Commissar Gaunt, Inquisitor Eisenhorn, Malus Darkblade all icons of the Black Library. The man behind the legends, best-selling Black Library author and Ghostmaker Dan Abnett, talks to White Dwarf about Gaunt, Warhammer 40,000 and the craft of writing.
By Nick Kyme
Dan Abnett is one of the Black Library's most prolific and popular writers.
Author of almost twenty published novels as well as a raft of well-loved comic book characters, Dan just keeps on coming up with the goods. Cranking out such a plethora of great novels, it comes as no surprise to learn that writing has always been a passion of his. 'I always enjoyed writing and telling stories as a kid. I used to write and draw avidly,' Dan says. 'At a fairly early age there was a synthesis of these two things when someone showed me a comic. I thought, 'Wait a minute, I can do both of these things at once and tell a story that's exciting.'' This epiphany heralded the beginning of an illustrious career for Dan who, after finishing university, ended up working in comics as an editor for Marvel in London. It was a job that would see him working on such diverse titles as the Care Bears, Thundercats and even Thomas the Tank Engine.
Eventually, Dan discovered that he preferred the writing side of things and left the drawing board behind. 'It was a great learning curve,' Dan explains. He took this experience with him to work freelance on American comics for giants Marvel and DC, something he still does today. In fact it was as a result of working on prominent titles in the comics world that Dan came to the attention of the Black Library, then on the look-out for comics scriptwriters. 'I'd just done a couple of issues of Conan and somebody said to them, 'You should try Dan, he's just written Conan.'' (It was actually David Pugh who recommended Dan, whom fans of early issues of Inferno! might remember for his wild Obvious Tactics comic strip). Darkblade and Titan followed, short stories too. Dan's evolution from comic books to novelist had begun. 'Comics and short stories just led up to the idea of doing novels,' he says. 'I now consider the novels for Black Library to be the most important thing I do.' Read a bibliography of all Dan's novels and you'll see how important. Such a vast workload might be daunting for some but Dan chalks up his ability to produce such a large output to experience. 'I've been doing it for fifteen years, so I'm pretty well-practised at it,' he tells us. 'I actually enjoy the process of sitting down at a word processor and writing, which some writers don't. The fact that it's not a hardship helps enormously.' Believe it or not, Dan thrives on a crammed work schedule, producing his best material under pressure. 'I'd rather have slightly too much to do than slightly too little,' he says.
You might think a writer's life is all about eating take-out, playing computer games and penning the odd story here and there. For Dan it's a discipline and he approaches his writing, both comic scripts and novels, like any other job, utilising a method of his own. devised as he worked on more and more novels. 'I get up every morning and tend to write a minimum of three thousand words on a novel. On a particularly good day I might write four, five or even six thousand words,' he explains. 'In the afternoon I'll do a minimum of three to five pages of comic script.' Though both benefit from his meticulous attention, he has found he prefers the immediacy he gets with writing fiction. 'Because in comics you're writing a script, you're one step removed from the audience, from the actual words,' he explains. 'I like novels more. I'm actually getting in there and writing fiction. That's why I write my novels in the morning. To ease myself into the day, I do what's fun.' Dan's material is tremendously diverse, but unlike a lot of writers he's happy to say what inspires him and divulge his secrets. 'I use anything and everything really,' he says, 'I read voraciously and all sorts of things fiction that I think is very good, documentary fact and reference material.
I also read stuff that I know isn't very good, but delivers some degree of satisfaction. It's like eating junk food, though there might be a good idea locked away in a very poorly written sentence,' Dan pauses and, with a grin, admits, 'or I'll just enjoy it because I can't believe how bad it is!' Dan finds ideas coming out of the strangest places, which can spark off a train of thought seemingly incongruous with the initial source.
'I might read a report about a new piece of technology or an archeological dig. There might not be much in common with the final story, but something clicks.' Gaunt's Ghosts is one of Dan's best-known works for the Black Library, but despite the eclectic material that generally inspires him, the idea for it came about for a simple reason.
