Mr. Monster: The Sequel Begins.

Long, long ago, having written a novel called I Am Not a Serial Killer and shopping it around for publication, I got a phone call from Moshe Feder, an editor at Tor, saying that he loved it and wanted to buy it. I was, of course, ecstatic, though I’d like to think that I kept my cool somewhat during the conversation. I told him I’d find an agent to help work out a contract, and he said something completely awesome and completely frightening:

“I’d like to do a contract for multiple books. This one and at least two sequels.”

Well. My level of excitement was, shall we say, somewhat boosted by this announcement. It was quickly tempered, however, by the fact that I didn’t really have any idea of what the sequels would be about. I said yes, of course, because one does not say no when an editor tells you they want to buy three times as many books as you expected, but I was a little nervous. The story in I Am Not a Serial Killer was fairly self-contained, at the time, and while I had thought about a series I had never really done any work on it; I just wrote the book and called it done. Where could I go from here?

I sat down that night and wrote out two quick ideas, about a page each, that would eventually become the two sequels: Mr. Monster and Full of Holes. In my opinion they are both better than the first book. I’ll talk more about those ideas later, but first let me talk a little about sequels in general. The first thing you should know is: they’re hard. For every Empire Strikes Back or Dark Knight, in which the sequel is better than the original, there’s a hundred Daddy Day Camps and Back to the Future IIs, in which the sequel is far, far worse. I see sequels as having three major obstacles to success:

1) The audience wants more of the same, but they also want something new. This is an enormous paradox that a LOT of writers are never really able to solve. One of my favorite examples is the American TV show Heroes, about normal people trying to deal with strange new powers they couldn’t understand. The first season showed them discovering their powers and trying to solve a larger mystery, slowly building up to a climax where they all finally met each other and worked together to defeat a scary villain. Everyone was excited for season two, and then it arrived and we saw…the same people, discovering the same powers and trying to solve a big mystery about the same, not-actually-defeated villain. The writers knew season one worked, and they were right to try to provide more of the same, but they neglected the “something new” aspect and basically just told the same story over again. I almost killed the show.

2) It’s very easy to mis-identify what the audience loved about your first work. Identifying this correctly is incredibly important, because it will let you know what elements need to be the same and what elements can be expanded or altered or improved. A great example here is Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. In the first movie, the creators were trying to reproduce the feel of the classic adventure serials they’d seen as kids, and they did a very good job and people loved it. What they didn’t realize is that the audience wasn’t responding solely to the concept, but to that specific execution of it: they loved the globe-trotting pulpiness, the 1930s period stuff, the nazi-bashing wish-fulfillment, and most importantly the perfectly tuned love/hate relationship between Indy and Marian. When the time came to make a sequel, they identified the wrong success (“Audiences loved having a movie based on old adventure serials”) and thus moved in the wrong direction (“Let’s make a movie based on other serials, like the jungle-stomping wilderness stories”). The movie they made was great, but it was missing most of the stuff people loved from the first one, and thus had a very poor reception. Go back and watch it today and I think you’ll agree that it’s a great adventure movie, but most of us remember it as "the crappy one" because, at the time, the audience felt a that it went in such an unexpected direction.

2) Your character has already had a strong arc in the first work, and now needs a completely new, unrelated arc that’s even better. Of course your sequel needs to be better than your first—if it’s not, people will feel like they got a bad deal. But how can you tell an even better story about the same character, when the first book already dealt with (presumably) their main personal issue? What do you do with Luke when he’s already learned how to use the Force? What do you do with Bruce Wayne when he’s already become Batman? There are plenty of stories to tell with those characters, but how do you give them the same emotional weight as the first installment after that central character hook has already been dealt with? The answer, of course, is to find a new hook. The first Spider-man movie showed a young, goofy teenager, slightly directionless and rebellious, grow up and learn responsibility. They hit those themes really solidly in the first one, and they told that story really well, and they couldn’t just tell it again; if they’d tried to rehash the same themes in Spider-man 2, it would have tanked. Instead they took it in a new direction, showing Peter Parker growing in other ways as he tries to cope with that responsibility and teach it to others.

