, others are fictional.

7.  What are some of the challenges you have faced as a writer and how did you overcome them?

I don’t know!

In all aspects of my life, including writing, I am quite content with where I am and do the best I can do. Then I progress, and when I look back I celebrate the improvements.

This has forced me to rewrite some of my earlier stories and even entire novels.

8. What is the best writing advice you have ever received and why do you feel it is important?

I sent each of my first three attempts at writing a novel to a different freelance editor. Their feedback was enormously helpful. The third novel was published. And the next one I wrote won an international award.

I strongly recommend impartial, critical feedback from a variety of beta readers.

Now, as an editor, I pass on the baton, and like those three way back then, I am as much a teacher as a nitpicker.

8.  What sort of writing do you do now?

I always have several projects going. I am seeking representation for a YA science fiction series, am working on a book on grief, have just completed a couple of short stories, and am researching an essay intended for a contest with a word limit of 8,500.

9.  Where can we find some of your work online?

All of it can be accessed through my blog, Bobbing Around

10.   What advice do you have for aspiring writers thinking of taking the leap of getting their work published?

Writing is the chocolate icing on the cake of life.

Do what you love and love what you do.

Obsessives of the world unite! Every comma matters.

If you can say something in 20 words, don’t use 21.

Writing is both an art and a craft.

11.   What are your final thoughts about being a writer?

Deep in a forest, there is a clearing. A potato plant starts there, and in time it has a lovely little flower. A potato reproduces through its tubers, so the flower is sterile. No one sees the flower, not even a bird, and at last it dies.

It was still beautiful, and still part of the wonderful life of our planet.

It’s wonderful when other people appreciate our writing, but even if your words are that potato flower, they are still an essential part of All. Cherish them.

ABOUT BOB:

Bob Rich, Ph.D., is a visitor from a faraway galaxy, where he is an historian of horror. So, Earth is his favorite place in the universe. Nowhere else do sentient beings engage in a game of killing non-combatants (war). Nowhere else are child raising practices designed to harm children. And delicious for an historian of horror: nowhere else is the entire global economy designed to destroy its life support system.

Here on Earth, he is disguised as an Australian storyteller, with 19 published books. Five books, and over 40 short stories, have won awards.

He has retired five times so far, from five different occupations, one being psychotherapy, so six of his books are psychological self-help. He still works as an editor for several small publishers and a steady stream of writers.

Above all, he is a Professional Grandfather. Anyone born since 1993 is his grandchild. Everything he does strives for a survivable future for them, and one worth surviving in. This means environmental and humanitarian activism: an attempt to change a worldwide culture of greed and aggression into one of compassion and cooperation.

He has been writing since 1980, with a byline column in Earth Garden magazine and other periodicals. His first book, The Earth Garden Building Book: Design and build your own house, went through four editions between 1986 and 2018. A biography, Anikó: The stranger who loved me, has won four awards. Two of his novels are science fiction, with Ascending Spiral having gone through four print runs.

He discovered that he was a Buddhist at 23, when a Presbyterian minister told him. When he checked up on this claim, he found his philosophy set out in beautiful words. He decided not to sue the Buddha for plagiarism, as an act of metta (lovingkindness).