Author. Screenwriter. Playwright. Robert Inman has achieved the kind of success most writers only dream about.

But this award-winning author didn't just decide he was going to write books one day. He worked long and hard to get where he is.

FictionAddiction.NET's Apryl Duncan found Inman in the middle of a massive book tour. And he generously agreed to take some time out of his busy schedule to tell his story.

For most creatives, story ideas pop into your head when you're least expecting them. The concept for Captain Saturday came to you the same way, correct?

The first notion of Captain Saturday came to me, literally, at 70 miles an hour. I was on a busy interstate highway several years ago, enroute to a speaking engagement at a high school. At the time, I was a news anchor for a Charlotte TV station, and the high school students may have thought that my celebrity status carried with it some kind of wisdom I could share with them.

The traffic was terrible that afternoon -- big trucks and buses and the like, rattling the windows of the small car I was driving. I thought to myself, "Bob, you could get killed out here." And then I thought -- what if I were in a wreck and survived, but for some reason could never appear on TV again? Who would I be? Had I put so much stock in my public life that, if it were taken away, I would cease to exist in some essential way?

When I got to the high school, I threw away the speech I had prepared about minding your parents and doing your homework and the like, and talked to the students about looking deep inside yourself, finding out who you really are, and setting your priorities right -- putting your relationships first. Then I went home and hugged my wife and daughters and tried to be a better husband and father.

I was working on Dairy Queen Days at the time, but the idea I had there on the busy interstate stayed with me. So Will Baggett was born -- a TV weatherman who is so caught up in his celebrity status that he neglects his relationships. And when he loses his celebrity status, he finds the rest of his life is hollow. So he has to try to reinvent and redeem himself, decide what's really important, and try to rescue the relationships he has neglected.

How did you take your experience from your career and narrow it down for the plot and character development of your novel?

Captain Saturday is only incidentally about television. It's really about priorities. Will, I think, is all of us. We all face the danger of letting something like a job or status take over our lives and failing to cherish the people who should be most important to us.

I certainly drew on 30 years of experience in television in creating an authentic environment for Will. But once he lost his job and status, fairly early on in the story, I was on new ground. Will was just a guy in big trouble.

Your main character, Will Baggett, is a TV weatherman forced to discover just who he is when the camera's not on and the fans aren't asking for autographs. How close is this fictional character to the real you?

Will isn't me, and he isn't any TV weatherman I've ever known. He's his own person, warts and all.

But after that long career in the public eye, I look at him and say, "There, but for the grace of God, go I." I learned a lot from him. And if reaction I'm getting from readers is any indication, we're all learning a lot from him.

How did reporting news events help you tell stories in the fictional world?

I've always believed that all stories are about people -- whether they're news reports or works of fiction. When I was in the news business, I tried to relate events and ideas to the way people live day to day. If I did that, I could take the most complex news story and make it relevant to my viewers and readers.

In telling a story in a novel, I start with a central character I'm really interested in, confront him or her with an dilemma, surround that character with other characters, and let them start bumping up against each other and making sparks and creating a story. If I deal with my characters honestly, they'll tell me a story that's worth sharing, one that will get to some essential truth about the agony and ecstasy of being human.

You're credited with an accurate description of the South, a region aspiring writers often attempt to write about. What mistakes do you see other writers who don't have firsthand knowledge making?

I think it's essential for any writer to be authentic about the place he or she writes about. You owe the reader an honest view of the real landscape where the story occurs, so that the reader is then willing to take the leap of faith that's necessary to get involved in the imaginative world of the story.

I've lived all my life in the South, and that's the place I know how to write about. I can't write authentically about Kansas City or Sacramento, because I don't know them well enough -- not only the geography, but the particular ways of thinking and doing things and the historical context that are unique to any place.

I think one of the really interesting things about my region of the country right now is the clash between the Old South and the New South. And I get into that fairly heavily in Captain Saturday. I couldn't do that if I didn't know the region.

But again, the stories are about people. And the way we conduct our business as humans is pretty much the same all over. As my writer friend and mentor Barry Hannah used to say, "All our secrets are the same."

Your books have a strong Southern literature background. What do you think the fascination with Southern literature is, especially for readers who aren't located in the South?

Reynolds Price says that in the South, our families are our entertainment. A lot of Southern writers write awfully well about families, about the messy business of blood kinship. But we also think of "family" in the larger sense of community.

I grew up in a small southern town, a wonderful place to observe human nature on a small stage. In a place like that, if you have any curiosity and powers of observation, you figure out a lot about what makes people tick by observing the same folks in the same place over time.

We also have a strong oral storytelling tradition in the South. That's partly because for a long time, we had a high rate of illiteracy, and the best way to hand down our histories and myths and legends was by word of mouth.

We know how to read and write now, but the storytelling tradition remains. And again, all our stories are about each other.