Dan Jolley grew up in a rural Southern town as a huge fan of all things science-fiction and fantasy, and now considers himself lucky enough (and stubborn enough) to make a living writing novels, video games, comic books, and children's books.
Tell us a bit about your latest work.
I’m right in the middle of my first-ever fantasy series, The Demon-Sleuth Scrolls. It’s actually a genre mashup of high fantasy and mystery – it takes place in an original setting, where an all-human empire has been using rune-based magic to solve crimes for the last three hundred years. When something begins to break that magic down, it falls to the first-ever non-human member of the Imperial Criminal Investigation Ministry to begin introducing actual detective procedures for the first time in twelve generations, as they try to figure out what’s going on and maybe keep the empire from crumbling. I’ve had a lot of fun building a brand-new world, as well as a brand-new species – the protagonist, Nysska Stonegate, is a sethyd; they all have deep violet skin, yellow or orange eyes, and horns. Male and female sethyds alike are uniformly tall, graceful, gorgeous, they’re faster and stronger than humans, the entire species is pansexual, and the humans hate their guts. So Nysska has no choice but to become a reluctant ambassador for her people and an even more reluctant detective.
What are the themes and subjects you tend to revisit in your work?
I’ve found that I like to write from the perspective of the outsider. I’ve felt like an outsider most of my life – pretty much no matter what situation I’ve ever found myself in – so I guess it comes pretty naturally. I’ve just never felt any real connection to “mainstream” characters in any kind of media. I’d rather read about some obscure superhero like the Creeper than Superman; I’d rather play (and I know this is going to date me horribly) some oddball like Blanka or Dhalsim than Ken or Ryu. The only “standard” character I think I’ve ever created was Travis Clevenger in my creator-owned comic book series Bloodhound, in that he was a blond-haired, blue-eyed white guy, but even that was because my then-wife wanted me to model him after the professional wrestler Triple H.
Also, no matter how I try to get away from it, I always seem to include either lightning or bears. Or both. I just really like lightning and bears, apparently.
What happened in your life that prompted you to become a writer?
I have two older siblings, a brother and a sister, but they’re a lot older – eleven and nine years, respectively. Thanks to that, by the time I was in third grade, they were both out of the house and gone, so I was basically what a sociologist would call an only child. We were juuuust above the poverty line, so we never went anywhere and I didn’t have any fancy toys. I also didn’t have any neighborhood friends to hang out with, and we didn’t get cable TV till I was seventeen, so I spent a ton of time in my most formative years alone. That’s where the overactive imagination that every writer has comes in. To entertain myself I just started making stuff up. I was writing short stories at six, and I wrote my first novel at thirteen. (It was about as horrible as you’d expect.) As soon as I realized it was possible to earn a living by making stuff up and selling it, that became my career path, and I’ve never really wavered from it.
What inspires you to write?
Inspiration comes in all shapes and sizes. Every now and then – not as often as I’d like, for sure – an idea will just appear in my head, fully formed, out of nowhere. That happened once when I was mowing the lawn. Other times I’ll see a sign on a business, or notice some detail out in public somewhere, that’ll give me the germ of an idea that I’ve got to think about for a while and nurture before it grows into something worth writing down. For example, I got an idea for an entire series of novels (that I haven’t started on yet) when I saw the chicken wire in a window in a restaurant in the Atlanta airport.
Realistically, the other kind of inspiration you get when you’re a working professional writer is the knowledge that if you don’t come up with something good and get it turned in by the deadline, you won’t be able to buy groceries or pay the mortgage. I’ve been doing what I dreamed of as a kid – earning a living by making stuff up and selling it – for better than twenty years now, and let me tell you, nothing gets me in the right creative space faster than knowing my financial security rests on finishing a comics script/book manuscript/video game scenario in a certain time frame.
What would be your dream project?
Hmmmm…I don’t know. I mean, another key aspect of doing this job, for me anyway, is being able to fall completely in love with whatever project you’re working on at the time. Kind of like my favorite cat is whichever one is in my lap at the moment. And, y’know, in theory, you’re supposed to get better at stuff the more you do it, so whatever my latest project is should be the best thing I’ve ever written.
That being said, if I could ever figure out how to get Travis Clevenger from Bloodhound, Janey Sinclair from The Gray Widow Trilogy, and Nysska Stonegate from The Demon-Sleuth Scrolls all in one project together – and have it actually make sense – that might be Peak Dan Jolley.
If you have any former project to do over to make it better, which one would it be, and what would you do?
I’d make some different choices about how I handled the DC Comics series Firestorm. I rebooted the character, making the change from the Ronnie Raymond incarnation to the Jason Rusch version, and I’m proud of the work I did on it, but the behind-the-scenes was really messy. Basically I had one editor who wanted me to do one thing, but then his boss wanted me to do something completely different, and I got stuck in the middle. And I didn’t have the experience or the confidence to stand up for myself and get the situation straightened out. Plus I would have pushed back on utterly useless nonsense notes, such as, “I don’t feel like you’re bringing your A game, Dan.” That was the entire feedback I got on one script. What can you do with that? Nothing. But instead of saying, “Sorry, you’re going to have to be more specific about what you want to see,” I just wrote draft after draft after draft until by chance I produced what the editor was looking for. What a waste of everyone’s time that was.