These were the thoughts that rolled through my head as I sat down to plan out my series. Next week I’ll talk more about how these ideas helped create the story of Mr. Monster.

How I Write - Dan Wells

Today’s blog marks ten weeks since I started writing posts for Headline, and in this two and a half months I’ve talked about what I write, and why, but I’ve never really talked about how. So, here’s how.

The first thing I do when I start a new book (after the preliminary “mulling ot over for months” phase that I tend to go through) is to write down all the story elements I can think of: one document for characters, one for events, and one for general free-writing about the book’s themes or plot or climax. It’s important for me to get all of this done and down on paper, because it solidifies what I’ve got in my head and lets me manipulate it directly. It sounds strange, but most of the book is already rolling around inside my mind, and putting my fingers on a keyboard is like plugging the computer directly into my brain. I think with my fingers, I guess. Once I get a chance to write it down, the ideas gain form and the story starts to take shape.

At this point I compile my ideas into an outline, usually a simple chapter-by-chapter thing with a simple paragraph for each. These paragraphs are not pretty, and sometimes don’t even have complete sentences—all I need is a quick description of what happens in each chapter. When it’s time to write, all I have to do is open my outline, look at today’s chapter (I try to do one per day), and start writing. On subsequent days I add another step: after I look at the outline, I read through everything I wrote the say before; this helps get me in the right frame of mind, makes sure the sections flow together well, and helps me catch any egregious errors I may have made. When I get to the end of yesterday’s section I just pick it up from there and keep going.

For almost ten years I was a corporate writer, writing copy for ads and magazines and websites and brochures and everything else you can think of, right down to that blurb on the back of the shampoo bottle that tells you how to use it. I would sit in a cubicle all day, typing on a computer, and then I’d come home, eat dinner, put my kids to bed, and sit at my desk all night, typing on a computer. I did this for nine years, and in that environment managed to produce five books, none of which were good enough to publish. It was kind of fun, in a way, at least in hindsight, though it quickly became very difficult to sustain—when you write all day you get burned out on writing, and it’s hard to go home and do the same thing even longer. Sometimes I think that aspiring writers shouldn't have writing jobs, to avoid this kind of burnout, but at the same time I admit that I would never want to work at anything else. Writing is what I do, whether it’s for novels or for people who don’t know how to use shampoo, and I can’t imagine not doing it for hours and hours every day.

When I got the idea for I Am Not a Serial Killer (a process detailed more fully in last week’s post), I was very excited to get started, but I was finishing up something else and talking to any editor about one of my other books and blah blah blah, and I kept putting it off. Then I lost my day job on the same day the editor finally rejected my book, and I had to make a choice: do I drop writing for a while and do a full-time job hunt, or do I use this time and write that serial killer book I’ve been desperate to write? I chose the latter, and treated it like a real job: every morning I’d get up, get the kids to school, spend 30 minutes or so on Internet job searches, and then drive to Brandon Sanderson’s house to write in his basement for eight or so hours. I knocked out the entire book in 6 weeks, then dove back into my job search and found a new one very quickly. I sold the book several months later, and they asked for a trilogy, so I wrote book 2 of the series on the good old nighttime schedule again (plus all day on Saturdays and, for a time, all day on Thursdays and Fridays while I burned off all my vacation days). Eventually I was able to sell enough foreign contracts to quit my job and go full time, so book 3 was written on the daily schedule again.

The Story of the Story: How did I Am Not a Serial Killer come to exist?

This is not the story of how I started writing, because I’ve always been a writer—telling stories and manipulating words has been a passion of mine for as long as I can remember. This story starts much later; I think I’m going to start it just after I graduated from college, with two finished but atrocious books under my belt. They were high fantasy, with sprawling plots filled with elves and dwarves and blah blah blah. I was ready to move on and try something new, and starting from a free-write project I ended up with a dark, funny, screwball book about historical vampires and literary figures. It was pretty good—good enough to sell, assuming I could actually find an audience for something so non-standard and weird. I started shopping it around, fielding rejection after rejection, all while plunging back into the world of high fantasy in the next several books I started.

