Dave King has done it all. He's been a florist, a bartender, an artist and even an editor. Now he's taken a successful leap into writing fiction with his debut novel, The Ha-Ha and Warner Brothers Pictures will now turn his book into a movie. FictionAddiction.NET's Danielle DeFrain talks with King about his creative past, his novel and his take on the writing craft.

You've had such a successful painting career and now it appears your writing is going to be equally flourishing. What made you finally decide to delve into the world of novel writing?

To be honest, my painting career was a mixed bag. My undergraduate degree was in painting and film, and I was a serious painter for almost ten years. During the end of that time a partner and I founded Dynaflow Studios, Inc (now called Franklin Tartaglione, LLC) to create decorative painting and murals for high-end residences.

I enjoyed the décor world very much, and it's true we were successful, but it's a different kind of creativity when you're pursuing a craft and delivering a commissioned product; I missed the freedom I'd enjoyed in the studio. Since I was already painting all day, I enrolled in a writing class as a creative outlet, and one of my first teachers, the wonderful novelist Melvin Jules Bukiet, encouraged me to consider graduate school.

After several years of writing on nights and weekends only, I sold my portion of the business and entered the MFA program at Columbia. The Ha-Ha (in quite a different form) was my Master's thesis.

There is this burning question that results from reading your biography. How does one set off for Tokyo and end up in Alaska?

Mostly, it's a factor of youth. The story of our trip to Alaska was one of my first (never finished) writing projects, conceived as a farcical picaresque of two clueless suburban kids at large in the world.

Here's the short version: my best friend Baby and I were freshmen at a Wisconsin college, and we were restless. Since adolescence, I'd been dreaming of seeing Japan, so when Baby and I got fed up enough we decided to leave college and move to Tokyo.

We each had a little bit of money (mine was from delivering papers as a boy), but when we visited the local travel agency we were told we didn't have enough money for a ticket to Tokyo. "Well, where can we go?" we asked; the answer was Anchorage, Alaska.

Anchorage was about the last place we wanted to go, and we left the travel agency in a bit of a huff; but walking back to campus, we passed a telephone pole where a flyer advertised jobs in Alaska. In our willingness to cast ourselves to the four winds, we decided to interpret the flyer as a sign; we retraced our steps and bought those tickets to Anchorage. (By the way, it's worth noting that Baby has, using her real name, Amy Sillman, become a pretty celebrated painter whose work has been included in the Whitney Biennial, among other important venues.)

The character of Howard Kapostash in "The Ha-Ha" is three-dimensional in his role as protagonist. He has such a convincing mixture of flaws and feelings, and you did an amazing job bringing him to life. What inspired you to choose him as the basis of your novel?

My interest in disability is a consequence of having had a profoundly autistic brother, but it's important to note that while my brother Hank (who died in 1993) certainly helped spark the character of Howard Kapostash, Howard is not an attempt to "give voice" to Hank's experience.

The two lives are substantively quite different, and one of the book's primary dynamics is the exploration of Howard's loss; since Howard, unlike Hank, has known the full range of a normally abled life, his rebirth as a disabled person encompasses the narrowing of every expectation for what we loosely term the American dream. With this knowledge of what might have been, Howard bears an extra burden of sadness I hope my brother never experienced.

Child-rearing is one of life's greatest challenges. With the difficulties that Howie already faced, why toss that into the mix?

There are a number of reasons I included Ryan in the story, the first being that I enjoy writing about kids. Though we don't have children ourselves, The Ha-Ha was written during a happy period when my life was rich with children, especially my young nieces and nephew. They—and many children of friends—contributed immeasurably to the portrait of Ryan.

A second reason to build the story around Howard's time with Ryan was to raise the level of challenge for myself. The story of a damaged child and damaged adult who bond and find reconciliation is pretty classic and has already been told in a variety of ways (the foremost example in our American literature probably being Huckleberry Finn).

I wanted to see if I could add something to this literature without allowing my book to become cheesy, predictable or clichéd. Treading this line was one of the harder tasks I addressed in writing The Ha-Ha, and in fact, the book follows fairly foreseeable lines for its first half before ultimately veering off in a direction that I hope will surprise most readers.

Howard has been compared to some impressive characters of literature. How does it feel to have crafted someone who has touched the hearts and souls of so many?

It's wonderful, and I never tire of hearing from readers. Among the most satisfying responses I've received have been many notes and Emails from Vietnam vets and from those in the health care professions: employees of long-term care facilities, nurses, surgeons, even shrinks. An unexpected number of readers have had some experience of traumatic brain injury or post-traumatic stress disorder, and it's been thrilling to earn the validation of those who have gone through challenges like the ones Howard faces in the novel.