Where Did Danny Come From?
I get this question a lot. “Where the hell did Danny Valentine come from?”
Characters very rarely spring full-blown from someone’s forehead. I mean, they usually do arrive with a voice of their own, demanding all sorts of special treatment because they are, after all, Protaganists. In this case, it was after a long night of finishing another book that Danny leaned over and whispered in my ear as I was staring at blank white space–the writer’s equivalent of engine idling, I suppose.
Looking back I can see all sorts of influences I didn’t catch during writing. Mostly because a five-book series is such a huge undertaking, so emotionally draining, that you can’t see the forest for the trees. Finishing the damn thing does give one some perspective.
Not to mention a sudden urge to drink a bottle of wine in celebration. But that’s another blog post.
So. Where did Danny Valentine come from?
Originally she came from several piecemeal sources. I was watching a lot of the first Kill Bill movie and a wonderful Roman Polanski movie based on an Arturo Perez-Reverte novel, The Ninth Gate, not to mention watching a lot of Seven Samurai. (I’m a big Kurosawa fan.) Danny has a katana because, well, what else does a samurai have? Edged metal and honor. She’s my answer to Toshiro Mifune, I guess.
Any discussion of Dante Valentine has to include Perez-Reverte’s The Club Dumas, because the figure of Lucifer owes so much to the Girl in the book and Emmanuelle Seigner’s sphinxlike androgyny in the film. I had originally planned for Lucifer to be beautiful only in the beginning, but Emmanuelle changed my mind. Part of my fascination with the character of the Devil (as presented in the books) is the fact that he is so inhumanly beautiful, and his agenda isn’t human either.
He is, in short, a worthy adversary for someone uniquely human. No, I haven’t forgotten that this is all about Dante.
The last three books of the Valentine series are the real meat and potatoes. Working For The Devil was an overture, where the major themes–revenge, loss, change, humanity–are introduced and touched, and Dead Man Rising is where those themes are given a good goose and extended a bit. But where I really wanted to go was Devil’s Right Hand.
I just didn’t realize it when Danny started speaking.
All through Dead Man Rising I was playing with two questions. First, was Danny still human? And secondly, how far do our childhood traumas excuse us acting like idiots when we “grow up”?
The first draft of DMR came back from the editor with the overriding comment that it needed to be less dark. In the original version, there was precious little hope–this was Danny’s valley of darkness, and she had to pay a price for passage. I suppose I was too close to her to see that she was replaying some very old ideas of mine–how do you deal with hurts that can’t heal? Do you make the choice of being like the people who made your childhood a living hell, or do you choose to be different?
And if you do choose to be different, how can you train yourself to be so?
I listened to a lot of Rob Dougan during the writing of DMR. I also watched a lot of the first season of La Femme Nikita, because the question Nikita struggles with in the original Luc Besson movie and in the first arc of the series, is how to keep your own soul when you’re presented with no choice but to become terrible. Strangely enough, I also read a lot of Milton. (As if you couldn’t tell.) Lucifer really came into his own during the book he has the least involvement in; mostly because he was gestating as a character with motivations of his own rather than just a foil to Dante’s humanity and the necessary impetus to the plot in Working For The Devil.
Does that sound strange? Yeah, I’m a hack, but I think about what I’m doing. Really, I do.
Then it was time to get serious and write the trio that would end the series. I always knew what events lay in each book, I just didn’t know the scenery. I knew the basic arcs–first this happens, then this, then this–but I didn’t know the details, or the way the puzzle pieces would fit together.
The Devil’s Right Hand centers around trust issues. How far can you trust someone who lies to you? If someone lies to you for a good reason, can you accept that? The tension in the book comes from two sources–the very real ticking of the clock while Danny is trying to stay alive and figure out who’s trying to kill her now, and the bigger source, which is Japhrimel and his agenda. Can she trust him? She thinks she can, but that trust is chipped away through a very subtle process of clashing agendas. Danny places a high value on “truth,” (whatever that is) and Japhrimel places a higher value on a more pragmatic set of ideals. Like how he’s going to keep her alive. So there’s two different systems of thought here, battling for dominance within their relationship.
Danny’s relationship with Japhrimel was pulled into focus, oddly enough, by a book by Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible. The agendas in that book are all perfectly logical from each character’s point of view, but put them together and you get not only tragedy but very real heartbreak. I often think of the beginning stages of a relationship as the “anima/us hook stage,” where each person’s anima or animus finds a convenient hook on something about the other person. Whether the relationship is strong enough to survive the revealing of the actual person and not just one’s perception of that person and how they meet your needs is something I think our modern movies and songs don’t cover very well. It’s all about the first jolt, the first twitch of the hook in the flesh, the chemical soup of “falling in love.” Dante really missed out on that with Japhrimel. She had to deal with this demon falling in love with her and changing her, willy-nilly, because he couldn’t stand the thought of losing her. It was a tremendously selfish thing to do.
Japhrimel came from two places: flamenco music and vampires. Whenever I wrote him or wanted to listen to him to hear the shape of the story, I played flamenco music–Paco Pena, Segovia, Paco de Lucia. There’s a piece by Jesse Cook titled “Virtue” that is Danny and Japh’s relationship. (I’m listening to it right now.) The heartbreak of a demon struggling with a very human feeling, and of Danny struggling with the fact that it took a demon to teach her to be vulnerable again, is encapsulated in that piece of music.