I only finished one of the those fantasy projects—they were fun, but they weren’t satisfying. There was something off, and I couldn’t put my finger on it; I liked my funny horror book, and kind of wanted to write something like that, but I was having so much trouble selling it that I didn’t dare. Eventually I submitted my book to Stacy Whitman, then working at Wizards of the Coast, and she gave me some excellent advice: “This book is a great historical horror, but too wacky for us right now. Take out all the wacky, focus on the scary, and write me a proposal for a historical horror YA series.” Somehow, in all my soul-searching, it had never occurred to me to just try a straight-out horror. I threw some ideas together, wrote several proposals, and eventually got rejected in favor of another author who did the history much better than I did. This is when I got another piece of excellent advice from my friend Brandon Sanderson.

You may have heard of Brandon; he writes the Mistborn series, the Alcatraz series, and he’s finishing the Wheel of Time. He’s also been in my writing group for years, ever since those original fantasies that sucked so bad, and one night when we were out driving I mentioned my recent rejection for the historical horror series. “You already took out the wacky stuff,” he said, “now take out the historical stuff and just focus on horror—a pure modern horror.” We debated what kind of modern horror story I could tell, and somehow the conversation drifted toward my part-time hobby of serial killer research. I mentioned some of the behavioral predictors that show up in a serial killer’s pre-killing years, and Brandon nearly jumped out of his seat. “That’s what you write,” he said. “A character who has all the predictors of becoming a serial killer, but doesn’t want to be.”

The idea caught fire in my mind almost immediately, and I ran through a hundred different scenarios: how old should he be? Should the book be adult or YA? Serious or funny? Supernatural or completely real? I toyed with it for a full year, find pieces here and snippets there that slowly started to form the character of John Wayne Cleaver. One of the first pieces to fall into place was his family: I knew I wanted a mom, since most serial killers have horrible relationships with their mothers, but I also knew I wanted a sympathetic mom—if she was too much of a harridan (the way many real serial killers’ mothers are) the book would feel like an apology, as if John were not as responsible for his own choices. I also knew I wanted an absent father, both for the sense of mystery and the sense of loss; John needed to have plenty of holes in his life.

The next big piece of the puzzle was the other killer—I wanted to throw John into a big conflict situation, where his psychology could really come to a boil, and that meant he needed another serial killer to follow and learn about and compare himself to. If I was going to have a serial killer investigation I needed a plausible way to involve a teenager in it, so I searched around and eventually came up with the idea of the mortuary—a part time job in a small-town police station would have served the same purpose, but the mortuary added so much to John’s character, with a spooky background and an obsession with death. The peripheral characters followed soon after: John needed someone to talk to, so I gave him a sidekick and a therapist. The final piece was Brooke, who I didn’t plan at all—she inserted herself into the story and worked perfectly, and when I eventually found out I needed to turn it into a trilogy I discovered just how valuable Brooke really was. The series, and John’s character, would not be the same without her.

Now that I had all the pieces, all I had to do was put them together—but that turned out to be the hardest part of all. I had such a cool idea for the bad guy that I didn’t want to leave him a mystery for too long; a typical “investigation” plot structure would need to end with his reveal, and I really felt like that would lessen the impact he was supposed to have on John. Without giving too much away for those who haven’t read it yet, I’ll simply say that I came up with a very different structure which not only used the villain better but strengthened John immeasurably: we get to see him being both better and worse of a person than the original plot would have allowed for.

I’m very pleased with how this book came together, and even more pleased with the exciting new directions it opened up for books 2 and 3. But that is another story, and will be told another time.

When We Were Very Young - Dan Wells

When I was a kid my Mom would recite poems to us; there were several, but I remember three of them more than any others: Bed in Summer by R. L. Stevenson, Animal Crackers by Cristopher Morley, and Vespers by A.A. Milne. I will admit that I had to look up those first two just now in order to find the authors, but the third, Vespers, I did not: I’ve had it memorized for most of my life, I own three copies of both Christopher Robin poem collections, and I’ve read them all countless times. My mother, and arguably that one poem, sparked a lifelong love of poetry that only continues to grow.

The best poetry is like a puzzle: how can you say something, or evoke an emotion, or prompt a specific reaction, in the simplest way possible? Poetry allows you to paint with words, to create images and feelings in your reader that ordinary prose cannot.

