Me vs What lives in the Dark




Most people leave their dangerous tools back at the shop, safely locked away.
What about a fiction writer? Say, someone who writes about nasty little Aliens, zombies, ghosts and ghouls?
Can you detach yourself from your work when night comes? Can you switch off your computer, go to bed in an empty old house and go like … “yeah, everything is hunky-dory, cute rainbows and gentle butterflies… monster and ghost are just business… this is real life… I can safely look into a mirror and my reflection won’t grin back at me while I scream in horror!”
If you write about… the end of the world, you tend to see signs of the forthcoming doom everywhere. If you write about UFOs, bingo – your night sky becomes an E.T. highway at rush hour. If you write about ghosts, even in a comical way, won’t they start walking out of walls and haunt your nights? The wind becomes a spine-chilling complaint. An old cracking painting turns into a gateway for specters to slide into our world and drag you back into their realm of terror.
The problem with ghosts, trust me, is not if you believe in them or not. No matter how irrational ghost fear seems during daylight, at night the argument for their existence sounds more like… ‘WHAT WAS THAT FREAKING NOISE DOWNSTAIRS!?”
Once, a teacher in creative writing told me to be careful when you write fiction. He said writers get haunted by their stories. When I told him mine will be about demons, exorcisms, and what’s undead in general, he told me “good luck with sleeping!” Now that I’m writing this post trying not to look away from my computer screen in case something white and dead is actually staring at me from the darkest corner of this creepy bedroom, I’m convinced he was right.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ateliers d’écriture : «Cette envie de créer une histoire, c’est magique» (à lire sur Libération.fr)

Image
(Image Rudy Spiessert/Libération)   Une maîtresse maléfique accompagne ses élèves en voyage scolaire. Au lieu de les amener en Espagne, elle les traîne en enfer pour offrir leurs âmes innocentes à Lucifer et s’assurer ainsi un statut de VIP auprès du Prince des Ténèbres. Elle échoue grâce à un enfant muet, timide et discret, qui s’avère posséder des pouvoirs extrasensoriels et suffisamment de courage pour sauver ses camarades et les ramener dans les bras de leurs parents. N’ayant plus d’âmes à offrir pour payer son séjour dans l’au-delà, notre maîtresse est condamnée par le diable à se faire cuire dans des chaudrons bouillants touillés par des démons, et ce jusqu’à la fin des temps. Ce pourrait être le résumé d’un cauchemar de Stephen King ou les prémisses d’une histoire d’horreur pour un recueil de nouvelles fantastiques. Il s’agit en réalité de l’histoire imaginée par les CM2 de Mme Arnaud, de l’école élémentaire Antide-Boyer, une classe de 24 élèves âgés de 10 ans à 11 ans, qui, en
Read more

I want a love like Gomez and Morticia

Image
My initial dream was so 80s. I wanted to be the class clown for a while, dress weird - mainly in black -, paint my eyes and nails, and then, go out there into the world and meet a monster that would have loved me and that I would have loved back.  We would have exchanged blood, snakes, scratches and bites. She would have called me her favorite abomination. I would have called her my worst nightmare and I would have totally French kissed her under a full moon. We would have got married in a crypt somewhere in Paris on an Halloween Night surrounded by horrendous goons - and then, we would have walked the streets to find an abandoned Manor where we would have lived together until flesh rotted off our bones. Oh. And also, we would have procreated. We would have bred a flock of abnormalities that we would have named and loved no matter how many legs they had. I wanted at least two girls and a Cyclops. We would have been this super sexy dark couple totally into each
Read more