A Conversation with Van Jensen, Creator of the Sci-Fi Thriller Godfall
Novel Suspects: Was there a particular comic book or graphic novel from your youth that first sparked your love for the medium and for the sci-fi genre?
Van Jensen: I grew up in a tiny town, so I had very little access to, well, anything. I read whatever comics I could find. G.I. Joe, Spider-man, and X-Men mostly. I loved the combination of bombastic stories, dynamic art, and soapy melodrama. Specifically, there was a wordless issue of G.I. Joe that made me realize the way comics worked as a medium, and I was always writing and drawing my own little stories after that.
It was really on the prose side that I found sci-fi. My grandpa died when I was young, but he left behind a collection of early sci-fi. Asimov. Sagan. Bradbury. Heinlein. I vividly remember reading The Illustrated Manand feeling a new world open up to me.
NS: What was the moment you realized you wanted to transition from journalism to storytelling through comics and fiction
VJ: While my first “career” was in journalism as a newspaper crime reporter, I had been writing and drawing stories from the time I was 3 or 4. I just never had access to any artists or writers, so I didn’t think that was something you could actually do for work. But even as a journalist, I was always approaching it as storytelling. Even short police briefs I would try to craft mini-narratives, which readers appreciated but my editors did not!
It was in my mid-20s that I realized I was always meant to be a storyteller, and I gave myself permission to throw myself into that world.
NS: Your work spans newspapers, comics, graphic novels, screenwriting, and now
prose. How do these mediums influence each other in your creative process?
VJ: Great question. Something I always emphasize is that creative writing entails two disciplines—writing and storytelling. The storytelling part is mostly the same, medium to medium. The big difference is whether something is serialized like a TV show or comic, or one-off like a novel or film. The writing side is where they’re all different, and each medium has a different set of tools to utilize. I do find myself trying to recreate the effect of something from screenwriting in a novel, or vice versa. Mostly, it just keeps my brain limber as I shift gears.
NS: What first sparked the idea for GODFALL? Was it a single image or question that acted as the catalyst?
VJ: Very much a single image. I was sick with the flu, and I had a fever dream about a giant alien falling next to my hometown. When I woke up, it was burned into my head, and I knew I had something iconic. My town, Lewellen, Neb., is incredibly flat. Unbroken horizon all around. So, this massive alien blocking the view would be incredibly jarring and disruptive.
NS: You started your career as a crime reporter. How did that experience shape the way you build stories, tension, or characters especially in GODFALL, but also in your other work?
VJ: Honestly, it made me NOT want to write about crime for a long while. I saw a lot of death, and it hit me hard. But now that I have some distance on it, that experience helps in a couple of ways. One, I think I have a good handle on how policing works, the way that cops are and how they see the world. Two, I never treat violence lightly. Any violent act is going to have deep tangible impact, of course, but also lingering emotional impact. I want that to feel real in my stories, so it’s never cheap or trivial.
NS: You were born and raised in Nebraska, the same setting for GODFALL. Can you touch on your thought process behind making this choice? Were there certain aspects of the location you wanted readers to understand from a local’s
perspective?
VJ: Like I said before, just because of the iconography alone, it felt like this had to be the setting. know rural America really well. But I’ve grown up and seen these mostly clueless depictions of rural life in fiction (excepting some great work like, say, Winter’s Bone). So, firstly, I wanted to be true, to show the richness and weirdness of a tiny town.
From there, I started to think a lot about this divide we have in America between the rural and the urban. In the novel, the outside world descends on this small town, and urban and rural people are forced to coexist. That’s something that I wish we had happening in the real world. Instead, the two sides never interact, and it’s led to a deep polarization.
NS: Having worked with visual mediums like comics and graphic novels, did you find it was easier to envision the story in your mind’s eye? How did this help you develop the setting and scenes in GODFALL?
VJ: Whatever medium I work in, I think visually. It’s just the way my brain is. When I write a scene, I see the setting and characters in my head, and I play the scene out, then just write what I see. With novels, it’s during the rewrites that I focus more on language.
With GODFALL having a pretty complex world, I think it helped me to flesh it out fully and to paint a real enough picture for readers to fall into this small town that is being subsumed within a growing city.
NS: GODFALL is your debut novel, and it’s already in development as a TV series with Ron Howard set to direct. At what stage in writing the book did you start to think cinematically?
VJ: It’s really funny, but when GODFALL was in the middle of this Hollywood bidding war, all the producers and executives kept insisting that I wrote the book cinematically in order to entice them. Not at all! I simply write the way I write.
I never intended GODFALL to be anything other than a book. It’s awesome all that has happened, but I don’t think you can or should engineer that sort of thing. All I intended was to craft a book that was a fun read that would hopefully engage readers.
NS: As someone who has worked in so many different avenues already, is there a dream project or medium you haven’t yet worked on but would love to?
VJ: Oh, great question! When I was a kid, if you would’ve told me that I’d write a Superman comic, I would’ve said that was the top of the mountain. I really am so blessed that I got to achieve my biggest dream, and now I’m still going.
One thing I would love to pursue would be a TV adaptation of I, Robot. There are several of Asimov’s books to draw from, and I envision it as a police procedural that almost feels like an anthology, moving from one case to another every season, and to different planets, all while building up the threat and mystery of robots’ growing separation from humanity.
NS: If you could give any advice to your younger self or to younger writers, what would it be? Is there anything you wish you knew before beginning any of your different careers?
VJ: Patience, mainly. I’ve come to be a believer in work over talent. You have to get a lot of bad writing out of you to become a good writer, let alone a great one. When I was younger, I was so anxious to jump straight to greatness that I stumbled along the way. At the same time, I think I made it here because I stumbled all those times, and I was too damn stubborn to stop going.
Discover the book
As the sheriff of Little Springs, David Blunt thought he’d be keeping the peace among the same people he’d known all his life, not breaking up chanting crowds of cultists or battling an influx of drug dealers. As a series of brutal, bizarre murders strikes close to home, Blunt throws himself into the hunt for a killer who seems connected to the Giant.
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