It started with Milne, so I’ll start there now: A.A. Milne is one of the greatest poets of the English language, and if he had written “grown up” poems instead of children’s poems he would be widely celebrated as such. Read Disobedience and look at the way he uses such strict rhythm and rhyme, yet managing to be completely playful and even conversational. Read Happiness out loud and listen to the way the sparse, simple words create such a perfect syncopation. Then read Politeness, and Halfway Down, and Teddy Bear, and The King’s Breakfast, and…well, all of it. The man is a genius.

Robert Browning is not one of my favorite poets, but in My Last Duchess he taught me one of the most important writing lessons I’ve ever learned: narrators can lie. I’ve essentially built a career on that premise, and it’s certainly nothing new, but reading My Last Duchess opened a whole new world of possibilities. Read it now and watch the way Browning tells you two stories at once: one on the surface, as a duke shows his visitor a portrait on his late wife, and another story buried in subtext in which we begin to suspect that the duke killed his wife out of baseless jealousy. You can see this concept of the “unreliable narrator” all over the place, from music (Operator by Jim Croce) to movies (The Usual Suspects by Christoher McQuarrie) to books (I Am Not a Serial Killer by…me). The ability to tell one story, while suggesting multiple layers of truth underneath it, is one of the reasons I love writing.

One of the many books in my parent’s library was a collection of poems that I read several times as a child, and through which I discovered the romantic poets: Lord Byron, Lord Tennyson, William Blake, and John Keats. I love almost everything they ever wrote, from the heartwarming (Byron’s Epitaph to a Dog) to the horrifying (Byron’s Darkness); from extended narrative (Keats’s The Eve of St. Agnes) to pure imagery (Keats’s To Autumn). I also discovered more modern poets, like Langston Hughes and ee cummings and T.S. Eliot; Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock is probably my favorite piece of writing ever.

Somewhere in the middle there is Emily Dickinson, who I used to like until I realized that you can sing every poem she ever wrote to the tune of The Yellow Rose of Texas. Try it: “Because I could not stop for death, he kindly stopped for me. The carriage held but just ourselves, and Immortality.” And now I apologize for telling you that, because it will ruin Dickinson for you completely. It took me years to get over it, but I’ve finally re-convinced myself of how awesome she is.

When I was in eighth grade we were in the midst of the first Gulf War, and my English teacher compiled an incredible little pamphlet of poetry about war, death, and loss. I still have it, and I consider it one of the highlights of my education. It included everything from the ubiquitous The Second Coming by Yeats and Ozymandias by Shelley (proof that Shelley is not the total hack I sometimes accuse him being), through the funereal The Dark Hills by Robinson, to such horrifying poems as Death of a Ball Turret Gunner by Randall Jarrell, or Dulce Et Decorum Est by Wilfred Owen. These poems taught me that poetry was not all happy, and that the grotesque could hold its own kind of beauty.

So who is my favorite poet? Eliot’s a contender, based solely on the strength of Prufrock; Milne is up there, too, and Keats, but the crowned champion is actually one I stumbled on by accident. I’ve never studied her poetry in any English class, or seen it printed in any academic anthology, but my favorite poet is Emily Bronte, hands down. Most people know her for Wuthering Heights, which is dark and seething, and her poetry is very similar: she’s a little low on technical skill, but with a vast well of raw talent just roiling violently under the surface. I believe in a life after this, where we will be reunited with those who have gone before, and one of the very first people I want to meet is Emily Bronte—I’m going to get her, John Wilkes Booth, and Philip K. Dick into a room and just talk for hours. And then we’re going to go find William Carlos Williams and kidney punch him so hard his great grandchildren won’t be able to eat for a week.

One of the questions I get a lot is “how can I become a better writer?” and my answer is simple: “If you want to learn how to tell stories, study fiction. If you want to learn how to use words, study poetry.” The skills and principles of language you learn from poetry will improve every aspect of your writing, and when you learn how to evoke image and emotion as powerfully as, for example, Ezra Pound’s In a Station of the Metro, no force on Earth will stop you from getting published.