What writers have influenced your style and technique?
The shortlist is Robert E. Howard, Larry Niven, Dean Koontz, Louis L’Amour, John Sandford, and James O’Barr. Those were the ones I read growing up and into college. I think I read every Western L’Amour ever wrote, with particular love for his Sackett Family series. Then, getting into film and TV influences, two huge ones were The X-Files and The Silence of the Lambs, followed closely by Pulp Fiction. Pulp Fiction was a huge turning point for me in the way I approach dialogue. Quentin Tarantino made me realize that when you’ve got characters who know what they’re doing when they’re in the process of doing it they don’t talk about it.
In fact, Tarantino was the reason I wrote my first real book. I had decided to do a screenplay, and I got a book that had his scripts for Reservoir Dogs and True Romance so I could study them. Well, in the introduction, Tarantino basically said, “Screenplays get changed. Film is a collaborative medium, and what you write will get changed. If you want to keep control of your words, write a novel.” So I took that to heart and wrote a novel.
Where would you rank writing on the "Is it an art or it is a science continuum?" Why?
I’d say it’s probably 65 or 70% art and 35 or 30% science. The science part, for me at least, comes in in the form of story structure, which I learned thanks to the late Scott Ciencin recommending The Writer’s Journey by Christopher Vogler. That book takes Joseph Campbell’s work on “the hero’s journey” and applies it specifically to writing. I cannon laud it highly enough. That, along with Invisible Ink and The Golden Theme by Brian McDonald, are the keys to the kingdom. My productivity skyrocketed after I absorbed what they had to say.
That’s about plot. Plot is necessary, and not to be neglected, but I have also learned that it is by far not the most important part of writing. The most important element in your writing is your characters, and that’s where the art comes in. Especially in any kind of serialized format, the reason people come back to anything is the characters. You have to make your characters memorable, vivid, evocative – alive. Sympathetic and heroic, hateful and despicable, whatever, your characters need to occupy space in your readers’ minds and stay there. Move in. Sign a long-term lease. Audiences will come back to, for example, a TV show where the plots are absolute gibbering madness if they love the characters. Creating living, breathing, resonating people who live in readers’ heads is one of the greatest forms of art I can imagine.
What is the most difficult part of your artistic process?
Probably when I need to learn to write in some new format. That usually involves scouring the web for examples of existing works, so I can understand the nuts and bolts of what’s needed. Like, just recently I had the opportunity to write a short audio drama script. I had never written an audio drama before, and, y’know, bang, I’m back to amateur status. All the decades of experience I’ve had doing comic books and video games and novels doesn’t go out the window, exactly, but I am kind of busted back down to “figuring out how to do this” stage. It’s humbling, and sometimes frustrating, but I don’t shy away from opportunities like that, either, because taking in new information – learning new skills, figuring out new processes – is kind of crucial. Not just to being a writer, but to being a human.
How do your writer friends help you become a better writer? Or do they not?
I’ve never been a part of a writers’ group, but I have enlisted a few writer friends as beta readers, which has been super-valuable. Most of the time, though, I see people I know doing amazing things, getting new jobs, publishing astonishing new works of fiction, and it just inspires me to work that much harder. There is no resting on one’s laurels.
What does literary success look like to you?
Well, on one hand, I kind of feel as though I’ve already achieved it. I mean, I’m making a living by writing, which is something not a lot of people can say. Am I a household name? Hardly! I often joke that my career has finally moved all the way up from “unknown” to “obscure.” But I get to sit around and think up stories and characters and get paid for it, and that’s kind of amazing. I’m grateful for my career.
On the other hand, I see book series getting adapted into film and TV…I see these six- and seven-figure deals announced for an author’s latest novel…I see end-cap displays in bookstores and novels on the shelves in airports. It’s easy to look at that kind of rarefied success and feel bitter or discouraged, or beat yourself up for not having achieved it. And, y’know, would I take my own Netflix adaptation, or an advance big enough to buy a beach house in Malibu? Well, yeah. Of course.
But I’m about to have my eighteenth original novel published. And I added to the official canon of DC Comics. And I got to sit in a recording studio where Peter Cullen, as Optimus Prime, read lines that I had written. So, yeah – I’m in a pretty good spot.
Any other upcoming projects you would like to plug?
The first two books in The Demon-Sleuth Scrolls – The Runemaster Homicide and The Black-Horned Grave – are already available, and Falstaff Books has plans to debut the third book, entitled The Runebearer Curse, this year at DragonCon. If you like high fantasy, or police procedurals, or badass sword-wielding female protagonists, or sentient animals – or all of the above – then these are the books for you. (Not if you’re a little kid, though. They’re super-R-rated. I don’t want any parents coming for me with torches and pitchforks.)
For more information, visit:
www.danjolley.com
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