Roxana Arama on the Inspiration for "Extreme Vetting"

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.

Jordan King on The Inspiration for "White Oaks"

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.

Chad Boudreaux on Creating A Different Kind of Scavenger Hunt

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 Chad Boudreaux, author of Scavenger Hunt which releases on January 31

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?

The specific origin point for my novel Scavenger Hunt is a hidden eighth floor of the Main Justice Building in Washington, D.C. Main Justice is headquarters for many of the top U.S. lawyers, including the U.S. Attorney General and U.S. Solicitor General. The elevators at Main Justice, however, only reach the seventh floor. But there are eight sets of windows. That seemed strange to me back in 2002, when I started work there, so I conducted research on the building and unearthed no clues. Coming up short, I sought out a man who’d worked at Main Justice for several decades—a silver-haired institutionalist—and he told me that, before they built the FBI building (across the street), the eighth floor had served as the old FBI ballistics lab. He said there was a secret staircase that led to the eighth floor, which was now more of a utility floor. Mesmerized by this news, I grabbed a custodian with access to the staircase, a flashlight, and a notepad and ventured to the hidden floor. Many of the notes I doodled on that notepad are now in Chapter Two of Scavenger Hunt.

Once the original concept existed, how did you build a plot around it?

I figured the secret eighth floor at the Justice Department would provide the perfect meeting place for a clandestine, illegal operation staffed by amazing counterterrorism operatives from disparate agencies. The group consists of a Rambo-like figure from Delta Force, a former CIA operative with a questionable past, and a beautiful and stealth woman—a shadow—from NSA. All that remained was placing my all-star group in a theatre of unimaginable danger facing unspeakable tragedy. Beyond that, I introduced the real-life tensions inherent with combatting terrorism in a constitutional republic underpinned with strong individual rights. Readers will find that, throughout the story, I take them to cool spots in the Nation’s capital and pull back the curtain a bit on how things work in the mysterious U.S. intelligence, legal, and law enforcement communities. All that rounds out a plot that, if I’ve done my job, provides the platform for an entertaining, unforgettable story. 

Have you ever had the plot firmly in place, only to find it changing as the story moved from your mind to paper?

My mischievous characters do whatever they can to turn my original outline on its head. I will have a story plotted in my brain, but I rarely can predict how my characters will respond when I place them in theater, trap them in a box, and tell them to escape from the box. Stephen King mentions this phenomenon in his classic book On Writing, and when I first read it, I rolled my eyes at the thought of characters having minds of their own. But now I know that great characters will surprise you, and sometimes you must let them do their own thing, even if that means changing the story. My protagonist in Scavenger Hunt, Blake Hudson, is a fairly composed young man . . . or so I thought until someone messed with his four-legged best friend. I’m still shocked at how Blake responded to certain events in the book, and his actions when left unsupervised changed the novel’s trajectory and ending.   

Do story ideas come to you often, or is fresh material hard to come by?

Presently, I have five stories in my head. Story ideas come easy, putting them on the shelf is hard. Great stories will haunt you if you don’t tell them, so eventually authors must memorialize, nurture, and finish them. Many of my story ideas come while exercising and listening to fast-paced music. One of my recommendations to writers of fiction who struggle with finding and holding stories is to assign sticky titles to bubbling ideas. For instance, I had an idea recently for a story that was vague and ephemeral. I assigned it a title: The Puppeteer. Because I gave the idea a title, my mind had a solid reference point to revisit, and now it’s developing into a compelling story.  

How do you choose which story to write next, if you’ve got more than one percolating?

I suspect there is some business savvy inherent in prioritizing stories. My artsy answer is that the next story in the queue knocks the loudest. For example, I plan to write more novels in the Scavenger Hunt series, and many ask if my second novel is a sequel. It’s not. My second novel will be a thriller outside the series. I’m not sure if that makes the best business sense, but—although I desire to sell a ton of books—I’m not writing novels for fame or money, and I had to write that non-sequel thriller next. It just kept knocking, knocking, knocking loudly—driving me mad!

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?

My writing buddy for Scavenger Hunt was my bestie and the only real character in the novel: my Great Dane, Judge. Judge died of cancer several years ago, and his death broke my heart into pieces. I haven’t mustered the courage to adopt or buy another dog, so Eddie Vedder and Pearl Jam remain my primary writing buddies.

Before becoming Executive Vice President & Chief Legal Officer of the nation’s largest military shipbuilder, Chad Boudreaux served as Deputy Chief of Staff for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, where he advised Secretary Michael Chertoff on almost all significant matters facing the newly established department.  Before working for Homeland Security, Boudreaux served in several high-ranking positions at the U.S. Justice Department, where he was hired the night before the September 11, 2001 attacks. During his time at the Justice Department, Boudreaux focused most of his time on matters relating to terrorism and homeland security.  Boudreaux graduated from Baylor University in Texas in 1995 and from the University of Memphis School of Law in 1998, where he was Managing Editor of the law review.