This week I’m going to leave you with some homework—a reading list—and, being a horror writer, I’m going to choose some of my favorite “dark” poems. Read them, ponder them, and post your comments.

Darkness, Lord Byron
Elegy, Chidiock Tichborne
Isabella, or, The Pot of Basil, John Keats
Suicide’s Note, Langston Hughes
At Castlewood, Emily Bronte
A Day in the Life, Lennon/McCartney (Yes, it totally counts)

My Favorite Movies - Dan Wells

Lists of favorites are always so hard to pin down—I really love X, but do I love it more than Y? Do I need to? It’s hard (and probably meaningless) to really start ranking movies in terms of absolute favoriteness, but there are some movies I love so much that I feel comfortable putting them in an unranked top five. This list will probably change multiple times throughout my life, but for now these are my favorite movies:

Jaws, Steven Spielberg
Psycho, Alfred Hitchcock
Annie Hall, Woody Allen
Mary Poppins, Robert Stevenson
The Searchers, John Ford

Jaws, Steven Spielberg
I say these are in no particular order, but this one is my favorite. A few years ago I realized that I’d seen Jaws more times than I’d seen any other movie, and being curious and over-analytical I started to wonder why I sought it out so much, and so subconsciously. The conclusion I came to is that it is simply some of the best storytelling and characterization I have ever seen anywhere. When people ask me how to build suspense, I point them at Jaws; when people ask me how to make human characters, I point them at Jaws; when people ask me how to blend drama and humor and terror and triumph, I point them at Jaws. I could write pages and pages on all the things I love about that movie, but just trust me: go out and watch it.

Psycho, Alfred Hitchcock
When I set out to write I Am Not a Serial Killer, a friend told me “the hardest part is going to be your main character—readers will have to identify with him even when he does bad things.” He was absolutely right, and the problem of anti-hero empathy became the core of the book. When I set out to solve that problem, I went straight to the master: Psycho. Today most of us know that this is a movie about a crazy killer, but back when it first came out that was a secret, and Hitchcock took his sweet time revealing that. Instead he started with a different story altogether, showing a woman caught up in a crime; you get invested in her and in her story, and you follow her as she tries to hide, and it goes on for a long, long time, and then all of a sudden she’s dead, and poor Norman Bates has to clean up his mother’s mess. He doesn’t want the police to come after his mother, so he decides to hide her crime instead by putting the body in a car and sinking it in a swamp. He pushes it in, watches it sink, and it stops halfway; he watches it nervously, scared to death of being discovered, and then with a groan it sinks in the rest of the way. Instantly, in that one scene—in that one look of fear—you in the audience have switched gears: you’re completely invested in Norman now, and from that moment on the movie is completely his. There are tons of other things to love about the movie, but that one scene has taught me so much about fear, emotion, and identification. One warning: Psycho is nothing at all like modern scary movies, so if you watch expecting a thriller you will be disappointed. Watch it as a character movie, and you’ll love it.

Annie Hall, Woody Allen
Yeah, I know: two scary movies and then Annie Hall? What kind of crazy list is this? Hey, if you don’t like it you can make your own list. These are my favorites. For me, Annie Hall is about two things: it’s about loving people in spite of (and perhaps because of) their flaws, and it’s about talking. The people in this movie talk about everything, no matter where they are or what they’re doing, and sometimes they even step into voiceover and talk about their talking WHILE they’re talking. If you hate talking, this is not the movie for you. The thing is, the people talking are so funny, and so interesting, and so layered with good and bad that they are endlessly fascinating to listen to. So many love stories are about people who are destined to be together, and after one or two obligatory plot problems they live happily after, but Annie Hall shows us real people who try, and fail, and screw up, and change, and stay the same, and fall down, and get up and try again.

