The Art of Craft: An Interview with Jason Gurley

Recently, I had the opportunity to speak with a young, up and coming writer who has bypassed the traditional road to publishing and forged a career for himself as a self- published author. It’s hard to believe that just a few short years ago, getting published meant finding an agent, writing query letters, shopping the manuscript around, and, more often than not, receiving one rejection letter after another. It was a frustrating and stress-inducing time, enough to discourage all but the most persistent of writers.

Today, however, getting published is as easy as uploading a file to online stores like Amazon.com or sending print-ready versions to services like SmashWords or CreateSpace. Without gatekeepers, anyone can publish a book. But should anyone publish just because they can? Isn’t it still true that quality matters?

Enter indie writers like Hugh Howey, author of the smash hit Wool trilogy and Robert Bidinotto, author of the Hunter series of thriller novels. Both are excellent writers and both chose to self publish instead of opting for the traditional route. They have had great success in this new world of go-it-alone publishing.

Jason Gurley is one of the new vanguard, too. An affable young man in his mid-30s, I came to know Mr. Gurley through his Greatfall trilogy of novellas set in Hugh Howey’s Wool universe. I later learned that he designed book covers, too. (For the purposes of full disclosure, Mr. Gurley has designed the cover for my own soon-to-be-released book.) It’s a unique combination of talents, akin to being an excellent composer and musician. They exist, but they are few and far between.

JL: Jason, how did you get started as a fiction writer and designer?

I’ve written fiction for almost as long as I can remember.

JG: I’ve written fiction for almost as long as I can remember. It started with a piece of Hardy Boys fan fiction that I wrote and illustrated when I was five or six years old, and continued on with short stories throughout my school years, and then got serious when I was eighteen and started writing my first novel. You know how people say to write what you know? I blew that off from the start. That first book, that was me writing what I wanted. It was a very tedious novel about a teenager who writes a book and gets a book deal and becomes famous. Ta-da! Talk about living vicariously through your characters.

Design promised a more immediately rewarding career than writing. I stumbled into my design career as a writer. I took a job sixteen years ago that involved writing a customer newsletter for an internet service provider, and I had to learn HTML and a bit of Photoshop to produce an attractive newsletter that nobody, not a single person, probably read. The next job I took was a writing job for a web design studio. One day, our primary designer was sick, and there was a design emergency. I taught myself a bit more Photoshop on the spot, and from then on, I was a designer. I was good at it, and worked for digital agencies, designing all kinds of projects for brands from HP to Netflix. I spent a few years working as a creative director, and recently shifted my focus into software design, which is what I do now.

All those years of design work made book cover design a foregone conclusion, at least for my own books, and then quite soon for just about everybody else’s. I’ve only designed book covers for eighteen months or so, but I’ve done several hundred projects in that time, and now I’ve hung those gloves up for good so I can focus on my career, my family, and my writing projects.

JL: Did you grow up in a family that encouraged you to pursue your creative goals? 

JG: My parents have always encouraged me. In fact, if you visit my folks’ house now, you’ll find plenty of my old art projects framed on the walls. Most of it is very difficult for me to look at. With any form of art, if you work hard at it, you get incrementally better over time, and as the years roll up behind you, it’s very easy to spot all of the flaws in old work that you thought, at the time, represented your best ever. That’s true with writing as well. I’m sure in a few years’ time I’ll look back on what I’m writing now and wish I’d done a few dozen things differently.

My mother has the very first signed copy of Eleanor, too. And despite the crude themes in some of my books, she and my father have read them – at least some of them – and are always excited to hear how the work is finally paying off and finding readers.

JL: When did you begin to grasp that you wanted to become a writer? A designer?

I have clear memories of climbing trees in our front yard, a book tucked in my pants, so that I could hang out in the branches reading.

JG: It’s hard to pinpoint a moment for either one. These kinds of things are usually decided because a combination of experiences push you in one direction or another. My parents taught me a love for books, and I’ve kept my nose in them my entire life. I have clear memories of climbing trees in our front yard, a book tucked in my pants, so that I could hang out in the branches reading. I did lots of other things, too, but it’s hard to forget how wonderful reading was.

When I was a kid – seven years old, or thereabouts – a few things really crystallized my love of good stories, though. That was the year that my dad let me watch Alien, and I was captivated by what I now realize is one of the best-executed suspense stories I’ve ever watched. And that’s the year that a babysitter, frustrated with my misbehavior, sent me to my room with a book and told me not to come out until I was done reading it. The book was Stephen King’s It, which was perfect reading material for a seven-year-old boy. I missed a lot of the book’s themes, but I was in love with the story. I can’t say that either particular event made me specifically think I MUST BE A WRITER IMMEDIATELY, but both certainly fed into that eventual decision.

