Excerpt from a recent interview I did at Potfiction

RW Tucker, Pot Fiction: You’ve mentioned that your own personal experiences influenced your writing. Many people turn their back on their past lives. Within the bounds of what you are comfortable talking about, of course, what made you want to put those experiences to paper?

R.D. Ronald: When I first went to prison I found the expected assortment of horrible individuals that anyone would expect to be in there. What did surprise me, though, were the number of decent people that had been the victim of horrendous circumstances they either reacted to, or took the only option left open to them. While I was inside I read and read and read, as you would expect, but while working my way through numbers of crime thrillers I began to find the plots somewhat tedious and predictable, and in no way reflective of the people I was surrounded by who had, and still were, living out their very own crime thrillers. I decided to put some ideas down on paper, much of it fiction, some very altered experiences I had lived through or heard of, and let it begin to take shape. I wanted the criminality to be reflected in as open a way as I could without vilifying or glamorising the experience. I had no idea how the readers would eventually take this on board, but I was writing the type of book I wanted to read, not seeking out commercial success by trying to please everyone. Through social media rather than backing from a big publisher I have been able to connect with like-minded souls and luckily for me they seem to love it, which has enabled me to carry on exploring my passion for writing.

PF: I just started The Zombie Room after reading The Elephant Tree. I notice that each person, no matter how honorable or dishonorable their actions, has some kernel of motivation driving them. What factors do you find carry people to lives on the black market?

RDR: Like I mentioned above, there are numerous types of people operating in that kind of world with many reasons for being there. There are your stereotypical thugs craving power and easy money, but there are also people who slip through the cracks of modern society and find themselves as low-level dealers quite by accident. Nice enough people who simply have no other way to make a living, unable to function in the everyday life most of us take for granted, either because of addiction issues, lack of education and social skills or even mental illness. 81TejJ8W-FL._SL1500_Some people grow up in that environment and it is all they have ever known. It also happens that regular working people that dabble in low-level crime on the side who are caught and then imprisoned lose their jobs, so when they are released they no longer have an income source, coupled with a brand new criminal record which makes getting a job much harder, so they find themselves through lack of any other option being sucked into life as a full time criminal, and the cycle continues. And these are not just suppositions. I have met and talked to countless individuals at various stages of all of the variations I’ve listed here. You can spot the pattern a mile away.

PF: Your books are dark and full of brutal people. Violence seems almost inevitable. What drives people to violence, in your view?

RDR: For some people violence has always been and always will be a way of life. For others it is a potential they carry around as a resource to be used only in the most extreme circumstances. The last group is perhaps the most sad, and I say this after meeting dozens of people convicted of murder that fit into this group. The reactionists. These could be people who have never laid a hand on another human being in their whole lives, then one day – bam! Something happens, they react in the most extreme way and in a matter of seconds life as they knew it is over and someone is lying dead at their feet.


You can check out the full interview here: http://potfiction.com