Mary Poppins, Robert Stevenson
This one would look a lot weirder on this list without Annie Hall to soften the blow. Why do I love Mary Poppins? For some of the same reasons I love these other movies, actually: because it’s funny, because I love the characters, and because it combines humor and sadness in some wonderful. It also pulls a Psycho-ish twist toward the end, where you suddenly realize (though it’s been there all along) that the movie is not really about what you thought it was about, and it pulls back the curtain and you realize that what you thought was a wacky kids movie is actually one of the most touching movies about fatherhood ever made. And yes, I know that Dick Van Dyke’s cockney accent is terrible, but seriously—get over it. It’s completely overshadowed by all the awesome. If you’ve never seen it, go watch it, and if you have seen it before here’s a neat trick: imagine that singing is a metaphor for emotional connection, and watch it again with new eyes; pay attention to who sings to who, and why, and how. It’s so much deeper than people give it credit for.

The Searchers, John Ford
I just saw this one a few years ago, but it leapt to the top five almost instantly. The Searchers is so much more than just cowboys and Indians: it’s about hatred, racism, obsession, and love. It’s about the painful borders between community and solitude; between doing what you want and doing what has to be done. And holy crap is it beautiful to look at. In some ways, it’s the perfect representation of my favorite archetype: the outsider who tries to help a group of people even though he knows that he will never truly belong. When you think about it, that’s also the subtext of every other movie on this list (Psycho is kind of a stretch, but it still works). It is no mistake that the hero of my book is named John Wayne.

Next week I’m going to change course a bit and talk about the final piece of the “my literary influences” puzzle: poetry.

My Favorite Books (at least for now) - Dan Wells

Last week I talked about the books I read growing up, and how they shaped my reading and writing tastes. Today I’m going to talk about the five “Favorite Books” listed in my bio on my website, www.fearfulsymmetry.net:

Dune, Frank Herbert
Les Miserables, Victor Hugo
Perfume, Patrick Suskind
American Gods, Neil Gaiman
Taran Wanderer, Lloyd Alexander

Dune, Frank Herbert
I have read Dune more times than any other book. It’s a brilliant blend of SF, fantasy, politics, ecology, and military strategy. I love the world Herbert created—not just the planet of Arrakis, but the entire universe of feudal lords, semi-human space pilots, mystical witches, and giant sandworms. The Butlerian Jihad, outlawing all thinking machines, was a masterstroke, and really gives the book (and the rest of the series) a unique flavor. What I like most about Dune, though, is the intrigue; every scene, every sentence, every word in the book is rich with layer after layer of schemes, counter schemes, and plots within plots. The dinner party when Paul’s family first arrives on Arrakis is one of the tensest, most fascinating scenes I’ve ever read—and it’s a dinner party, for crying out loud! My favorite scene in the book is Feyd’s knife fight in the Harkonnen arena, where every attack, every step, every choice is part of a complex plot (or plots) to gain, shift, or consolidate power. It’s an absolutely stunning book.

Les Miserables, Victor Hugo
I read Les Miserables because, like most people who read it these days, I heard the musical and thought it was kind of cool. I was in high school at the time, on summer break with nothing else to read, so I decided to take a shot at the unabridged version; people warned me against it, telling tales of gigantic tangents and non-fiction essays, but I was undaunted. I made the right choice. The unabridged Les Miserables is an epic so vast and so…well, epic, that it has become the measuring stick against which I compare any other epic I read. What I love about it is the vast range of human emotion and experience—the book contains some of the most vile, depraved people in all of literature, right next to some of the best and most righteous, and includes the full spectrum between. In some cases, people will actually move from one category to the other, and because the book slows down and takes its time you can really feel the transition. And I loved the wacky tangents: the section on quicksand was harrowing; the detailed description of Waterloo was a gruesome depiction of hell on Earth; and even the essay on sewer systems was a joy to read, believe it or not, simply because Hugo’s mastery of language makes anything worth reading, regardless of topic. Obviously this will depend on the skill of your translation (I did not read the original French), but find a good one and give it a shot.

Perfume, Patrick Suskind
Another book I read in translation, Perfume is the only horror-ish book on the list. It’s the story of a man in 18th century France who has no human emotion whatsoever, but possesses instead the most incredible sense of smell ever seen in human history. This premise establishes not only a tense thriller but a fascinating historical novel with an uncanny power for descriptive language. Jean-Baptiste, the “hero,” becomes a perfumer obsessed with capturing the scents of beautiful women, and as he plots and murders his way through French society he describes the various smells so perfectly that you can almost smell them, right in your room reading them. It’s phenomenal on many levels.

