I am Richard L. Fricks, a novelist and Fictionary Certified StoryCoach Editor living in rural Alabama, not far from the small-town world that has shaped much of my fiction, memory, and questioning.
My novels are rooted in and around Boaz, Alabama — not merely as a location, but as a moral landscape. Small towns remember what they pretend to forget. Churches shape what can be said. Families carry old wounds. Reputations become a kind of currency. Silence can last for generations.
That is the ground my fiction keeps returning to.
I am interested in buried truth, inherited belief, moral contradiction, grief, loyalty, justice, and the quiet moment when a person begins to see clearly. Sometimes that person is an attorney. Sometimes a private investigator. Sometimes a teenager. Sometimes someone who has spent a lifetime inside a story that no longer holds.
Fiction lets me explore those moments without reducing them to argument.
Before I came seriously to fiction, I worked in more formal worlds. I was a CPA and later an attorney. I spent years inside systems that promised order, structure, answers, and authority. I understand the appeal of those systems. I also understand how fragile they can become when life stops cooperating with the story they tell.
I came to fiction later, but once I began, I kept going.
Since then, I have written and self-published a body of novels shaped by the same recurring questions: What happens when the past refuses to stay buried? What does loyalty cost? How do inherited beliefs shape ordinary lives? What truth is a family, a church, or a town willing to protect? And what happens when someone finally sees clearly enough to ask the forbidden question?
Story Coaching
I also work with beginning novelists who want thoughtful, structure-based guidance as they draft, revise, and strengthen their stories.
As a Fictionary Certified StoryCoach Editor and novelist, I am especially interested in the architecture beneath a story: character, plot, scene purpose, conflict, stakes, pacing, turning points, and the relationship between individual scenes and the larger manuscript.
My work with writers is not about taking over the story or forcing it into a formula. It is about helping a novelist see what is working, what may be missing, and what practical revision path might make the story stronger.
I know what it feels like to write alone, to wonder whether a manuscript holds together, and to sense that something is wrong without knowing exactly where the problem begins. Story coaching is one way of bringing structure, language, and perspective to that uncertainty.
The Life Behind the Work
My fiction is also shaped by my own long loosening of certainty.
I grew up inside Southern Baptist fundamentalism. For many years, I inherited its assumptions about God, purpose, morality, identity, and meaning. Eventually, those inherited answers stopped answering. Doubt did not arrive all at once. It came slowly, quietly, and then unmistakably.
What followed was not merely a change in belief. It was a change in how I understood life itself.
Purpose no longer seemed like something assigned from outside. Identity no longer felt fixed. Certainty became less valuable than honesty. Presence became more trustworthy than performance.
Over time, I began calling that way of living The Pencil-Driven Life.
A pencil makes a mark without pretending the mark is permanent. It allows revision. It leaves room for humility. It reminds me that a life can be lived attentively without being forced into a final script.
That sensibility runs through much of what I do, but this site is now primarily the home of my fiction and storycoaching work.
Related Work
Some of my reflective writing continues at The Pencil-Driven Life, where I write about presence, attention, deconstruction, consciousness, aging, and the practice of living without a borrowed script.
I have also written through The God Question, where I examined faith, doubt, religious claims, and the cost of inherited certainty.
And some of my practical life happens through Oak Hollow and other building projects, where land, cabins, dogs, weather, tools, and ordinary days keep pulling me back from abstraction into the physical world.
Those strands are not separate from the writing. They are part of the life behind it.
But RichardLFricks.com is where the story work gathers: the novels, the Boaz fictional world, The Tanner Files, Notes from the Story Desk, and my work with beginning novelists.
If you are here as a reader, you are welcome to begin with the Novels.
If you are here as a writer, you are welcome to visit the Story Coaching page.
If you are interested in fiction, structure, mystery, revision, and the making of stories, you are welcome to read Notes from the Story Desk.
And if you are looking for my reflective work on presence, deconstruction, consciousness, aging, and life after borrowed purpose, you are welcome to visit The Pencil-Driven Life.
And if you are simply curious about the life and questions behind the work, you are welcome to linger.
Richard L. Fricks 