'It would be easy to say I just did Sharpe in space, but the honest answer is I looked at the vast array of Games Workshop material before me, bearing in mind I only had a passing knowledge of it at that stage, and thought, 'Oh my God, I'd better start with humans, because I understand how they tick.''
Double Eagle, a spin-off from the Gaunt's Ghosts series which describes the adventures of Imperial Thunderbolt pilots, takes this notion and develops it further. 'I make no bones about the fact that it is inspired entirely by my enthusiasm for the Battle of Britain,' Dan says.
This is something that comes across in the novel in terms of its structural similarity to the war reports of World War II. The referent realism this endows the book with is something Dan believes is very important. 'It's about authenticity. We're writing about future war and fantasy, but I think the best way of doing that is grounding it in things people will recognise.' This sense of identification by the reader is possibly one of the reasons for Dan's success. He reads a lot of military history, this informs his novels and helps achieve a kind of pseudo-realism. 'Moulding Thunderbolt pilots to be like Spitfire pilots, who have the same concerns, do the same activities and have the same long periods of stress, is very useful.' This injection of realism that Dan puts in all of his books is something that is afforded to him by the way the Warhammer 40,000 universe works. It is part of the appeal in exploring and expanding upon it with his novels.
'There's something in particular about Warhammer 40,000 that I enjoy the mix of the gothic and science fiction,' he explains. 'It's not just what the next book is going to be about, what they haven't seen before, it's about where we can push it next.' This is quite different from Dan's experiences at 2000AD, Britain's well-known and award-winning science fiction comic. Dan has written and continues to write some of their biggest strips, including Judge Dredd, and is responsible for creating some of 2000AD's best-loved characters, like Sinister Dexter.
'2000AD is a forum for wild and sometimes wacky explorations of what comes into the parameters of science fiction,' Dan says. 'Warhammer 40,000 has a flavour all its own. It's not so much a case of finding new things as finding new ways of describing an already well-defined universe.' One series of novels written by Dan that does just that is the Eisenhorn trilogy. 'It was less about the Imperium at war and more about societies and cities,' Dan tells us. The stories typified by Gaunt's Ghosts essentially dramatise the games fought on the tabletop, but it is the environment away from the battlefield that offers more opportunity to develop the 41st millennium, as Dan describes. 'If you take things to a city, you can pretty much mirror anything in modern society. It's the stuff people know in their hearts has been there all the time, they'd just never heard anyone describe it before.' An example can be found in the follow-up to Eisenhorn Ravenor, in which one of the main characters is a street kid, living in a hive city. Not something you'd ever encounter in the game.
Characters are at the heart of Dan's novels, and this is certainly the case in latest book in the Gaunt's Ghost series,
Traitor General. 'The plot is hurled forward by simple character choices and decisions. It all came out of the characters,' Dan says.
Traitor General begins a new sequence of events called 'The Lost', which are further developed in the next three books. These happenings are also part of the Sabbat Worlds campaign story arc. The second book of 'The Lost' is
His Last Command. 'This book will answer all the questions set-up in Traitor General, some of the answers to which are going to be quite surprising,' Dan tells us. 'It's also the second most ominous title of the four books.' And the most ominous? That would be the final instalment, Only in Death, which opens with brace yourselves dear readers the death of Gaunt!
Before this, Dan is heading out to the open sea with another novel.
Fell Cargo is based, in part, upon the Inferno! short stories of the same name and tells of the adventures of swashbuckling pirates in the Warhammer world.
'I really enjoyed it,' Dan says. 'I set out to put in every single pirate cliché that I could possibly imagine.' Everything is there, either cunningly veiled, or as a Warhammer equivalent. 'The only one I didn't put in is women dressed as men.' With this whole raft of new books following in the wake of numerous others, there seems to be no stopping Dan. If you've got aspirations to follow in his footsteps then he offers this advice. 'Read and absorb stuff and see what ideas you get, but most importantly, just write. I firmly believe that with writing you just do it. Exercise your writing muscles so you can do it more easily, with more fluidity,' he says, '70 per cent of writing is stamina and the ability to keep at it.'