American Gods, Neil Gaiman
Gaiman is one of my favorite authors, and American Gods is my favorite of his books. It’s the ultimate story of immigration, and as such becomes the ultimate story of America itself; these are not all-powerful deities, but strangers in a strange land doing their best to survive. The great demon Chernobog lives in a brownstone apartment with the Three Sisters (one of Gaiman’s favorite archetypes), eating cabbage and playing checkers. The god of the Internet eats at McDonalds, and burns his fingers on the hot apple pie. More than anything else this book is about setting—it’s about the simple lives of everyday Americans, mortal or otherwise, simply trying to get by the best they can. It’s also a wonderful love story and a grand-scale con job. American Gods is Gaiman’s most awarded book, but it deserves it all.

Taran Wanderer, Lloyd Alexander
When I grew up reading fantasy, it was all about dragons and heroes and wars and all the other stuff that little boys love. So when I got to book 4 of the Prydain Chronicles, Taran Wanderer, I didn’t know what to make of it—instead of high adventure the small, weather-beaten story of a young man trying to become an adult. There’s a line early in the book, spoken by one of the witches, which establishes the whole thing (I paraphrase): “The little chicken wants to soar with the eagles, but first let’s see if he can scratch for his own worms.” In other words, growing up and becoming a useful, responsible person is not only more important, but far more difficult, than slaying a dragon and saving a kingdom. The villain Taran faces is not an evil wizard but an arrogant jerk, and he defeats him not with an ancient sword of power but with an ugly, sturdy sword that he made himself. In everything I write, and in everything I do, I try to remember the lessons I learned from this book: that a hero must first be a person, and that the most important challenges are usually the most personal.

Next week we'll take a similar look at my favorite movies.

The books I grew up on - Dan Wells

Books have been an important part of my life since before I ever went to school. My Dad used to read to my brother and I every night before bed, and my Mom always had a book in her hands. Reading was just what you did—it was as much a part of life as eating or sleeping. As I got older I realized that not only did my Mom always have a book, she always had a new book; she reads faster than almost anyone I know. Being naturally competitive, I decided to race her, and thus began my personal relationship with books.

The first real book that I have any conscious memory of is The Hobbit, which my Dad read to us at night. Soon after that came the Narnia books, and then The Lord of the Rings (though I was too young to really appreciate it until I re-read it a few years later). My brother and I had a bookshelf in our bedroom stocked with fairy tales, from Hans Christian Anderson to the Brothers Grimm, and after I’d devoured those I moved on to a series of “history for young readers” books, full of non-fiction stories about life in the Yukon gold rush, or the American revolution, and so on. I remember reading kid mystery books, like Encyclopedia Brown, and then in elementary school I was re-introduced to fantasy through the works of Robin McKinley, Madeleine L’Engle, and Lloyd Alexander. My sixth grade teacher had us do a school project on Anne McCaffrey, and I was officially hooked on fantasy.

Meanwhile, I was developing a deep love of poetry. One of those early books on our shelf was the collected works of A.A. Milne, and while I liked the Pooh stories well enough what I really loved were the Christopher Robin poems. I can still quote many of them by heart. The books I was reading were introducing me to stories and plots and grand emotions, but through poetry I realized the deep power of words, and for that subject you can’t ask for a better teacher than Milne. Go read “James James Morrison Morrison Willoughby George DuPree” and watch the way he manipulates your voice and cadence so perfectly, just by the words he chose and the order he put them in. A good poet isn’t just using words, he’s playing with them, and when you read those words you can’t help but join in the fun. So powerful was Milne’s effect on me that it took me years—well into college, probably—before I would accept any kind of poetry that didn’t rhyme; sure, they had a nice sentiment and everything, but if they couldn’t do that AND make it rhyme I figured they just weren’t trying hard enough. That’s also why I eventually became a huge fan of Stephen Sondheim.

In college, though, I finally “got” non-rhyming poetry, and in a big way. You’ll notice as they are released that the epigram for each book in the “I Am Not a Serial Killer” series begins with a quote from a poem; I chose these poems, and the poets, very carefully. The first is a quick quote from “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” by T.S. Eliot, which is quite simply my favorite piece of literature ever, in poetry or prose. I learn something new every single time I read it. Books 2 and 3 use Edgar Allen Poe and ee cummings, respectively, but you you’ll have to wait to see which ones.

