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 Jordan King, author of White Oaks, a story about a disabled veteran whose repeated drug overdoses result in him being sent to a mental hospital with a dark secret.
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?
Yes, so White Oaks started as a short story; it was actually one of the first things I ever wrote. If you read the book, chapter four is that original short story. Although it has always been fiction, there are elements that are pulled from my real life. Like my protagonist, Jason, I’m a disabled veteran and have had a lot of issues over the years and continue to deal with a lot of chronic pain. There have been periods over the last 15+ years when my way of dealing with those issues was with substance abuse. I wanted to address that head on with the short story, and I just couldn’t get it out of my head so I started to expand it and it ended up becoming like therapy. How I processed the things I’d done over the years and how I was ultimately able to let some of that stuff go and move on.
Once the original concept existed, how did you build a plot around it?
I just started asking what if questions. What if Jason were to get clean? Would it be voluntary or forced? If forced, who would force it and what would those circumstances be? It was obvious to me from the start that it should be forced, so I started thinking of ways to make Jason’s world much smaller. I couldn’t think of a better way to do that other than stripping him of his autonomy, and putting him in a place he couldn’t simply walk away from when things got too hard. Somewhere he’d not only have to deal with his personal issues that landed him there to begin with but simultaneously deal with fundamental things like survival.
Have you ever had the plot firmly in place, only to find it changing as the story moved from your mind to paper?
Oh absolutely. I’ve heard authors talk about how they often felt like the story wrote itself, or once the characters were firmly established, they’d take on a personality of their own. I never understood that until I started writing myself. I plot and plan and map things out before I start writing. Usually, I’ll stick to the plan (or somewhere plan adjacent), but there are times when things just kind of happen while I’m writing, things that are nowhere near the plan, they just end up on the page. Even though it can be problematic at times for “the plan” those are some of the moments I enjoy the most about writing…when the characters take over and push the story in a direction I never considered before and I just kind of vanish, like I’m narrating events rather than creating them.
Do story ideas come to you often, or is fresh material hard to come by?
They come often enough to keep me busy continuously, but that’s probably because I focus on novels and those take a really long time, so if I don’t have a solid idea for several months, it’s not a problem because I’m still working on the last one. If I was a short story writer, I think I’d be in a lot more trouble as far as coming up with fresh material regularly. Successful short story writers are like magicians to me. I can rarely figure out how to write something interesting, fleshed out and complete in such a small package.
How do you choose which story to write next, if you’ve got more than one percolating?
White Oaks is my second novel. I have a third finished (still looking for an agent or publisher!) and am working on my fourth novel now. Each time was the same. I chose whatever I couldn’t stop thinking about. There are some ideas that come and go, but the other ones (the ones that become books), I obsessed over until I felt like I just HAD to write it. Also, going back to what I said about plot and feeling like I vanish into the story. That’s probably the best part for me and when I really know I’m working on the right thing, when I sink in so far that I feel like I’m narrating events and the real world around me and anything that’s wrong with it vanishes into the story with me.
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?
I don’t have any pets, so no writing buddy for me. I don’t think I’d find distracting at all – it’d be a comfort, but I say that from a place of complete ignorance of what pet ownership is like. That said, my brother and his wife have a Great Dane (Duncan) they rescued a couple years ago. I just met Duncan for the first time recently and he is the sweetest living thing I’ve ever encountered. He can be my writing buddy any day.
Jordan King earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Miami of Ohio. His non-fiction essay "Lost Time: A Road Trip Journal" was published in Adelaide Literary Magazine, February 2019. White Oaks was a finalist in the Ohio Writer’s Associations’ Great Novel Contest of 2019, and is Jordan’s debut novel. He lives in Central Ohio with his wife and son.