Friday, April 30, 2010
Dan Wells
Posted By Gavin Sheehan on April 30, 2010, 11:07 PM
When
delving into the psychology of a murderer its easy for most writers
to jump right into the thick and allow their creations to go on a
rampage. But so few times do readers ever bare witness to the
beginning, let alone the evolution of the uncontrollable sociopath
before them. The recently released book I
Am Not A Serial Killer takes a
look into the mind of a potential homicidal mortician who tries to
hold back his urges and stay on the good side, only to be tempted
with a potential threat to the community to unleash the beast
within.
--- Local writer Dan Wells recently
penned this novel and has received great acclaim both here at home
and overseas. Even just recently winning a Whitney Award for the Best
New LDS Writer of 2009. And with a successful nation-wide tour underway
and a second title about to be released, his career in writing looks
to have a prosperous future. I got a chance to chat with Dan while
he's currently running around the country, chatting about his work so
far as well as his thoughts on local writers. Along with some photos
from the man himself of both the current tour and his visits to
Germany and England.
Dan
Wells
http://www.fearfulsymmetry.net/
Gavin:
Hey Dan, first off, tell us a bit about yourself.
Dan:
My name is Dan Wells, I grew up in Salt Lake City, and I live in
Orem with my wife and four kids. I've been writing since I was kid,
when I told my parents in second grade that I was going to be an
author. A few years ago I sold a book, which turned into a series,
and I'm incredibly lucky to be working today as a full-time
novelist.
Gavin:
What first got you into writing and what were some of your favorite
titles over the years?
Dan:
I've always wanted to be a creator, and specifically a storyteller,
and I believe that stems back to my parents. I am a writer because my
parents were readers; it's really as simple as that. My dad read to
us every night, starting with The Hobbit and moving on from there,
and my Mom is reading or holding a book in literally every memory I
have of my early childhood. They put a bookshelf in the bedroom I
shared with my brother, Rob (another local author), stocked with the
Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen and A.A. Milne, who
remains to this day as one of my favorite books. We had a big
selection of historical novels, such as Johnny Tremain and Bullwhip
Griffin, but my greatest love was science fiction and fantasy--I
remember a book about a boy who lived in an ocean observatory on the
bottom of the sea, with a pet dolphin, who discovered a prehistoric
creature recently freed from a cave; I must have read that book 15
times. I read the Lord of the Rings, the Prydain Chronicles, the Pern
books by Anne McCaffrey, the Berserker books by Fred Saberhagen, and
on and on. As I got older I started reading more of the classics, and
fell in love with Victor Hugo and Joseph Conrad and Fyodor
Dostoevsky. I still read and love poetry, thanks to that early
grounding in A.A. Milne, and I always end up sneaking poetry into my
books. And of course I still love science fiction and fantasy: I
think that Dune, by Frank Herbert, is my favorite book of all
time.
Gavin:
How was it for you growing up in Utah your whole life and having the
local culture as an influence?
Dan:
I love traveling and experiencing other cultures, but I also really
love Utah. As a self-employed author I can literally live anywhere I
want--we're not tied to an office or a company or even a country--and
yet my wife and I both agree that we love it here and want to stay in
Utah. There's an incredible writing community here, and a nice blend
of civilization and wilderness: my front yard is a quiet street in an
awesome neighborhood, my back yard borders a horse pasture, and
within a one-mile radius there's a university, my favorite game
store, and the busiest Wal-Mart in America. And despite Utah's
reputation for overwhelming whiteness, my neighborhood is deliciously
diverse. Not everything's perfect, of course--Utah is a lot more
politically conservative than I am, and I tend to disagree with a lot
of our political decisions. On the other hand, I don't pay a lot of
attention to politics, so this doesn't have a lot of opportunity to
bother me.
Gavin:
I read that you spent a lot of years reading at the Sprague Library.
What made you spend spend so much time there?
Dan:
I grew up in Sugar House, so the Sprague was only a few blocks away,
and I'd ride my bike there almost every day during the summer. I
remember they did lots of reading incentive kind of activities, and
my Grandma would pay us a dime for every book we read and things like
that, but I didn't really need any of it--I just could never stop
reading. It's been hands-down my favorite thing to do since the day I
learned to do it.
Gavin:
You currently have your Bachelors in English. What were those years
like in college and how was the overall experience for you as a
writer?
