Author Interview with John Kent

Posted on by Cindy

1) If your book were to have a theme song, what would it be?

–I listen to music when I read. I make soundtracks. I always have Big Wreck on it. They always have epic love songs. Very emotional.

2) If Hollywood optioned your book, who would you want to play the lead characters?

–My stories always play out like movies. I experience the stories like they are telling themselves. Though it wasn’t what I envisioned,  I liked Harrison Ford’s Colonel Graff from Ender’s Game. He would be a great Captain Talk. Rigid and yet emotional. 

Truth be told otherwise,  I would love a movie to be made,  but not with mainstream actors.  In Hollywood films, the actors become more important than the message.  It would have to be an actor who could become the part of the scenery without being the same character they were in every other movie they’ve played in.

3) Who is your favourite author, and why?

–Melanie Rawn is my favourite author. She wrote the Dragon Prince Saga and some others.The Dragon Prince is the only book I have read multiple times and even then I had to replace the book once. I always found her characters riveting and her lead, Rohan, is quite possible the most awesome name in the world. The characters go through some harrowing events and they  grow and change.  I love that they aren’t two dimensional.

4) Which 5 authors (dead or alive) would you invite to dinner?

–I think I’ve said before that you should never meet your idols. It stands for authors too. We aren’t exactly what we put to paper so I wouldn’t want to sit down at length with someone that I feel shares my values and find out that they aren’t who we expect. Look at Orson Scott Card. If you haven’t read any of the Ender’s series, then you are missing out, but it’s too bad the man had to turn out to be such a close-minded ignorant individual. I would have been happy just to know that he wrote the books, but when he started to spout off about his true beliefs, I lost all respect for him. I think that if I were to invite any fiction writers to my table I would ask those people who I read their books and asked, what the hell did you do that for? Take Robert Jordan, now deceased. His books have a dreadfully slow pace for the first 400 pages and then in the last 150 or so, they go so fast that you don’t hardly know what’s happening. I would also ask if he thought there was more story to tell or whether he was trying to milk it for all the money he could. I would ask the same things of Terry Brooks, another author I love to read, but question why he kept going back to the same world. Was it because the world was already created and he didn’t have to do the leg work or because he had a built in audience?

Now when it comes to non-fiction writers I think it’s different. Scientific writers put out their thoughts and then publically defend them.  Neil Degrasse Tyson is an interesting man, but I think he might recognize it too much himself. I expect though that I could spend hours…. if not years picking his brain about different universal phenomena.

To round out the five, perhaps I would invite Stephen King, not because I idolize him, but I am curious sometimes what goes through his head. Some of his stories seem like he had to have come up with them in a dream or something. They are just strange. I would ask him where they came from.

5) What came first – the title or the story?

–Story came first. Title made sense.

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