“Hard at work doing what I love,” He says as he described the picture on the left.  “Pardon the mess, but it’s comfortable here and I can work in solitude.”

That’s how John spends the majority of his free time when he’s not on his “paying job,” as he calls it.  “Few people make a lot of money or even get a great deal of recognition.  Fiction writing is something I do for the love of the suffering, so to speak.  I try to tell my stories in my own way and hope they find an audience.  Maybe it’ll pay off someday and maybe it won’t, but either way, I got a story inside of me that needs telling and I’ve got to put it in words.”

There have been many writers who have inspired me such as John Steinbeck, Jack London, Rudyard Kipling,  Charlotte Bronte and many others, including modern writers like Stephen King, Pat Conroy.  Patricia Hagan’s historical works helped inspire Cragan’s Journey as well as some of the western writings of Louis Lamoure.  Robert W. Service wrote some good stories too an is one of my favorite poets of his time. If you’re not familiar with his work, Google-up “The Cremation of Sam McGee,” or “The Shooting of Dan McGrew.”  I was first introduced to his work from a recitation of one of his shorter pieces entitled, “The Men Who Don’t Fit In.” It touched home to me somehow and is as true today as it was a hundred years ago when it was written.

I have too many favorites to mention them all.  There are many good writers both modern and long since passed.  I salute them all.  They each have inspired me in their own way through their works to tell my own stories; to put them in words and somehow make my own writing into something worth reading, and I thank each one of them for their inspiration.

John

John L. O’Quinn

Writing Fiction and Keeping it Real

About the Author

John O’Quinn, pictured on the right lives in Wayne County, North Carolina and works at a private college.  He has a wife and a son, John L. (Trey) O’Quinn III.

             “I love a good story and I enjoy the struggle of putting one together.  Any writer will  tell you that it is a love and a  challenge.  Sometimes the words come easy and other times it is difficult to capture the feelings and mood of the characters in the right words.  The drama doesn’t end until the story does.  My characters are real to me in my imagination, and I hope to make them real to you, the reader.”

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