Dan:
I went into the English program because I wanted to work with words,
and yet my education and career counseling had convinced me that
writing was a fun but useless endeavor completely separate from the
concept of money. Our educational system is designed to put you in a
cubicle, and there's no room for art anywhere in that cubicle, so I'd
kind of given up my dreams of writing professionally and kept it to
myself as a hobby. So anyway, I figured that becoming an editor was
closest I could get to playing with with words for a living, and BYU
has a great editing program, and I loved it. And then one semester a
few friends and I signed up for a writing class taught by Dave
Wolverton, a fantasy author, and on the very first day of class he
told us "You can make a living as a writer." no one had
ever said that to me before. I consider that I got an excellent
education, from elementary school on up, but at no point had anyone
ever told me that art was viable career, or explained how to make it
happen. Dave knocked down all those barriers and walked us through
the entire process: how to write, how to sell, how to sell enough to
live on, and on and on and on. I brought all my half-written novels
out into the light, set my goals as high as I could, and I've never
looked back since.
Gavin:
On the side you also do a lot of role-playing games. What got you
hooked on those games?
Dan:
Like I said before, I'm a storyteller, and role-playing is just one
more opportunity to tell stories and flex your imagination.
Role-playing has such a weird stigma attached to it, especially in
highly religious communities, and frankly I can't think of anything
more backwards. Parents, if you really understood what role-playing
was you'd push your kids into it, not warn them away: imagine a game
that's inherently social, encourages reading and math skills, and
develops personal interaction in a cooperative, problem-solving
environment. We talk all the time about how our kids are rotting
their brains with TV and how no one reads anymore and how we want to
make sure our children develop strong, supportive friendships, and
role-playing is the one-stop shop to make all of that happen, and
more. I've already started playing role-playing games with my kids,
and I feel like I can almost see their imaginations getting stronger,
and their communication skills getting better and better. Role-playing
is awesome, and everyone should do it.
Gavin:
How did the idea come about to officially start work on a
novel?
Dan: I
wrote my first book in second grade--a Choose Your Own Adventure
book--so the idea of writing a novel was never really new, it's
always been there. I started writing seriously my second year of
college, and I started submitting them for publication soon after
that. The book I eventually sold, I Am Not a Serial Killer, was my
sixth finished book, and I'd already started on a seventh by the time
it sold.
Gavin:
Where did the concept come from for I Am Not A Serial Killer?
Dan:
Like all normal, well-balanced people in the world, I study serial
killers for fun--or as a hobby, more correctly, because it's hard to
say that it's fun. I don't how I got hooked on them, but I find them
fascinating to research and read about, and I've done it for years.
One day, driving home from my weekly writing group, I was telling my
friend Brandon (of Sanderson fame) all about sociopathy and
developmental psychology, and we started a kind of jam session on the
idea. Brandon and I do this all the time, and we come up with tons of
awesomely goofy ideas we'll never be able to actually use, but this
one we knew instantly would make an incredible story: a young
sociopath who has all the predictors of serial killer behavior, but
who's trying very hard to be good instead of bad. The story itself
didn't coalesce for another year, but that character was too
compelling, and I couldn't get him out of my head. I knew I had to
write about a book about him.
Gavin:
What was the process like for you while writing it and defining
those characters?
Dan:
It was surprisingly easy to get into the main character's head; that
makes me sound like a really creepy person, but he's actually a lot
more normal than people realize. Sociopathy is primarily defined as a
lack of empathy: you feel emotions but you can't connect emotionally
to other people. You feel different and weird; you don't understand
why other people act the way they do, and they don't seem to
understand you. That sounds very alien, but it's also an eerily
perfect description of adolescence, and that makes it something we
can all relate to. Why do I feel the the way I feel? Does anyone else
feel it too, or am I a freak? Are the people at school being nice to
me or making fun of me? Are my parents growing distant, or am I? The
big surface problem in the book--a supernatural serial killer--is not
something the average reader has any personal experience with, but
the emotional problems at the core of the book are things we've all
gone through, things we still go through every day. At it's heart
this is the story of a boy trying to be good, and once I discovered
that the entire thing just snapped into focus.
Gavin:
Was there a lot of rewrite work to it or did everything just kind of
fall into place?
Dan:
I spent a year playing with the idea before I ever wrote anything: I
placed him in different times and places, I gave him different
families, I tested him in different genres. Slowly, the more I worked
with it, the more ideas fell into place: he had to live in a certain
kind of family, in a certain kind of town, facing a certain kind of
enemy. Supernatural elements were a very early inclusion; the
mortuary where he and his mother live was a very late inclusion, but
one that kind of tied all the various ideas together. I wrote a few
sample chapters, more monologues than anything else, just to make
sure I understood the character's voice, and then I wrote out an
outline and sat down to write and the first chapter just flowed out
of me, like it was the most natural thing in the world. The tone was
perfect. I don't think I've rewritten more than three sentences in
that first chapter from that draft to the published one. Other parts
of the book were much harder--the ending, for example, has been
completely rewritten three times, from the ground up, because I
couldn't get it right. My editor at Tor, Moshe Feder, and of course
my writing group, helped a lot to get that ending right.
