I’ve recently (as in the last few years) accepted that I am a horror writer. Perhaps not a super traditional horror writer, but horror is part and parcel of everything I do; horror and horror-adjacent is often what I default to, as my work is not always scary per se, but it uses the tropes, characters, and structure of horror in various ways. I find horror to be the thing that is most accessibly in my brain, and the lens that I filter the world through. Sometimes we just don’t have much control over these things; if my mom had her way, I’d write nothing but rom coms.
I was talking about this with a writer friend of mine (an immigrant, a father, sober) — about this newish embracing of horror in my work — and he had a visceral reaction when thinking about his own work in conversation with that. He enjoys horror (we have watched many a horror movie together) but he cannot write horror, at least right now. For him, the horrors of the country and the world at large is already horrific enough—and he can’t spend his creative time living in that space.
And I think this is valid. There are two modes of thinking here — you write to respond to the world you see around you, or you write to create the world you want to see. I’m not trying to make a binary rule here, and sometimes you’re doing both…but these are the buckets I tend to see my writing peers fall into. Sometimes this changes as we get older, as our priorities or responsibilities change. Sometimes the world IS too horrific, and we have to find hope in the story worlds we choose to spend our time in.
I’m not so great at imagining the world that COULD be. Maybe I’m too materialistic or nostalgic to be able to do that; I’m fixated on and reacting to the good and the bad in the world we’re in right now. And horror continues to be the genre-language of my processing.
No matter the genre, what kinds of stories are you finding yourself writing? Are you reacting or imagining?
