Why I Write, Redux
It's the most popular question you're likely to hear if you've ever put pen to paper: Why do you write? I happen to get a certain variation of it: Why do you write horror? No matter how you look at it, a question's a question. Each is just as overplayed and, depending on the context, patronizing. You don't ask a welder why he welds, or why a baker bakes. Those are jobs you just accept on face value, because it's just that: A job.
Writing is a job, even though you might know this depending on who you ask. The details get lost in words like muse, art form, pure creativity. It seems magical to the reader, some ethereal craft that allows writers to create people and places out of thin air. But, like magic, it's a sleight of hand in its own way. You're selling a story to somebody, and hoping that they believe it long enough to buy it. There's nothing wrong with that. After all, writing is a profession, and all professionals, even in the creative fields such as art, music and writing, want to earn a living from their work.
But I digress. I write because it's what I want to do for a living, or at least, as a way to supplement my income. Professors and editors, artists and readers have all told me I have a knack for it. I would write even if I wasn't trying to sell stories; I've written hundreds of stories as a hobby long before I talked myself into trying to get published. It's just what I enjoy doing, the same way some people paint or bake or fix-up old cars on the weekends. However, I write horror for a very different reason.
Depending on who you ask, I may not even write horror. Maybe that's true, too. The definition is always moving on me. Even for it, I love horror for what it is, taken down to its constituent parts. Strip away the cheesy fun of masked killers, the schlock-and-awe of zombie cheerleaders, vampires, monsters, the occasional giant radioactive cockroach, and even the existential terror of the human condition, and horror is simple and exciting to me. Horror is a vehicle for examining the world around us: It's how we deal with the things that we don't understand. About nature, God, the Devil, science, the future, and ourselves. It's the understanding of what is frightening to us, and the use of that understanding to tell a story.
Horror isn't easy to write. That's why it comes in so many forms, and used to tell so many kinds of stories. Apocalyptic, bizarro, creature horror, paranormal, psychological, supernatural, ranging from hardcore gore to cheeky fun. Horror is rooted in the fear of things we don't know as well as the things we do, the things that hurt us, that hunt us, from collective experience. That's why fear is a personal thing. What a reader or viewer takes from this fear is exclusive to his or her experiences. As a writer, trying to capture this, sort it out, and use it in the future is a challenge. It helps me tease out my own fears and exploit them for something productive, rather than just collecting dust in the back of my mind.
I don't often do gore. I don't often follow familiar tropes. While certainly enjoyable, they're not usually my cup of tea from a writing standpoint. I prefer to explore the things that frighten me in my own life, as well as the things that interest me, because these topics tend to coincide. In some ways I truly enjoy the things that frighten me, because I'm learning something new about the things that exist in the dark, and the things lurking in the peripheral. Writing is how I investigate these things.
So while my writing doesn't always jive with the genre's standards and practices, it's the challenge of horror that brings me back. It's my desire to understand why the world is so scary. After all, if we're not trying to scare people, in some way or another, what is horror really for?
Written as a response to Why Write? from Wealie's World.