Back to books. I read fantasy and science fiction about as fast as I could get through it, including Terry Brooks, Fred Saberhagen, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Ray Bradbury, and more. Meanwhile I was also developing a love of “classic” literature, aided in no small part by the fact that I already loved classic poetry, and I figured that if old, dead poets had something valuable to say then old, dead authors probably did too, even their books didn’t have dragons in them. So I read Charles Dickens, and Nathanial Hawthorne, and Harper Lee, and Mark Twain, and finally Joseph Conrad—and it was Conrad, at long last, who ignited my love of dark fiction. You see, for all my reading I’ve never really read a lot of “traditional” horror, but through Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” I discovered this very dark, very bleak side of literature that for some reason I responded to powerfully. I don’t know why, I just did—there was a kind of epic grandeur to it, some level of tragedy that just hit all the right buttons for me. I wanted to read more stuff like it, but I was leery of horror fiction because I assumed (mistakenly) that it was all just slasher movie stuff. With horror off my radar, and so much of fantasy perpetually cheery (though I did read quite a bit of Michael Moorcock), I turned back to the classics for my fix of darkness: I read more Conrad, I discovered Lovecraft, and by happy chance I found a deep well of darkness in French and Russian literature, in everything from Crime and Punishment to The Hunchback of Notre Dame. I still thought I wanted to be a fantasy writer, because that how I had defined myself in my head, but it was the classic themes of human obsession, misanthropy, and self destruction that eventually came to define my writing. Dragons are cool and all, but who needs a dragon when humans can do such horrible things to themselves? I latched onto serial killers and true crime essays, and when I finally started to read modern horror it was through the psychological side-door of Thomas Harris and “The Silence of the Lambs.”

Which brings us, by a long and twisty road, to “I Am Not a Serial Killer.” It’s got a bit of everything: human weakness, supernatural terror, and even a snippet of poetry here and there (quoted from others; I won’t subject you to my own). I hope you like it.

As you can see on my own website, www.fearfulsymmetry.net, I’ve listed a long list of favorites in my bio, including my favorite books. Next week we’ll go through all five of these books and talk about why each one is so awesome.

Who is Dan Wells, anyway?

Hi! My name is Dan Wells, and I’m the author of the new book I Am Not a Serial Killer, which comes out in a few weeks. It’s the story of a boy named John who has a very dark side that he keeps tightly bottled up, and then a monster comes to town and he has to let his dark side out in order to stop it. In other words, it’s the kind of book where the hero is maybe a little scarier than the villain—and it’s got a pretty scary villain, so that’s saying a lot.

I’ve always been fascinated with villains. I love the darkness, the sense of fear, and the tragic mix of power and damnation. A great villain usually thinks he’s the good guy—he has a good reason for being bad, even if that reason is flawed or outright false. I don’t necessarily want the bad guys to win, but I love to watch them try, and when they finally fall I find myself identifying with them even more. As John tells his mother in one of the early chapters of the book: “It’s not weird to be fascinated by that. It’s weird not to be.”
Playing with that idea, I Am Not a Serial Killer blurs the lines between hero and villain in some pretty cool ways. John is a good kid, and he desperately wants to be the hero, but sometimes the only way to be a hero is to become a monster yourself.

I’ll talk more about heroes and monsters in the coming weeks, but first let me tell you a little more about myself. I was born in the US, in the state of Utah, where I’ve lived most of my life (plus two years I spent living in Mexico, which I loved). I am the oldest of three children, and at the young age of 31—yes, that’s still considered young—I have four children of my own. I love to read, write, eat, and play games; I have an entire room of my house stuffed to the gills with tabletop miniatures, roleplaying games, trading cards, and an ever-growing collection of board games. My five-year-old son already shows strong signs of growing to be just like me: his favorite games are all the ones with monsters on the cover.

Next week: I spent my childhood reading everything I could get my hands on. Find out what I read, and why, and which were my favorites.