Horror —n: an overwhelming and painful feeling caused by something frightfully shocking, terrifying, or revolting; a shuddering fear.
Who were the first Black horror writers in a country that made enslaved Africans’ everyday life horrific? How did stories develop and what were their themes? I wanted to write this because of my own curiosity. I didn’t know where this was going to lead me but the more I dug the more I found. The yellow brick road of discovery took me away from the land of published authors to places unexpected.
What inspired you to start writing?
This is always a difficult question to answer because I have always loved writing. My imagination was always running wild and growing up, rather than paying attention to lessons in class, I was writing stories in the middle of my notebooks. I used to look forward to doing creative writing with spelling words in elementary school. But my inspiration for starting to take writing seriously was in high school. I had a teacher, Mr. Dolan, who was always encouraging me to tell my stories. One open school night he told my parents “Your son is a writer and is really good at it. You should help him nurture that talent because he can go far with it.” He was one of those teachers who always believed in what I could do. I had told my parents I wanted to be a writer, and they weren’t a hundred percent behind it as a profession with my father saying that I had to be good at the craft to make it. That was before Mr. Dolan told him this news. And until I heard Mr. Dolan say this, I thought about finding something else to pursue. But he confirmed that small belief I had in myself, and it inspired me to go forward with it.
What inspired you to start writing?
Pain, uncertainty, and hope. Honestly, I was a naive child, filled with joy at the thought of meeting another face. But when homelessness found my family in the South Bronx, I quickly learned that people weren’t always safe. Being exposed to ‘American history’ in school further revealed what it meant to be Black in this country, a trauma, in my view, that demands mental health support, like counseling, in schools. These harsh realities made me dream of a better world. I found that place within the pages of books, the ink of a pen, and the boundless depths of my own imagination.
The worldview of horror writers, editors, screenwriters, etc. population is a plethora of different groups. The definition of groups within a demographic is large and multi-faceted. One thing horror creators have in common is they want their work to generate a sense of fear or discomfort in the reader or viewer. This work is influenced by the experiences of the group in the world and their individual lives. Each creator’s work is flavored by the disturbing aspects of their life and the world around them. The HWA runs a monthly series each year highlighting horror writers and editors, etc. from different marginalized groups.
What inspired you to start writing?
To be honest, it was a group of alley cats. Even before I could write, I’d literally scribble and loopity-loop in a composition notebook about the cat families I saw outside from my window. The way I portrayed their stray lives was often like an anthropomorphized telenovela and I remember being frustrated when no one could read what I’d written.
What inspired you to start writing?
I was inspired to start writing because of the ghost stories I would hear as a kid, in particular, La Llorona; they sparked my imagination. I made up worlds in my mind and found myself lost in them—still am most days. Then one day, I decided to bring these worlds to life by actually putting them down on paper.
What inspired you to start writing?
For a long time, I wanted to be a comic book writer/creator. I wrote various stories in the comic book medium. Unfortunately, the search for an artist/collaborator was a difficult task. After quite some time of fruitless searches, I did some deep soul-searching and made the jump to writing genre fiction where I had no one but myself to rely on. It has turned out to be the best decision I could have ever made for my creativity.
What inspired you to start writing?
It was a combination of two things: reading, and my day job. After I started working full-time, I developed the terrible habit of not reading anything longer than a magazine article. Then, per my mother’s recommendation – which is odd, considering how not into horror she is – I picked up The Books of Blood, short story collections by Clive Barker, those slim American paperback editions with the monstrous faces on them. The stories The Midnight Meat Train, The Forbidden, and In the Hills, the Cities tore a hole in my brain. I could barely believe people could write such things. I became a lifelong fan of his work. Meanwhile, my career took me in the direction of audio production for TV, movies, and video games. If you combine high-concept short-form story ideas and my fascination with sound, you get the lion’s share of my fiction.
What inspired you to start writing?
I’ve always been a voracious reader, and I dabbled a bit in high school with a creative writing class, but I never really considered tackling anything substantial until I went through a bout of major depression that left me grasping for anything that could bring a bit of relief. Writing did that for me. I began with free writing, choosing a word at random and scribbling everything that came to my mind without stopping or correcting myself for five minutes. I’d then try to transform the themes I spilled on the page into poetry. It was purely therapeutic at first, but as I started filling notebooks, I began sending some poems out to a variety of journals and e-zines. Surprisingly, editors liked them. It all kind of spiraled from there.
What inspired you to start writing?
What actually inspired me to start writing was my sister. She has two children’s books out. One is called, I’m Hungry but No Bugs, Please, and Hello, Pretty Cloud, both available on Amazon. She was trying to write her first horror book and asked for my help. I gave her advice and helped with the editing. She asked me why I had never tried to write a book myself. She knows how much I love to read. I couldn’t believe I’d never thought of trying this before. I was also about to undergo major surgery and would have weeks of recovery time. I used that time to start brainstorming plot ideas. I instantly fell in love with writing and have been making time for it ever since.
What inspired you to start writing?,/p>
My parents are avid readers, so they instilled that in me from an early age. We always had lots of books in the house, and they would often read to me. Trips to the public library were frequent, and something I very much enjoyed. By age five I asked where books and stories came from, and my mother explained that there were these people called “writers” who created stories in their imaginations and wrote them down for other people to read. I knew instantly that this was what I wanted to do with my life.
What inspired you to start writing?
When I was 12, I became addicted to John Le Carré’s novels. At that age, I had read everything because at home my parents didn’t censor my reading. I read Flaubert, García Márquez, Zola, and Homer, terrifying stories about the Tower of London, and comics about Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and Snoopy. And all this mishmash of heterogeneous readings added to Le Carré’s novels, created in me the need to write a spy novel that mixed suicidal women, walled-up children, incestuous relationships, and of course, a political crisis. I read it to my friends at school who didn’t pay much attention to me and I think the manuscript, which was in several ring-bound notebooks, was lost during a move.
What inspired you to start writing?
I started writing fiction around my junior year of high school. Unlike many of my writing peers, I hadn’t grown up doing it, nor was I much of a reader. I was dyslexic and gravitated more toward visual media: comics, shows, and movies. Oh, so many movies. I didn’t have a ton of adult supervision growing up, so I saw Alien and The Exorcist when I was six or seven—having one parent hospitalized due to lung cancer while the other tends to them will do that to ya.
What inspired you to start writing?
I have been writing since I was a kid, but it wasn’t until I went to Acting School in New York that I had to write a one-act play. That assignment focused on how to create compelling characters and situations, and how to tell a story. Years later, play/scriptwriting shifted to short horror stories for anthologies.
