Inspiration is a funny thing. It can come to us like a lightning bolt, through the lyrics of a song, or in the fog of a dream. Ask any writer where their stories come from and you’ll get a myriad of answers, and in that vein I created the WHAT (What the Hell Are you Thinking?) interview.
Today’s guest for the WHAT is Roxana Arama, author of Extreme Vetting, the story of an immigration lawyer who fights to keep her client from being deported and losing his family. But those who want him gone will stop at nothing—including murder. Extreme Vetting releases on February 7, 2023
Ideas for our books can come from just about anywhere, and sometimes even we can’t pinpoint exactly how or why. Did you have a specific origin point for your book?
One afternoon in 2018, I watched a video of the president of the United States at a rally, where he compared immigrants to venomous snakes that should be crushed underfoot. He’d been bashing immigrants since he was a presidential candidate, but this was different. He read a poem to his crowd about a kind-hearted woman who took pity on a snake only to be bitten and killed by it. The crowd loved it. I was horrified. I tried to imagine what it would be like for a Trump supporter to look at me, to hear me speak with an accent, and to see me as less than a human being. A dangerous beast that should be killed. Soon I started writing an immigration thriller. I wanted to take readers inside our immigration system so they could see for themselves how complicated and broken it sometimes is. Through storytelling, I hoped to affirm the humanity the president had denied foreign-born people like me.
Once the original concept existed, how did you build a plot around it?
I researched the legal immigration framework, which I hadn’t completely grasped while going through the green card process—twice—and then the citizenship application. I interviewed an immigration lawyer extensively. I read news and articles about immigration, and thrillers to learn how to write one. I asked my immigrant friends how they felt about their lives in their adoptive country.
The seed for the plot was my own experience as an immigrant, though my story is quite different from the one in the novel (I arrived in the US from Romania in 2001 with a job in software development). Here’s a quick synopsis of my thriller Extreme Vetting. An immigration lawyer fights to keep her client from being deported to the country where his family was murdered many years ago. Then she finds out the killers are coming here—for both of them. As a single mom, she must protect her daughter and the sons of her detained client. The inspiration for one of my villains came from two criminal cases in Washington State where ICE prosecutors were sentenced to prison for defrauding undocumented immigrants. Once I had my main characters and conflict, the plot had momentum, and the supporting cast appeared next.
Have you ever had the plot firmly in place, only to find it changing as the story moved from your mind to paper?
That usually happens between my initial outline and the first draft. Once I have a draft, it happens again with every critique from beta readers and editors. I sometimes make substantial changes to my characters and the plot—if the novel needs it. I don’t think a story is ever finished because I slowly change as a person while I work on it, and I sometimes see my existing pages in a new light. But at some point, I must set it aside and decide it’s done.
Do story ideas come to you often, or is fresh material hard to come by?
There are times when I’m in between projects and I’m not sure what to write next, but I usually go through the nonfiction concepts that fascinate me at the time, and I find one that allows me to spin a fictional story from it. From my passion for the history of religions, I wrote a historical fantasy, still unpublished. From my interest in artificial intelligence and interplanetary travel, I’m now writing a sci-fi. Prompts for magazines or literary contests are always nice, though not every prompt resonates with me. For now, I have more work planned than time to do it, so I won’t complain.
How do you choose which story to write next, if you’ve got more than one percolating?
I try to write them all, especially when I’m just beginning to imagine the story or draft the essay and I’m not yet committed to the prose. I always try to work on a new concept to see where it leads. Sometimes it leads nowhere, but I wouldn’t have known that without experimenting with it. Once a story forms in my mind, I rely on my brain to develop it while I’m not thinking of it directly, as when I do the dishes or walk to school to pick up my kids. I also discovered that having multiple things to work on keeps me from feeling burned-out.
I have 6 cats and a Dalmatian (seriously, check my Instagram feed) and I usually have at least one or two snuggling with me when I write. Do you have a writing buddy, or do you find it distracting?
When I first started writing, I used to need my own space, away from all distractions, where I could think about my story. Not anymore. I still have my office, where I go when my kids are at school because it has a big monitor where I can plug in my laptop. But half the time I write in my bed, crisscross-applesauce, on my laptop, with my door open so I can hear the kids in the house. Sometimes when I’m in the middle of a scene or an essay, one of my kids runs in and jumps on the bed to ask me something. I set my laptop down and we talk. And when we’re done, I pick up right where I left off. But it took me many years to build that kind of flexibility, I now realize.
Roxana Arama is a Romanian American author with a master of fine arts in creative writing from Goddard College. She studied computer science in Bucharest, Romania, and moved to the United States to work in software development. Her short stories and essays have been published in several literary magazines. Extreme Vetting is her first novel. She lives in Seattle, Washington, with her family.