Guest Post: Why Do I Like to Write Horror Stories?

Today’s guest post offers great insight into why writers write in general, as well as why Paul Dail, today’s gust post author, writes in his particular genre: horror.  Thanks so much to Paul for offering us a trip into his head…

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If you’ll notice, there are really three questions in the title to this introductory post, cleverly pieced together to hopefully gather your attention while hopefully not sounding too pompous and self-absorbed (as in my first idea for a title, “Why do I write?”).  If you didn’t notice, don’t worry, because I’m about to break them down.  Oh, and if this is the first time you’ve read one of my postings, you might want to plan for a few minutes.  In Word, this entry runs a little over three pages, single space.  But again, hopefully I’ve gathered your attention.

At this very early stage of my new blog, most of you are visiting as a result of a mild form of coercion and shameless self-promotion on my part.  Because of this fact, many of you have already heard the answer to one of these questions.  As a horror writer, why do I write the things I do? And perhaps more importantly, should you be worried if you ran into me in a dark alley by yourself?  Without anything to protect yourself.  Far away from anyone who might help you.  Or at least… far enough.

Ever notice how many of Stephen King’s characters are writers?

See?  Why does that sort of thing come out of my head?  Most of you know me as a pretty mellow, mostly gentle, and usually kind individual.  I’d like to say my affinity for the dark side came from watching the old “B” horror movies as a kid, then reading Stephen King and company through high school and well into college, but truth be told, maybe there’s something deeper, something I was born with.

Many of you have also heard about my imaginary childhood friend.

While most kids have imaginary animals, or other invisible friends, my imaginary friend when I was three to four years old, living in a farmhouse in the middle of nowhere in upstate New York was The Little Man Outside with a Flashlight.  Although I don’t imagine that I’ll ever create anything as screwed up as Eraserhead, this is the type of friend I would imagine David Lynch had as a child.  And apparently I used my imaginary friend to scare the bejeezus out of a babysitter one very dark night.  So has it been there all along?

I know this is “chicken or egg” sort of stuff, but these days as an adult, I’m the type who knows the horror movies are fake but still gets a little scared.  And a little more likely to lock the doors.  I’m mildly superstitious.  And when the seemingly bi-annual predictions for Doomsday come and go, even though I feel mostly confident I will live to see the Day After Tomorrow (see what I did there?), I’m the type who is never quite comfortable until these expiration dates are passed.  I had a pretty minimalist religious upbringing, but I believe that even just a limited exposure to the Bible instills a fear that it’s all got to endsometime.  And growing up on the tail-end of the Cold War, I vividly remember the fear that seemed so prevalent in this country of death from a nuclear holocaust.  And I will always remember the bomb drills we did in elementary school.

So I’m guessing that as a result of some part of all the above, I write the types of stories that I do.  And when I don’t, when I take a break that starts to last too long, as oft they do, my nightmares will run me ragged, keep me awake and make me fear going to sleep.  Or even make me afraid to be awake.

I will never forget those two nights in a row when I lay awake in the middle of the night convinced that my whole life was fabricated by someone/something otherworldly.  I believed that nothing about my life was actually real, and I knew that I couldn’t wake up my wife to comfort me because she didn’t really exist either; she was implanted into my life by “Them,” and her trying to comfort me, convince me I had just been dreaming, was exactly what a masquerading wife would do.

The second night of this occurrence was a little easier (even though going to sleep that night had been a bit of a nervous proposition), but that first night it happened, I lay nearly paralyzed in fear and confusion for at least fifteen minutes before forcing myself to sleep, knowing that there was nothing I could do about it, hoping that I actually did exist and this was just some exhausted delusion.

I have to admit that there’s still an undeniable little part of me that wonders.

So you see, writing these stories isn’t really a choice.

But beyond that is something bigger.  And it addresses the second, more pretentious part of this title, “Why do I write?” Well, for me, beyond the enjoyment of creating a story, I write in an attempt to answer one of the great questions of humanity.  How does the mind of another work?  Most of my life I have wondered this.  Whether it was in my teenage years, wondering if other kids had the crazy thoughts I had, or as an adult, wondering why some people find my thoughts so crazy.  There are multiple examples of film and literature reflecting this basic curiosity, with most of them telling us that it would be folly to be able to read the thoughts of another and that the insight we might gain into the human condition isn’t worth the tradeoff of all the other things we might learn about people.  Yet it is still an alluring mystery to me.  Because we can never really know what is going on in the mind of someone else.  Even when someone tells us exactly how they feel, even during those rare moments when we allow ourselves to be truly honest with one another, we paint over their words with our own perceptions, memories, associations, etc…  We are not getting an accurate representation, and as a result, we never get a true understanding.