JL: What was your first fictional piece?

JG: Well, there was the Hardy Boys piece I mentioned above. And there were several short stories in high school, most were action-soaked crime thrillers. But the first novel was the one I mentioned, about the writer and his fantasy career. The second novel was about a voice-of-his-generation author reflecting on his youth at the end of his life. Neither was a masterpiece; they’re both essentially practice novels. As was my third, which was just good enough to be dangerous. That book, about a boy who cries wolf and causes someone’s murder, led to my being signed by an agent, at which point I was certain I’d made it, and the world was about to become my oyster. (I was 23.) When that representation fell apart, I spent some time in a funk, and a couple of months later, I began writing Eleanor, which would consume my full writing attention for the next thirteen years. I just didn’t know it at the time.

I have never made much of a habit of revisiting those early books. I did, once or twice, and I certainly cringe at the language. Back then, I wouldn’t say a thing once if I could say it seven times just as easily. But I’m proud of my teenaged self for having written them, unwieldy as they are. I’m proud of myself now for sticking with writing, for fooling myself into thinking I was good long enough to learn how to be good, or at least something reasonably close to good.

JL: You’ve carved out a name for yourself as an independent writer and designer. What motivated you to go it alone? 

JG: By late 2012 I was pretty much stalled on Eleanor. I’d taken some time to attempt a graphic novel adaptation, but it didn’t find an audience, and I was really bad at drawing anatomy, and each page was taking me anywhere from eight to sixteen hours to complete, so it was slow going. There was very little reward, other than discovering and improving some new design skills.

My wife told me about a novel-writing competition that Amazon sponsored every year, the Breakthrough Novel contest.

My wife told me about a novel-writing competition that Amazon sponsored every year, the Breakthrough Novel contest. There were some attractive rewards — a $50,000 advance, I think, and publication by one of Amazon Publishing’s imprints. I decided to enter it, but the real challenge was the timeframe. By the time I learned about the contest, the deadline was a month away. And what was I going to enter? Eleanor? It didn’t seem right to try to rush that novel to completion after twelve years of work just for the sake of a contest.

So I decided to write something new. I figured it would be a nice challenge — my own personal NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) — and it would serve the added purpose of showing me if I even knew how to finish a novel anymore. It had been more than a decade since I finished one.

I wrote a short novel about a billionaire who just wants to be the last man on Earth, and when the apocalypse doesn’t come along quickly enough for his tastes, he takes the fate of the world into his own hands, and accelerates the process. It’s a dark story, kind of blackly comic, and it was extremely fun to write. I was done with it a few days before the contest deadline, and as I got ready to submit it, I thought to myself: I’m really bad at winning contests. The odds are always ridiculously long, and I just don’t usually win them. And writing is such a subjective thing. What if what I wrote was good, but the judges disliked it anyway? I didn’t want the rejection. I’d had plenty of that.

So I chose to self-publish it instead. I’d been reading about Amazon’s KDP program, and I just pulled the trigger. Instead of waiting for three or four months to find out if my novel was a finalist, or a winner, I took it straight out there, hoping to find readers on my own. I think the book — which was called The Man Who Ended the World, by the way – sold about sixty-four copies in January, 2013. And that was enough. I was hooked. So I wrote another book in February, and another in March, and just kept going.

JL: Were there people who supported you in this decision to self publish?

JG: My wife has always been my biggest supporter. When she and I met, I was about six or seven years into writing Eleanor, so while she knew that I wanted to write books, she’d never really seen me finish writing one before. Much less publish one. Now every time something positive happens in my little writing journey, she’s sharing it all over Facebook and Instagram. I think she has more friends than I do. When I share something, a few people think it’s kind of neat. When she shares something about my work, dozens upon dozens of people pile on to celebrate it.

JL: Were there detractors who thought you’d fall on your face?

JG: I honestly can’t think of any. Certainly nobody told me they thought I’d fail. Maybe someone thought that privately. And working in a creative field always presents an interesting paradox. Not everybody likes the idea that their employees have creative projects going on outside the workplace. It’s such a shame when that happens, too. I think I’ve finally found a wonderful creative home in my career that doesn’t make me feel like I need to hide my writing experiences. It’s nice not to have to look over my shoulder, wondering when someone might say, “Hey, I saw you tweet about your new book,” and you wonder if they’re going to find a way to hang you for that.

JL: Tell me a little bit about your writing process.