Gavin:
Did you show it to anyone prior to finding a publisher?
Dan:
I have a writing group, as I have mentioned, and we meet together
once a week to read and critique each others' work. I really feel
like this group is the single most valuable resource I have as a
writer--they've helped me improve my writing, and this series in
particular, in innumerable and invaluable ways. If you're serious
about writing, take the time to find or create a good writing
group.
Gavin:
How did you come across Tor Books, and what was it like pitching the
book to them?
Dan:
Brandon Sanderson and I have been friends for nearly twelve years,
long before either of us was published, and we spent those early
years traveling to conventions and meeting editors and agents. We
both wanted to do this for a living, so we set goals and went after
it like a job search, or an actual job: we researched the various
publishers, we figured out which editors would be a good fit for our
work, and we tracked them down at parties and such to introduce
ourselves. At one such convention in Montreal we met an editor named
Moshe Feder, who'd recently become an acquiring editor for Tor and
therefore had a lot of "open slots." We found him,
introduced ourselves, pitched our books, and he asked to see them. A
year later he bought Brandon's first book, Elantris, and a few years
after that I wrote mine and Moshe loved
it.
Gavin:
When it finally got released what did you think of the public
reaction to it? And how has it been for you promoting the book?
Dan:
Seeing my own book on a shelf in a bookstore was one of the coolest
things of my entire life. And the reaction has been great--people are
reading it and loving it, sales have been excellent, and I even won
the 2009 Whitney Award for best new LDS author. People keep asking
why there hasn't been more of a controversy, with a horror novel in
the heart of Mormondom, but so far the readers have all "gotten"
it. It's not a slasher flick, though it is gruesome, and it's not
evil, though it does confront the concept of evil fairly head-on.
It's the story of a boy who's trying to be good, and that makes it
not only a very moral novel but a very Mormon novel in a lot of
ways--"the natural man is an enemy to God" and so on. The
word 'horror" has such a stigma attached to it, but the concept
of horror is at the heart of all fiction: something goes wrong, and
the characters have to make it right again. Tragedy must be survived
and conquered. Evil must be overcome by good. I think that people are
seeing that and responding to it. The single most common comment I
get from people is "I usually don't read this kind of book, but
I loved it." What these people don't realize is that they read
horrific fiction all the time, they just don't call it horror--they
call it thriller, or dark fantasy, or paranormal romance, or a dozen
other labels. This has made promoting the book very easy and a lot of
fun, though I admit that it is surprisingly hard to avoid
sensationalizing serial killers. People keep giving me ideas for
advertising, or for T-shirts, or for viral web games, and they're all
good in theory but wildly inappropriate in practice. Serial killers
are real, and the things they do are horrible, and while I feel like
I handle them well in my book it is surprisingly hard to handle them
well in my advertising.
Gavin:
Right now you're working on a second called Mr. Monster. Without
giving away any grand details, what can you tell us about it?
Dan:
I'm looking at the advance copies right now, actually--they just got
delivered. Here's a pitch that's relatively spoiler-free: the first
book is about letting your dark side loose, and the second book is
about how hard it is to lock your dark side back up again. It's
essentially a story about addiction, and about how doing something
once can make it very, very hard not to do it again. It's definitely
the darkest of the trilogy.
Gavin:
Going local, what's your take on the local literary scene and the
writers coming out of it?
Dan:
Utah has an incredible writing community, big enough that people all
over the country are starting to notice. I don't know how it started,
but it's easy to see why it's still growing: everyone here is very
supportive, specifically seeking to foster a strong writing
community, so it's kind of rolling with it's own momentum. We have
great local conventions like LTUE, CONduit, MountainCon, and
StoryMakers, we have a ton of excellent writing workshops, we have
local support from very big names like Dave Wolverton, Tracy Hickman,
L.E. Modesitt, Brandon Sanderson, Brandon Mull, Shannon Hale, and so
on. Even Stephenie Meyers and Orson Scott Card, though they don't
live in Utah, help foster the local writing community just by being
famous FORMER Utahns. Aspiring writers in Utah have a lot of
resources to work with, and those of us who are published are doing
our part to keep the ball rolling and gathering speed. Brandon and I,
along with Sci-Fi webcartoonist Howard Tayler, do a weekly podcast on
writing that's proven to be very popular, both locally and around the
world. We even won a Parsec Award last year for Best Writing Related
podcast. Just last week another Utahn sold a fantasy series, and the
week before that a friend of mine sold a YA novel. The community just
gets bigger and bigger.