I believe that to create a story, or more specifically a fictional character, is an attempt to understand how other people think.  In a way, it’s like being a god.  Without going on too much of a tangent, I’ve entertained the idea that maybe when we die, we are reborn into the life of someone completely different than us, someone totally unfamiliar.  Someone of a different race or religion or lifestyle.  And we keep this cycle up until we get it.  All of it.  And when we have lived all of these lives and can have empathy for all types of people throughout history, then we are as God is.

And I may need more than one go at this life to understand people who trick out their low-rider, Tokyo drift, matchbox-looking cars and go racing past me on a small town main street with a muffler that sounds like a lawnmower on a bunch of cocaine.

Or people like Jim Jones.  Or the people who followed him, right up to the point of drinking the cyanide-laced Kool-Aid after giving it to their own children.

Or soldiers in combat, whether they enlisted or were drafted.

Or women.  I’m not sure how many lives I’ll need for that one.  I’ve often told my students that if they really want to test their writing prowess, try writing a character of the opposite sex.

[Footnote:  This is an easier task for women writers, I believe.  Men are pretty transparent.]

In fact, the more disparate from me, the better.  Some of my favorite characters have only been cameo appearances, but they are my favorite because I felt like I connected with them outside of myself.  While in reality, all of my characters have a bit of me in them, I really enjoy when I write a believable character whose only link to me is through their creation.  Their actions are dictated by who they are, not by me.  And sometimes, they will even rally against their creator.

Which segues nicely into my last point, the last question.  Why do I like to write? As I mentioned, it’s not really a choice, but the truth of it that I love to write.  And in this one is some mysticism.  Stephen King once likened writing fiction to archaeology.  For him, he felt less like he was creating a story than unearthing an artifact.  I’ve always liked this idea.  As a student of Joseph Campbell’s Journey of the Hero (and subsequent adaptations for modern audiences), I am a firm believer in an undercurrent that makes itself apparent in the shared stories of all of humanity, seen as far back as the pictures in stone and cave walls.  A collective unconsciousness.  Patterns that replay themselves in our lives and decisions, from the mundane to the magnificent.  I could talk about this for hours (and probably have already bored many friends by doing exactly that), but I’ll make the connection here.  When I hear King talk about unearthing these stories, something about that strikes a chord with me because I’ve experienced moments where I realized I wasn’t in control of my characters anymore, moments when they rallied against their creator.

I’ve heard writers debate whether or not this phenomenon actually exists, but as a writer of the supernatural, I have to take the side in support of one of my favorite things about writing fiction.  This to me is what I could only guess to be like the runner’s “high,” a moment as close to Zen as a horror writer is allowed to get.  It’s that moment when one of my characters says or does something completely unexpected.  Often it is completely against what I had intended, and sometimes it is so huge that it completely changes the direction of the story.  It is as if they have their own free will.  As if they might actually exist in another plane or dimension or time.  Or simply as if the author has breathed enough life into them to allow them to sustain themselves, connect them with that current and let them sink or swim on their own.

Whatever it is, when it happens, it feels like a glimpse into the pattern, like I’ve tapped into something deeper, beyond our surface understanding of reality.  And I’m often left wondering who is telling the story for whom.

I don’t really know any of the answers to Life’s Big Questions.  But I love to keep asking them, and I guess my way of doing that is through story, to create varying characters of different personalities and throw those same questions at them.  Toss them into the current with the rest of us.  And of course, as a horror writer, those waters run deep.  And the light can’t penetrate through all the depths.  And there is darkness down there.

So that’s my story.  More than you wanted to know?  TMI, as the kids say?

What do I want from you?
So what about you?  For the readers among you, are you just here to support me, or are you a horror fan?  Why?  Maybe another genre?  How about any of you authors out there?  What is one of your favorite things about writing?

Paul Dail is the author of The Imaginings, a supernatural/horror novel.  Writing has always been his passion, and while he will quickly tell you that the people he has met in the many places that he has traveled have been the best schooling he could get, Paul received his formal education in English with a Creative Writing emphasis at the University of Montana, Missoula. Currently Paul teaches Language Arts and Creative Writing at Tuacahn High School for the Performing Arts in Southern Utah. While this post is about his life as a horror writer, his blog features a wider range of literary topics.