“I credit, other than my family, every good thing that’s happened to me since I got out of school to Bowling Green,” Robin Yocum said. “I don’t think I would have been able to do the things I’ve been able to do without the foundation that Bowling Green gave me. It was my launching pad.”
The people in Yocum’s life did not go to college but instead went straight to work. His dad was a West Virginia steel worker, he was one of five kids and his mom did not work. College became an option when a football coach from BGSU offered him a scholarship if he made the team.
Yocum went on to attend BGSU where he majored in journalism and graduated in 1978.
After graduation, Yocum went on to spend 13 years as a journalist, including 11 years at the Columbus Dispatch, where he became an award-winning reporter. After 13 years, Yocum felt it was time to end his career as a journalist and pursue his dream as an author.
“I didn’t want to miss my kids growing up,” Yocum said. “I had wanted to be an author for a while. I think at heart, I’m a storyteller. I figured there had to be a way I could weave that into a career.”
He did indeed weave his storytelling skills into a career. Yocum became an author and has published two nonfiction books and six novels.
According to his website, his most recent novel, “The Sacrifice for Lester Yates,” was a finalist for the Dashiell Hammett Award for excellence in crime writing. “Favorite Sons” was the 2011 Book of the Year for mystery and suspense by USA Book News. “A Brilliant Death” was also a Barnes & Noble number 1 bestseller and finalist for the 2017 Edgar Award and the SIlver Falchion Award for best adult mystery.
Yocum is a successful author who wants to share his writing process to help other aspiring authors.
When asked where he gets inspiration for his stories, Yocum said, “How do you explain your imagination? How do you explain where your ideas come from? Because sometimes I don’t know.”
He then went on to describe how important it is to have life experiences when wanting to write a book.
“Get out. Go make friends, go get experiences, go get involved with things and meet people. Keep your eyes and ears open,” Yocum said. “I don’t believe that writing is done in a bubble. You have to have life experiences, which I draw on all the time.”
Every book he writes has what he calls a “launch point.” “It’s that one little germ of an idea that makes me think that I could wrap a book around it,” Yocum said.
Once this idea is formed, he enters into what he calls a “brain dump.” During this time, Yocum just gets any and all ideas out without worrying about spelling and grammar. He will write them down on his computer or speak them outloud while driving in a voice text app. “It’s simply talking to the voices in my head and coming up with the concept for the book and the different things that I want to see included in the book,” Yocum said.
Another tip he shared was that he does not start writing page one of a story until he knows what words he will put on the last page.
While Yocum has been a successful author, he has experienced many difficulties and roadblocks in his path to getting to where he is today. “I could paper the inside of this building with rejection letters,” Yocum said. “I got turned down many many times, but I knew this: I knew I only had to convince one person that it was worth investing in it. I just had to find that person.”
The best advice Yocum can give to struggling authors is to keep plowing through. “The first 10,000 words of the book are easy because you’re excited to be writing a new book,” Yocum said. “The last 10,000 are easy because you can see light at the end of the tunnel. It’s that 80,000-90,000 in the middle that’s a grind. Writing is hard work. You have to put your butt in the seat and write. That is the key.”
Yocum said that when he is writing a book, he makes himself write a minimum of 500 words a day. “Some days the words come easy and some days they don’t,” Yocum said. “But I make myself do it because tomorrow I can go back and edit 500 bad words, but I can’t edit a blank sheet of paper.”
Writing a book and finding someone who wants to publish it is difficult. Published authors are no exception to this. Hopefully Yocum’s process and advice helped in some way. If you are interested in reading one of Yocum’s books, you can read a description of them or order them from his website.