JG: Well, I write fast, and I write in small bursts. If I had hours on end at my fingertips, I’d write for hours on end, but I don’t. I’m usually quite fortunate if I’m able to find fifteen or twenty minutes a day for writing, so I’ve learned how to get the most out of that time. It’s not unusual for me to produce an insane number of words during those bursts, and then later cull out what’s worth keeping or what isn’t.

I used to require a very precise environment to get into the zone.

I used to require a very precise environment to get into the zone. I needed the lighting to be just right, no audible distractions, etc. And that worked for a lot of years, mostly when I was single. I never want to miss out on spending time with my family when I’m home — I try (and probably fail) to be as there as possible when I’m there. But being a husband and father — we have a two-and-a-half-year-old — means I’ve learned to take my writing opportunities when they come, whether the light is just right or Mulan is playing for the 49th time.

JL: Do you outline or storyboard your work and follow it precisely?

JG: I outline in stages, I think. I’ll often jot down a very rough skeleton of where I think I’m going with a book, and then I start writing. The story always follows its own lead though, and usually by the halfway point in a manuscript, I realize that I’m doing something entirely different. So I outline again, in more detail this time, and look for the right path for the story. But when I start writing again, that’s usually when the real magic happens, and the story starts suggesting arcs of its own. Eleanor was about a girl searching for God. For twelve years, that’s what it was about. In the thirteenth and final year, it became something incredibly different, and I outlined it all over again, and then in the final weeks of writing it, it stunned me by going places I didn’t expect.

There’s something vaguely creepy and vaguely magical about a story taking the reins out of your hands. When a writer talks about it, it sounds like so much nonsense. But when it happens, it’s really difficult to explain. It’s really something.

JL: Is there a genre of fiction that you’re drawn to the most?

JG: As a reader, I’m all over the place. For years I’ve loved stories about the end of the world, though my preferences are super-specific: I prefer stories of people muddling through the mess as survivors, without any kind of supernatural themes if possible. I like detailed explorations of how society might rebuild itself after something cataclysmic. This probably means I should be really happy right now, since apocalypse stories have been a big deal for the past few years, but most don’t quite line up with my very specific interests. (Weirdly, the opening scenes of WALL-E might be the best representation of what I love about end-of-the-world fiction: eerie quiet, empty cities, solitude. That usually doesn’t make for compelling drama, though.)

I also read plenty of horror, science fiction, thrillers, mysteries, literary novels, the works.

As a writer, much of my reading preferences fold into what I write for myself. If you were to try to categorize everything I’ve written and published since 2013, you’d probably find that most of my stories are a blend of genres. Eleanor, for example, can be considered contemporary fantasy, but it’s also kind of a literary novel with a touch of genre affectations. It’s a bit of a time travel story, and it’s also a family drama. I have a hard time categorizing myself, which is not always the best thing for an author, especially when it comes to marketing and selling your work.

JL: Following on the previous question, what do you like to read in your spare time?

JG: The most recent novels I’ve read are by the brothers Grossman, Austin and Lev. Austin’s You, which satisfied my occasional craving for very in-depth geek fiction; and Lev’s The Magicians, which is a wonderful, dark drama disguised as a fantasy novel.

And now I’m reading an advance draft of a novel by Sarah Mensinga, an exceptionally talented writer and illustrator whose work I’ve followed for years. She’s going to be someone to watch out for pretty soon. She’s doing things with words that I wish I could do.

JL: You’ve told me previously that you enjoy the novels of Nevil Shute, which is unusual for someone your age. Can you tell me which novels you’ve read and what you enjoy about them?

JG: Well, I’ve read a couple of them years and years ago. I discovered On the Beach, my personal favorite of his books, during my quest for realistic post-apocalyptic stories. I think I was a teenager then. I read that novel as part of a flurry of books on the topic, among them Earth Abides, The Stand, A Canticle for Leibowitz, Lucifer’s Hammer. Once I’d run out of those sorts of books, I went back to Shute’s novels and found a couple in the library — A Town Like Alice, I think, and Pied Piper. I enjoyed them, and I alternated them with books by another author I was gorging on, Somerset Maugham. Weirdly, their works are a bit blended together in my memories. Both are probably due for a revisitation now.

But On the Beach was my favorite of the bunch for its attempt to present a realistic take on the final great war, and what a pocket of survivors might endure in the aftermath and the quiet that follows. Trace elements of this story appear in some of my work, particularly a short story called The Caretaker, and in a short story I’m writing now for an anthology that comes out next year.

