My Journey as a Horror Writer: The Road so Far.

Schooling Years

Creative writing for me has always been an outlet for things I could not say in words to anyone, whether it was my family or the one friend I had, I never felt like I could open up to them. I was a shy awkward child who preferred to live life through the pages of books and hide away from any type of social interaction possible.

I was the youngest of four siblings and I was perfectly happy to let them take the spotlight.

For as long as I can remember I loved crafting magnificently tall tales when I was playing games with action figured and stuffed dolls with my brother in the back of our parents van, but the first time I made the attempt to put these to paper a whole new world opened up for me.

This was good and bad.

The very first story I wrote was in a special binder my mother had bought me. I had drawn my own front and back cover wrote a short description on the back and tried to write my first novel at the tender age of 9.

It got me into a lot of trouble.

This story wasn’t the one my mother probably thought I was going to write in that 1-inch school binder, but it was the one I wanted to tell and though years have now passed (almost 20 of them) I still remember the story and have a small notebook dedicated to it in a keepsakes box.

I wrote about a woman who had decided to cut out her heart and offer it to the woman she loved, but every time she told her she did not love her, she would sew it back inside of herself only to cut it out again the next time she offered the woman her love.

This story was quite graphic and you can imagine how disturbing it was for my math teacher when she decided to rifle through my things while I was away at lunch.

Notebook check they called it.

Invasion of personal belongings is what my dad called it.

When I came back to the class, my things were missing from my desk, bag and all, and I was asked to go down to the principles office and wait there for my dad.

This would not be the only time in my schooling that my dad had to drop whatever it was he was doing to come down to the school and speak to my guidance counselors about some story I had written.

All I had to say was if they didn’t like what I was writing they could stop going through my stuff and then they wouldn’t have to read it, but it seemed several “concerned classmates” liked to tell the teacher that I was writing bad things in notebooks.

Lousy friends are what I would call them.

From elementary school to middle school, to high school. Three different schools all different kids, and I still encountered the same problem and several trips to the guidance counselor in each of them.

In my 8th grade English class we did a one-day lesson on Stephen King and my teacher had the common sense to say to the whole class that this is the type of writing that those who have disturbed minds and did too many drugs in their youth end up writing.

His goal was humiliation after he had already failed several of my creative writing pieces for being of poor quality and too descriptive.

Horror stories were banned in his class, but this was only mentioned after I had turned in my assignments.

I never gave up my love for writing and even though it seemed to make many people believe that something was dreadfully wrong with me, I went off to college and majored in what I thought was best.

Biology.

This only lasted a year, when I took a creative writing class as a free elective and fell in love, with more than just the class.

That very first class we were given a prompt about Ferris wheels. We could write anything we wanted, but it had to have a Ferris wheel. I naturally wrote a story about those who die during the carnival being attached to the Ferris wheel with lights around their bodies so they can swing out and still enjoy the carnival rides in death.

When I handed in my paper at the end of class I mustered up all the courage I had within me to apologize if what I wrote wasn’t allowed in class. She said she was sure it would be fine as long as it wasn’t pornographic.

In the next class when our stories were handed back to us, she came up to me with the biggest smile and told me that if that was the type of story I wanted to give to her all semester she will gladly read every single one of them.

So I did.

No matter what the prompt was I spun it into its own story. Never once did she complain about how graphic it was or how terrifyingly mental I must have seemed. For our final project, we had to take one of our stories and read it out loud in front of a group of people, she made it so I went last and since my story ended with a twist she wanted me to read the entire story to the audience.

The stories were ‘published’, printed, and sold at the reading. I put in for a change of major the very next day with her signing off on my paperwork.

I was now an English Major.

It was my first published story and I still have it sitting on my bookcase.

From that class on, I had less luck with all the other teachers I had in that college, and even when I transferred to a college in a new state and went from English Major to Creative Writing major, every writing teacher held the same opinion about horror stories and believed it was a genre only Stephen King could write in and nobody else. I received poor marks and red-marked stories saying to scrap the whole thing and do it again or fail.

“Speculative fiction is the work of those with no imaginations.”

Thanks, John, I’m glad to be taking advice from you who has one published work and they have to force it upon college kids at $75 apiece just to have sales.

Where I Am Now

The support and guidance I gained from that very first Creative Writing class have stuck with me through all the classes that forced me to change my writing style to appease them.

However, this wasn’t without a casualty.

Now free of teachers telling me that I’m not ALLOWED to write Horror stories, I find it pretty hard to sit down at my computer and share one with the world.

Sure my flash fiction pieces and drabbles still allow me to express my inner writer that loves stories where things go bump in the night, but when it comes to publishing I haven’t brought any of these stories to light. The closest I’ve brought myself has been a Y.A. Psychological Thriller I started back when I was in high school.

Maybe one day I’ll find the courage to convince myself that the world will read a horror book that’s not written by Stephen King… even if it is written by a Barbara King

Well, that’s my story.

Thank you for coming long for the journey and showing your support.

With love,

B.K. xo

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