About Will
Thank you so much for your interest in me and my book. If you would like to contact me, my e-mail address is willrlavender@gmail.com.
OBEDIENCE is my first published novel, but as any writer will tell you, there’s always something else in the drawer. I have always wanted to be a writer. I have met people who are tremendous novelists but who came to the profession the back way: their book writing was the result of some life experience, or some inner desire to write a book. Not me. I remember telling people that I wanted to write books in the first grade, not long after I learned to read.
And now it has happened.
OBEDIENCE is a psychological thriller set on the fictional college campus of Winchester University. Even though Winchester isn’t real, it takes its geography and some of its quirks from the places I’ve been as a student and as a teacher. The Seminary Building comes from Jefferson Community College, where I taught writing for six years; the viaduct in the middle of the campus comes from Cumberland College, where I attended as a freshman; the Carnegie Building comes from Centre College, where I graduated; the mishmash of architecture at Winchester comes from Bard College, where I went to graduate school.
Writing this book, then, has allowed me to borrow from my life in extraordinary ways. Some of this was intentional, and some of it seemed to be sort of dredged up from the subconscious. I didn’t even know I was putting some of the autobiographical bits in until readers began to tell me when the review copy came out.
Even though there are personal moments for me in OBEDIENCE, it is set in the state of Indiana – far away from my small hometown on the Tennessee border. The reason I made this choice was simple: I had tried for years to write stories about my hometown. My characters were prototypically Southern, they spoke in deep accents, they mused about their heritage at the drop of a hat. I wanted to be, as many Southern-born writers do, the next Faulkner.
Then, an epiphany. I realized two things:
1. I wanted to write suspense fiction.
2. I needed to get away from my hometown.
I moved OBEDIENCE to the Midwest to get my old setting and my old characters away from my face. If things are too close to you, if your themes or your ideas are so intensely personal, then they can smother you. And this is exactly what was happening for me.
It turned out to be a good choice. Rural Indiana is a nice backdrop for Winchester, a place that is cultivated and rough around the edges at the same time. I was still able to let my characters explore the raw terrain that they do as they are searching for Polly, but in many ways it seemed I was writing about a place I wasn’t familiar with. This allowed the story to come to me in fresh and exciting ways, and so what you discover as these characters become bound in this conspiracy is pretty much the same thing I discovered while writing. I had no idea where it was going when I began.
What I wanted to do with this novel was to write about a conspiracy that becomes so deep, so elaborate that even the reader begins to wonder if the book isn’t some kind of a mad prop. I want you, the reader, to be pulled into these students’ lives and wonder how in the world they are ever going to get out of what their professor has gotten them into. I want you to be suspicious of Professor Williams, as I was when I began this novel. And I want you to think, after you have finished, that you have never really read anything like OBEDIENCE.
Most of all, I hope you have a good time. Drop in any time to WillLavender.com,
—Will Lavender