JL: You’ve just published your longest and most personal work of fiction — Eleanor. Tell me about the road from initial story idea to the end result.

Eleanor was, for the longest time, a vehicle for my own personal reflection.

JG: Eleanor was, for the longest time, a vehicle for my own personal reflection. I grew up in a religious home. My father was and still is a Pentecostal minister and pastor. I have an uncle in Texas who pastors a large Pentecostal church as well. And there are other quite religious Gurleys that our family apparently is able to claim in its genealogical tree: A.D. Gurley, a minister who was part of the founding of the Pentecostal movement in the early 1900s; and Phineas Gurley, a Presbyterian minister who was not only President Abraham Lincoln’s pastor, but delivered Lincoln’s eulogy as well. There are many deep veins of religious history in my family, which is why it was so difficult for me, in my early twenties, to realize that I maybe didn’t believe in the same things that my family did anymore. Leaving church and spiritual belief behind was extremely difficult. I didn’t quite know a world without that particular lens to filter it through.

So I started writing Eleanor, which in its infancy was a novel about a girl who suffers a grievous injury, slips into a coma, and ends up meeting God. When she wakes, she’s not entirely sure if it was real, but she has to know for sure, so she sets about trying to recreate that experience in her real life. But real life is so drab and soulless compared to that magical experience she’d just had.

For years, that was the story of the novel. It was rather blatantly a mirror for myself, something I could use to sort out what I did and didn’t believe anymore. But the years wore on, and Eleanor needed an ending, and I wasn’t sure I could write one without deciding what I believed in. Twelve years later, it occurred to me that I’d come to a point in my life where I was comfortable with my beliefs, and with my lack of certain beliefs, and I didn’t really need Eleanor to sort that out for me anymore. The clarity I thought would bring me an ending for my novel did the opposite: it called into question the entire purpose of the novel in the first place. Twelve years of work were probably going to go up in smoke, all because I couldn’t feel what the characters felt anymore.

But I loved those characters so much, and I knew them so well, that I couldn’t quite abandon them. There were bigger themes in my story – themes that had nothing to do with a search for spiritual meaning, that gave the novel a kick in the butt. It transformed almost overnight into a story about mothers and daughters, about the echo of mistakes through generations, about healing wounds wrought by people who are long gone.

I think it’s a much better story than the original novel ever could have been. I hope it is, at least

JL: Can you tell me a little bit about your upcoming projects?

JG: There are a couple on the radar for me right now. I’ll be writing a novel called The Travelers later this year, which will be the third and final book in my Movement series. That should be an interesting climax for the series, and I hope one that nobody quite sees coming. I’m excited to get to work on it, but I confess I’ve been distracted by a few other things.

One of those things is a short story that I wrote recently that, I think, is the first stone in a bigger wall full of related and connected tales. It began as a short horror story, and before I knew it, had evolved into a story about the birth and death of the universe itself. That’s probably one of my weaknesses. I turn everything into an end-of-the-world story! The short story itself is likely to be called The Last of All Things, but the world it exists in will probably be called Limbs. I’ve got a half-dozen ideas now for new stories to write in this world. I probably won’t release any of them until I have a few in the can.

And of course there’s Eleanor, the novel that never dies. I’m working on some minor revisions to the book currently, and this fall, my agent and I will take it to publishers to see if there’s any interest. The book has done exceptionally well as an indie book so far, so I hope that it will get some bites. This is the most personal and important thing I’ve ever written, in my humble and biased opinion, so I am considering all possible avenues of getting it in front of as many readers as humanly possible. There’s no guarantee it will be published traditionally, or that the offers from any publishers will be good enough for this book, but those are things that you can’t know until you dip a toe into the water.

The last bit on my agenda is the short story I mentioned before, which will possibly make a nice homage to On the Beach, though I expect in a very subtle, mostly thematic way.

JL: Thank you, Jason, for taking time out of your busy schedule to talk to me. I wish you all the best in your writing endeavors.

JG: It’s been a real pleasure talking to you – thanks for the opportunity!

About the Author: Jason Lockwood

Jason Lockwood is the Managing Editor of The Savvy Street. He graduated from Université Laval in Québec City, majoring in French and Secondary Education. From 2009 until 2013, he kept a blog entitled A Life of Valuing, which he gave up in 2013 to focus on writing books. He has worked in the Information Technology industry for over two decades. Jason purposefully ousted himself from his Wisconsin roots in 1992 and made his way to Slovakia to teach conversational English. This experience resulted in a book, Banana Peels on the Tracks: Coming of Age in Post-Communist Slovakia, published in 2015.