And vampires. I am fascinated by how the image of the vampire changes every decade or so to mirror our needs. They are truly shapeshifters; and the most recent incarnation of the vampire is this antihero, wandering alone through an inimical world, being loved only for a brief while as he struggles against his nature. (They’re also snappy dressers.) The angst of a vampire caring for someone fragile and mortal was a major engine driving his development. I read a lot of Anne Rice and Barbara Hambly’s Don Simon (mostly the latter) while I was coming to grips with Japhrimel. Though his wings are all his own–I was just as surprised as Danny when he pulled that trick in Working For The Devil.
His coat actually came from a priest’s cassock. Yes, I’m not above taking the cheap shot. I was a Catholic schoolgirl once, you know. (Incidentally, two lines from Fiona Apple’s song Criminal were directly responsible for Japh’s later attitude toward Dante. “What would an angel say/The Devil wants to know?”)
At the risk of being a total meanie, I’m going to lay out the last two books as well. Saint City Sinners is the bridging book, and it deals with Danny being called home by an old friend and really facing the fact that she is no longer human. Her friends are aging, and their concerns are no longer Danny’s concerns. But still, she’s made promises, and when people start dying and she’s the only one who can avenge them, what can she do?
The theme of vengeance and retribution is a major one in the series. Movies like Kill Bill and Lady Vengeance, not to mention Lady Snowblood, figure heavily in the inspiration for this theme. My reading of Roman history came in handy here. The Romans were obsessed with the idea of justice, and vendettas or violence to restore the balance of justice fascinated them. The idea of the gods, or God, taking a hand in human affairs to balance everything out when the human avenues of justice can’t, feeds our own love of revenge tales.
But how far can the angel of vengeance go before she turns into the very thing she hates most, the thing she’s fighting against? When the abyss looks into Dante Valentine, she gets a heavy dose of reality shot right into her skull.
The fifth book, which I fought hard to have titled The Devil in Love to echo Jacques Cazotte’s book of the same name, was the hardest to write. (I lost the title battle, by the way. It’s now Hell And Back, because marketing thought nobody would catch the Cazotte reference. *sigh*) I have six different drafts on my hard drive, with different endings and middles. There was just so much I had to bring together, and I’m not sure I did. I suppose I’m nervous about the fans feeling they’ve gotten a satisfying ending. But it’s where the story wanted to go, with everything boiling down to one crucial question: in the crucible of vengeance and violence, what choice can someone make to retain their humanity?
I suppose a lot of that comes from the cultural atmosphere right now. I wrote the last two Danny books while becoming more actively involved in following politics and really thinking about the current administration and their use of fear to make a population docile. The book I can probably blame most for the subconscious tone and tenor of the last two Dante books is Antony Beevor’s most excellent book on the battle of Stalingrad, and to a lesser degree his book about the fall of Berlin. Stalin’s use of government and his xenophobia had terrible consequences that still echo today, and fighting the Reich made monsters of a lot of people. The Nazis were the most terrible flower of anti-Semitism and fascism, but they got their foothold by promising people bread and jobs. It is still an open question, whether a less-vengeful levy against the losers of World War I might have disallowed the conditions that gave rise to such fear and loathing, providing the Nazis with such fertile soil to grow their hateful flowers in.
Fascism rises in the middle of fear, and the gutting of our civil rights (not to mention the march to preemptively invade a country) was allowed because we were afraid after September 11, 2001. Who wouldn’t be? The accident of Fate placed the political party most institutionally predisposed to use that fear for its own ends in power, and we are seeing the cost now. We have become what we fear most.
That atmosphere of fear really informed the last two Dante books, where I was struggling with the question of just how far she could go without losing her soul. Hence my obsessive watching and rewatching of revenge movies, my reading of Beevor’s books, and my consumption of stories like The 42 Ronin.
So Danny started out being a Protagonist with some Personal Problems, but the further I got into her the more she became about very real questions that I’m struggling with even to this day. How far can you blame being a jerk on your own bad childhood? At what point do you take responsibility? When, if ever, is vengeance appropriate? When does fear breed fascism, and how can we stop it? When we are fighting monsters, how can we not become the very thing we’re fighting? Is it better to trust in God and justice, or to pass the ammunition and fix things ourselves? When is it appropriate to do either? What is honor? Where does honor come from, and how do we retain in in a world that has none? What does it mean to be human? Can you decide to be human, or is it something intrinsic that can be lost or broken? Who decides when enough violence is enough?
Danny Valentine isn’t an answer to these questions. Rather, she’s an ongoing process of thinking about them. As I say about so many things, it isn’t the answer that is important. It is the process of continually thinking and re-evaluating about these questions that makes art necessary. In fact, I’d go so far as to say the more one thinks one has answered these questions, the less one’s answer is satisfying or even humane. The continual questioning leads to toleration and to flexibility, to re-evaluation. As the DHM often points out, it’s a continual correction that brings one closest to that chimera called “truth.”
I tell the truth the best way I know how, through fiction. I suppose you could say Danny came about in answer to those questions boiling in my subconscious. I didn’t sit down to write a meditation on vengeance, truth, humanity, etc. I just wanted to tell a good story. It’s only now, looking back, that I see these things, these questions I still am intimately concerned with, asking myself, and working on, echoed in what I thought I was writing only for fun.
Strange how that happens, isn’t it.
And now comes the most important question of all.
What do you think?
