Attica Locke never intended to be a novelist. For that matter, the screenwriter and producer never intended to work on series like When they see us, Empire, From the beginning and nominated for an Emmy Award Small fires everywherefor which she won the NAACP Image Award.
“I always thought I was going to be a film director,” Locke tells PEOPLE. But after the studios lost confidence in her first film project, and she was “really young and really depressed and scared,” she decided to try her hand at screenwriting. After a few years as a busy screenwriter, she realized that the slogan of “writing just to go on dates” was not for her.
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“I want something more for my life,” she explains. “And so I made this crazy decision to leave Hollywood and write a novel.”
And she wrote novels. Readers may know Locke from page-turning books such as Black Water Rising, Cutting season and her Highway 59 series, which ends with Take me homeout on September 3rd.
‘Take Me Home’ by Attica Locke.
Mulholland Books
Today, Locke balances a dual career: writing screenplays during the day and writing books on the weekends. “I’m trying to balance these two completely different ways of telling stories,” she says.
Regardless of the type of writing, Locke is and always has been drawn to discovering what makes people tick, writing crime fiction that she approaches as “a deep study of the human psyche.”
“I have a deep love for human beings in all their colors and shapes. I just find human beings so interesting,” she says. “I’m curious about people. I have compassion for them and I think I’m always looking for reasons for human behavior.”
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When he writes crime stories, Locke enjoys discovering what makes “bad guys” tick. “I try to look at villains through the lens of what makes them who they are,” explains the author.
She sees her fiction as “a way of studying broken people,” Locke adds, as well as an examination of the scarcity mindset that is at the root of so many problems in society.
“It’s such a way to expose the fallacy of scarcity: There’s not enough. There’s not enough money. There’s not enough food. There’s not enough land. There’s not enough love for everybody, so I’ve got to get mine, and if I have to knock someone else out to get mine, I’ll do it,” she says. “And I think what these novels often do is they have a moral in them.”
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While he explores that morality is a deliberate choice, Locke is not one to methodically plan everything while writing his novels. She gets enough of that in her day job. Instead, she lets the book show her where to go.
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“I want the freedom to explore and be surprised, and I want the writing to feel like reading in some way,” she says. “There were times when I didn’t even know who did it. I just go, and I just sink into the world and throw all those complications onto the story.”
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Attica Locke.
Victoria Will
Much of her process involves researching elements of her books that she doesn’t know first hand. The Highway 59 series draws on her childhood knowledge of rural East Texas growing up in the region, but she had to learn a lot about the Texas Rangers, the Texas Aryan Brotherhood, the lumber industry and the Cato Indians to bring those elements to life.
For Locke, who likes to learn while reading, it’s all part of the fun. And as she nears the end, she is grateful for where the journey has taken her and for her readers who have come with her.
“I had the pleasure of hanging out with this guy who, as the author who wrote it, gave me a way to understand the last eight years of American history, which were really difficult,” she explains. “Writing this Texas Ranger gave me space to hold all the anxiety, all the confusion, ‘how did we get here.’ It gave me a place to think, and I’m hoping for the readers that maybe there’s some salve in this, that there’s some way to contain and sort through all these very difficult feelings while following an interesting story.”
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Take me home Attica Locke, last sequel in Highway 59 series, is available now, wherever books are sold.
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Source: HIS Education