Why don't you write something nice: Guest Post by Laurie Dalzell

Hey – is anybody sitting there? No, not the stool in the spot light, thanks, but that big squashy chair in the corner.

No? Do you mind? Ah, thanks.

What's that? Who am I? Why am I here?

I'm Laurie Dalzell. Writer of stories that earn me funny looks from my husband, wide-eyed looks from a friend I've had more than half my life, and from my mother-in-law, the question "If you're going to write, why don't you write something nice?"

Dark fiction. You know 'em. The stories that give you a little shiver when you read them and maybe make you want to check what's under the bed before you turn off the light. Then again, maybe not.

Now, about why I write what I do…

I honestly can't say why. I've asked myself this question again and again over the last couple of days since I was invited to post here and this one memory keeps surfacing as an answer. It's about one of the first stories I ever wrote. A tale about a girl who is kidnapped by aliens, married to their prince, and has several children with him, each of them with various deformities. I wrote it in second grade. After reading it, my father was the first to ever ask me "Why don't you write something nice?"

I don't remember what I said back to him, but remember looking at my "book" – a few standard sheets of white paper folded in half and stapled together – later that night, flipping through the pages and thinking that it was a pretty good story. I mean, even though the girl had been kidnapped and her kids were misshapen and deformed, she did find a kind of contentment, a happiness perhaps even, by the end.

Why didn't I write something "nice?" Because that's not the way the story went.

Now, about thirty years later, the answer is still the same. At its simplest, I write what I write because that's the way the stories go.

Why does any writer write what they do? Because the story is there. It whispers in my ear, dances behind my eyes, and wants to be told. So I write it.

Thanks for having me on your blog, Rich.

Find similar posts at Laurie's blog, Words to Paper,

About Laurie

Laurie is a writer of dark fiction under her own name and of erotic dark fiction under her pen name, Annie Duvall. A native of Vermont, Laurie presently lives in Oklahoma with her husband and two children.