Unlike many novelists who are chained to their laptops, spending countless hours grinding out the perfect manuscript, William E. Johnson is a novelist who takes an unconventional approach to writing. A busy practicing lawyer, Johnson just does not have a lot of leisure time. He is the father of five children, twice elected member of his local school board, executive member of the Governors School Board, avid athlete, coach, backpacker and black belt martial artist. The man is extremely busy. He was the featured defense attorney in the CBS Forty-Eight Hours Mystery episode, “The Taylor Behl Murder.” The list goes on and on. Surprisingly, Johnson makes the time to write four-hundred-page novels.
His first novel, A Silent Tide, debuted on the Amazon’s Legal Thriller Top 100 list at number 97 between John Grisham and James Patterson and, ultimately, rose to number 32. Along the way, the work, a modern Chesapeake Bay version of To Kill a Mockingbird, also won the National Indie Excellence Award for the Best Legal Thriller in the country and sold well, in both printed and Kindle edition. Pretty heady stuff for a first timer.
But he was not finished. His latest novel, A Silent Siege, is an international thriller about an ISIS takeover of Mathews County, Virginia. Arguably better than Tide, a tribute in and of itself, Siege is a first-rate page turner. To that I can bear witness, it kept me up until four in the morning. I literally could not put it down. Johnson is a man of strong opinions on a variety of topics. Often, he backs up his opinions with action.
William Eric “Bill” Johnson came into this world on September 30, 1957. His parents were born during the Great Depression and hardened by World War II. Three years later, his father moved the family north to a small town just outside of Reading, Pennsylvania, called Sinking Spring. He graduated from Wilson High School and attended Virginia Tech.
An unremarkable student in high school by his own admission, Northern says his early college years were troublesome, and he soon returned home to Pennsylvania where he received, in his words, “the best education I ever had” working a variety of blue-collar jobs from steel construction to selling car parts. Four years later, he was readmitted to Virginia Tech and graduated in 1983, with a GPA which, he believes, adequately proved he had learned his lesson.
After graduation, he went to law school at the University of Richmond. Northern recalls it was the only profession he ever considered. He stated, “Maybe it was a calling of sorts. Or maybe as a kid I thought Perry Mason and Matlock were cool. In any event, I certainly wasn’t a student of the law before I was admitted. In fact, my law school professors were the first lawyers I ever had met. I loved law school and felt very fortunate to have had the opportunity to attend, for which I dearly thank my parents. Both now gone, they had a faith in me that I sometimes struggled to recognize in myself. I miss them dearly.”
After graduation from law school, Johnson practiced both criminal defense and personal injury law before relocating to Woodbridge, Virginia where he managed a branch office for a Richmond firm. “I loved living and working in the Richmond area, but Northern Virginia was just not my cup of tea,” he says. Then fate reared its head. His father retired as a Senior Engineer for AT&T, and his parents moved to Middlesex County, Virginia. Northern was very close to his folks and spent quite a bit of time at their Middle Peninsula home. Ultimately, he made the decision that he was not going to travel north on I-95 anymore. Johnson made the move south. With no clients, no practice and little money, he packed his bags, and bought a home in Bavon, Mathews County, Virginia.
Johnson told me he did not see this move coming. He envisioned himself in a corner office high above the turmoil in a very busy urban jurisdiction. Mathews was nothing of the sort. Second smallest county in Virginia, it did not even have a stoplight. “A one room courthouse became my domain,” he relates. “Atticus Finch in 1991 I had become, and I wouldn’t change a thing.”
Johnson credits his love of reading to his mother. He describes his memories of her reading stories to him from a set of Childcraft books. His mother was an ardent reader, and he gladly followed her lead. Stories with a historical perspective were an early pull for him, and that has never changed. He says he read just about everything he could get his hands on in his tiny elementary school library and then grabbed his mother’s paperback novels once they made it back on the shelf.
His mother was a fan of Harold Robbins, Jeffery Archer, James Clavell, and every mystery work that could be purchased at the local drug store. Johnson says that he added to his mother’s repertoire with works by Robert Ludlum and John LeCarre. “International spy thrillers became my literary drug,” he tells me, “and I indulged daily. I particularly enjoyed the action scenes and relished how these great authors could take you into the moment, make you feel like it is you that is dodging the onslaught of automatic weapons fire outside a cafe on a side street somewhere in Venice. I loved reading their stories.”
In the early nineties, he discovered Pat Conroy whose words, in his opinion, remain unmatched by any holder of the pen, living or dead. “He captured me like no other author,” Johnson told me with great sincerity, adding that “his words resonate every time I seek to write anything, be it poetry, song lyrics, a short story, a brief novella or the next novel.”
It was in his young teens that the written word became his passion. Poetry was an early consuming interest. Letters to friends followed. Letters to the editors of local and statewide newspapers became frequent. This was followed by a script for a play while at Virginia Tech. But it was an advertisement in the local paper for a writing contest in 1996 that changed everything for him. He entered a short story, The Death of Redemption, in the 15th Annual Chesapeake Bay Writers Conference and won third place for Best Adult Fiction. “When my name was announced as a winner,” he relates, “I felt a feeling I had never experienced before, and I liked it a lot. A reviewer at the conference said I reminded her of David Baldacci and encouraged me to perfect my craft. Her words lifted me so that my tires never touched the road on my way home”.
Johnson offers this advice to aspiring writers. “First, it really pays to be a credible teller of stories interesting to your reader,” he stated. By ‘credible”, he instructs, “write about what you know well.” By ‘interesting’, he says, “always remember that first and foremost, as a writer you are in the entertainment business.” “Ignoring these time honored principles is to your detriment”, he adds.
Second, minimize your outlines. Early on, Johnson tells me his outlines were “lawyer-loved, well-organized creations”. Ultimately, that stopped because it took too much time, and he had only one, maybe two, weekend mornings a week to write content. He began to use only the frontside of a post-it note, figuring, “if I needed more space than that, I didn’t know my story well enough to tell it as it needs to be told”. Learned lesson - spend less time organizing and more time telling your story. “This way,” he adds, “you will develop your own beautiful style and more content will come about as a result of it. And that’s important, because after The End is when the editing starts and you will learn that you need to get to that point as soon as practical, because that is where the book gets the necessary polish to succeed and, more importantly, that’s when the opinion of others (your editor - do not edit your own work) will become a teachable moment in the betterment of your craft.”
Third, read your work aloud to another person. “This is very important,’” Johnson opines, “because if the written word speaks well, it will read great. It will have a vocal flow, rhythmic in fact, that keeps the reader’s mind engaged. I used this process for both A Silent Tide and A Silent Siege, and for Tiffany’s Tale, a post-Tide novella. It seemed to have worked well.” Fourth, apply the first three tips to writing a few short stories before you begin your Great American Novel.
These are lessons Johnson learned the hard way. He has refined his craft to become an award-winning writer whose books are, to say the least, a very “good read.”
Johnson’s books are available on Amazon and on his website, https://www.williamjohnsonbooks.com/.