Today we’d like to introduce you to Daniel Wells.
Daniel, please kick things off for us by telling us about yourself and your journey so far.
In 2015 I lost everything. I lost a girlfriend that moved with me to Houston, I lost my five-year career as a sales manager, and I lost my motivation to achieve; the drive that pushed me through a four-year English degree, through two unpublished novels, and for six months shut myself into an empty, 1100 square-foot apartment.
Late into those long six months I was staring, mindless and numb, at the shrapnel of forgotten projects, programs, and folders on my desktop, and opened an old novel I’d started in 2011 and asked to the bare apartment walls, ‘why did I ever stop writing?’
When I moved back to Dallas, I made a commitment to myself: I will visit every possible writing group I can find. And I did. Within two months I’d visited over a dozen writing groups, each with their own artistic merits, each with emblazoned trail pavers and storytellers that reignited my love of the written word. I started writing again. I started reading again.
I felt like I started living again. And haven’t looked back. One day, I found a writing group, Dallas Screenwriting Crew, that boasted, “share your story with us: we’ll turn it into a film,” and thought, ‘what have I got to lose?’ They said, ‘write us a script. Oh, and by the way, you have three weeks.’
I learned the format in a week, wrote the short story and adapted it to a screenplay the second, and wrote and practiced the pitch on the third. That was October, 2015, two months after returning to Dallas. The short screenplay was adapted to film, and premiered with Dallas Film Crew (now Dallas Filmmakers Alliance) in June, 2016.
Since then, I’ve curated over two years of hand-written workshop content on storytelling for film and, as the Development Executive for Dallas Film Crew, led multiple 8-week workshops taking writers through the development process for film, over a dozen of which went into production. I have spoken on panels and presented workshops with The Writers Guild of Texas, Romance Writers of America, and Dallas Screenwriters Association among others, and wrote and co-produced “Lily is Here,” a feature-length drama with Carpe Diem Pictures, scheduled to premiere Spring, 2019.
I am also a founding member and Vice President of WORD – Writing Organizations ‘Round Dallas – a 501(c), non-profit community arts organization created to connect writers to the resources they need to meet their goals, support local writing organizations, and cement Dallas/Fort Worth’s reputation as a nationally recognized haven of the arts.
Can you give our readers some background on your art?
Storytelling is my foundation for expressions of empathy.
Through novel-length prose and film, my work is grounded in fictionalized realism and the creation of work that tugs on heart strings until they ache. Over the years I’ve found that I write stories with hints of tragedy the characters live, or have lived through, to metamorphic effect.
I lean towards current social affairs, and challenge social foundations. I want to leave readers and viewers with a statement, not a question open for debate. How the consumer responds with the protagonist’s metamorphosis, often through the most challenging moment in a character’s life, is my motivation for storytelling.
How does a family struggle to overcome the addiction of a family member together? How does an adult come to terms with wrongs committed to them as children, when adults and peers had the best intentions? How does an openness to new ideas challenge the views of a contradictory moral majority? Those are the types of questions I answer through prose and writing for the screen.
In your view, what is the biggest issue artists have to deal with?
Saturation is the largest challenge artists face today. We have developed a culture of consumption but there’s so much out there that it’s hard to wrangle in people to come see it. But people are still truly attracted to passion. In film they call these ‘passion projects,’ the projects we don’t prioritize because they don’t have much potential to pay the bills. But I believe in the exact opposite.
I believe that artists must challenge themselves to prioritize passion projects and push through the fear of failure. I believe that artists must conquer the dichotomy of art and business, of which the greater of two opposites would be hard to come by. Artists do not have to be motivated by money, but must challenge themselves by asking what they want to accomplish with their project at the outset. Who is this art made for? Do I have someone I want to showcase, or purchase this art? Or am I making this art for me? With over a million books published online and over a thousand films/television series releasing each year, these are the realities I face head-on as a writer.
What’s the best way for someone to check out your work and provide support?
Lily Is Here will tentatively premiere in Q1 of 2019. Visit www.facebook.com/lilyisherefilm to see behind-the-scenes photos, keep up with the premiere date, and watch our progress as we transition from production to post-production, and then to distribution. WORD – Writing Organizations ‘Round Dallas – can be found by visiting www.wordwriters.org. Find your storytelling tribe with a map of organizations in D/FW.
Sign-up for our hands-on writing experience, ‘Writers in the Field,’ a weekend for storytellers and filmmakers to attend workshops of experts in swords, explosions, poisons, lock-picking, blacksmiths, costuming, dance, and more! All in a single weekend at www.writersinthefield.com.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.facebook.com/lilyisherefilm
- Phone: 4697661945
- Email: danielwells.dfw@gmail.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/danieldfw/
- Facebook: www.facebook.com/danieldfw
- Other: www.lilyisherefilm.com
Image Credit:
Jonathan Ruiz; Mark Andrew Ragunton; Ly Tran; “Jenn” Jennifer Lynn Rogers; Short Film, “The Lamp,” Directed by Nick Brooks, Cinematographer Mark Andrew Ragunton.
Getting in touch: VoyageDallas is built on recommendations from the community; it’s how we uncover hidden gems, so if you know someone who deserves recognition please let us know here.