Gavin:
Is there anything you think could be done to make it more
prominent?
Dan:
In national publishing industry, Utah is already hugely prominent,
but I don't know if many locals realize it. Just last year we had
four local writers hit the New York Times bestseller list, and I
think that kind of thing is only going to get more common and more
frequent as time goes on. Plus we have a massively prolific local
publishing industry feeding the LDS market, so there's a LOT of
writers in the area. I guess the thing I'd like to see is more
recognition of how many readers we have: national publishers don't
typically send their authors through Utah, or really anywhere
non-coastal, but I guarantee they'd get a huge response if they did.
With a few big successes and some word of mouth, Utah could become a
must-visit destination for book tours in every genre.
Gavin:
Do you have any advice for writers about their work and getting
published?
Dan:
Always be writing, and always be submitting. Don't get stuck on one
book, revising it until it's perfect, and don't keep your work in a
closet where no one can see it. If you want to get published you have
to treat it like a career, and you can't do a career in your spare
time. The single most important skill I have as a writer is not
writing but self-motivation; you have to make time and put in the
work and never give up, and if you stick with it long enough and hard
enough you WILL get published. Dave Wolverton said it to me and it
changed my life, so now I'll say it to you: you can make a living as
a writer. It just takes work.
Gavin:
If you had to make a list, who are some of your favorite local
authors?
Dan:
Brandon Sanderson is a close friend, and certainly one of my
favorites, as is our third podcasting buddy Howard Tayler. John Brown
and Larry Correia are two more local writers that I love, probably
because they write in my same genre of dark fantasy and horror. And
of course my brother, Rob Wells, is an excellent writer with a few
LDS books and he's about to close a deal with a national SF series
that I've read and love. Honestly there are too many to mention--the
local writing community is far, far bigger than most people
realize--so I'll just say "[insert your name here] is awesome!"
and leave it at that.
Gavin:
What are your thoughts on the local book stores and how they're
holing up against bigger chains?
Dan:
With the passing of the Read Leaf in Springville we're down to just
a handful of really solid indies in northern Utah, though the ones
that are left are remarkably strong and even growing. Places like Sam
Weller's and The King's English and The Purple Cow are fantastic
bookstores that are more than holding their own. We've kind of passed
the point, it seems, where indies are dying, and across the country
we're starting to see them coming back to life. I'd love to see a
Sci-Fi/Fantasy bookstore crop up in Utah somewhere, but I can't
complain about what we've got.
Gavin:
Do you feel like books are in decline with some being published
online, or do you believe there will always be an audience there for
a hand-held copy?
Dan:
This is a hard one to answer, because I am a hardcore bibliophile
but at the same time I'm a fairly avid environmentalist, and no
matter how much I love holding a book in my hands I have to hope that
we'll eventually move beyond the concept of non-digital printing.
That said, I don't think we're anywhere near that point today, and it
may be that even our grandchildren won't live to see it. But yes, the
digital revolution has come, and it's hit every other industry and
it's changed the way we do everything, and it would be foolish of us
to assume it will never happen to publishing. We just need to be very
careful in how we go about it--the music industry barely survived the
switch, for crying out loud, and they're huge; I have no idea what it
would do to publishing if every book was suddenly available at half
the price in an easily-copied format. A lot of the big houses
wouldn't survive. We need to give the major publishers a chance to
convert their business models on their own schedule.
Gavin:
What can we expect from you throughout this year?
Dan:
My second book, Mr. Monster, comes out in October of this year, and
my third comes out the following Spring. I'll be hitting a bunch of
conventions and going on tour for each of them, which is going to eat
up a ton of time, but even so I hope to get three new books written
this year. The first two will be easy--I'm already done with one and
working on the revision, and the second is about 1/3 written--but the
third will be hard to squeeze in. I've set the goal for three just
because I'm trying to push my limits a bit.
Gavin:
Aside from the obvious, is there anything you'd like to plug or
promote?
Dan:
The last week of May is CONduit, an awesome SF/Fantasy convention
in downtown Salt Lake. If you like writing, or reading, or even if
you just like watching "Doctor Who", this is a wonderful place to meet
other fans and writers and published authors and have a great time.
Please come join us.
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