It turns out I’m not the only guy to write a  coming-of-age novel about a young reporter trying to make it at a Southern newspaper.

Back in 1992, Sam Hodges wrote “B-Four,” starring Beauregard Forrest, cub reporter for The Standard-Dispatch in Birmingham, Alabama. Beauregard only got the job because his father is a big-shot banker, so his resentful editors relegated him to writing obits and pet-of-the-week stories. Those stories usually run on page 4 of the B section, hence his nickname: B-Four. 

In some ways, Beauregard is a lot like Ronald Truluck, my protagonist in “The Accident Report.” Both are bundles of insecurity. Both make dumb mistakes that end up in print. Each of them has an older newsroom colleague who coaches them through rough patches. They’re both newbies in the dating game and their romantic and work lives intertwine when The Big Story comes along.

Ronald Truluck didn’t have any family members in my novel, but Beauregard has family complications galore, mainly with his father. Beauregard thinks reporting is his calling, but Dad wants his son to quit the paper as soon as he has the SAT scores to get into Washington and Lee College. 

The novel takes an affectionate look at Confederate re-enactors, a theme that might be a hard sell with a major publisher in 2025. (St. Martin’s Press originally published “B-Four” and it was republished by the University of Alabama Press.) Dad has a Robert E. Lee complex, in that he re-enacts as a general and rides a horse he calls Traveler, though the animal’s real name is Snuffy. Beauregard also enjoys re-enacting and takes pride in his ability to “die” realistically on the battlefield. Sometimes, when he’s facing a crisis, he wonders what Robert E. Lee would do in such a situation. 

Hodges gets the details right about what it was like to work in a newsroom: the co-workers you can’t stand, the logic in deciding whose name goes first in a double byline, drinking massive amounts of coffee from white styrofoam cups, and digging through yellowing clippings in the morgue. Almost every page had a detail or sensory image I wish I’d put into my book.

“B-Four” is a very funny book about a bygone period of newspapering, when computers were commonplace in the newsroom but cell phones and the internet hadn’t taken over our lives. It’s also about the universal struggles of young people trying to figure out who they are. You don’t have to be a newsie to appreciate “B-Four,” but it helps. 

Maybe you’re wondering how I took the raw material of my life and turned it into fiction? Here’s an example.

On my first reporting job with The Thomasville (NC) Times in the mid-1970s, I wrote a story about a man who was attacked by his own dog—an attack so vicious he required stitches. What made this newsworthy, I thought, was that the man loved his dog so much he kept it. I interviewed the man, got a look at the dog named Amigo, and ended up being bitten myself. This was not participatory journalism. This was rookie stupidity. I wrote a story about it and described what happened in the last few paragraphs. 

That dog bite became part of The Accident Report. The protagonist, Ronald Truluck, is stuck at a railroad crossing and thinking about his inability to get ahead in the journalism business. 

“He’d tried to show initiative. He saw an incident report about a man, Crosby Melton, who was bitten so badly by his own dog, a German Shepherd named Banjo, that twenty-two stitches were required to close the wounds. That sounded like a human interest story, for man’s best friend to turn on his owner. Ronald drove to Crosby’s house next to the fertilizer plant. When Crosby opened his front door, Banjo ran onto the porch and bit Ronald on the left shin. The man pulled the dog back inside and yelled through the screen door, ‘He’s had all his shots.’

“Ronald drove himself to the emergency room, but he didn’t need stitches, just a bandage. His editors were amused and made him write a first-person account of what happened. The headline said, ‘Reporter Sings the Blues After Being Bitten by Dog Named Banjo.’ Ronald explained that a banjo is primarily an instrument used in country and bluegrass, not the blues, but the headline stayed.”

In the novel, I changed the name of the dog from Amigo to Banjo. I made the dog bite more of a lightning strike, rather than a case of me putting myself into harm’s way. I didn’t quote the fictional dog owner as much as I did in real life. From that point onward, I was always wary when I encountered dogs on the job.