Will Lavender: Obedience

Title:  Obedience
Author:  Will Lavender
Publisher: Random House Inc
Hardcover: 304 pages
ISBN-13: 978-0307396105

1.  First off, congratulations on the big novel sale! Give us the elevator pitch. What’s your book about?

My novel is a campus thriller about a group of students who are faced with a strange puzzle. On the first day of their Logic and Reasoning class, their professor gives them their one and only assignment: find a fictional missing girl named Polly. They have six weeks to find her; if they do not succeed, then the girl will be murdered.

At first the students believe that the professor’s puzzle is nothing but an academic game, but as they begin their research–using clues and doctored photographs the professor e-mails to them–they find that there was a real, unsolved missing persons case that occurred near the college in the 1980s. As the students rush to find the hypothetical Polly and possibly implicate their creepy, mysterious professor in the crime, they realize that they are on a quest to solve a much more dire mystery than they first believed: they may very well be trying to save their own lives.

2.  Most new novelists have an interesting story to tell about their journey to publication. What’s yours? Did you use an agent? Make sure to tell us about the day you found out you’d sold a book.

I really don’t have an interesting story. I queried agents, got representation, got a few bites on the manuscript, and we sold the book. There were plot twists along the way: rewrites, important characters erased from the manuscript, an important title change, one particularly ugly rejection–all the stuff every writer must deal with if he is serious about his novel. But eventually the novel was as tight as I could make it, and it sold in the winter of 2006.

One thing I quickly realized about the publishing process is that the editor is not some mad dictator who wants to eviscerate the manuscript. My editor was great. She worked with me to make the book as good as it could be. One thing that was interesting was that, every time we worked on a change, my editor gave me choices. I expected the process to be something like you might see on that TLC reality show about people who can’t dress themselves: the editor tells you what you need to do, and you do it…or else. But it’s much more painless than that. My manuscript remained mine all the way through, even though it went through pretty extensive changes from the time my agent submitted it to the time it was completely finished.

3.  Do you have another book in the pipeline? What are you working on now?

I’ve found that the second book is much more difficult than the first. I’ve been working for more than a year on book #2 (for comparison’s sake, I wrote OBEDIENCE in two months), and I’m almost finished. Because I’m interested in puzzle-oriented mind games, the plot is essential. And there are times when the plot will just not work with you. It’s like getting to the very end of a Rubik’s Cube: every side is blue save one, and you think you’re close. But it’s an illusion; you actually aren’t that close at all. This is the way my manuscript has worked in the year-plus since OBEDIENCE was sold. I’ve had to work really hard to understand it, to tame it, to find out what might make it interesting to a reader. I’m almost there, hopefully.

4.  What’s your writing process like? Morning writer, night writer, or something in between?

I don’t try and constrain myself to one particular time of day, because I’m worried that I’ll get up one morning and that time will be impossible. (I have two young children, so…) So I write when I can: normally I begin in the morning and go to the early evening, with only the essential e-mail checks and Yahoo! Games breaks every forty-five minutes. Six hours a day, every weekday, pretty much without fail. The only way to really make it happen, I think, is to be diligent and to force the mind into cooperating with your ambition. If I miss a day of writing, it’s like missing a day of exercise: I feel guilty, I feel like I’ve missed out on an opportunity, and I may even feel bloated. This is why getting the butt in the chair is so important, and it’s why I’m a firm believer that if you’re working hard then you should be able to write the first draft of a novel in two or three months.

5.  There seems to be an unusually high percentage of writers who own cats. Here at The First Book, we’re doing a study to find out if there’s a direct relationship between writing success and cat ownership. Do you own a cat? If so, tell us about him or her. If not, tell us what you have against cats.

We do not own any cats at our house, basically because I fear that my young children might saddle them up. My daughter (17 months) seems to love cats, however, and each time we go to the pet store I have to fight the urge to buy one.

Off-topic now, but when is the first great cat novel going to be written. We’ve had Edgar Santwilleylley, we’ve had Racing in the Rain, and of course there’s Marley and that guy who whispers. Who’s going to write the great American cat novel? I’ve thrown down the gauntlet!