010/25/2025
Hey, guys!
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what I write and why. In a world where there are so many genre expectations and established tropes, it can be hard to make space for yourself within the large sphere of what has already been written. With so many voices crowding to be heard, I think it’s important to write what means something to you. If you just copy what everyone else is doing, you’re throwing your chances to the wind against all the other stories that sound just like yours. But if you write what connects with you? Not only will your readers feel that genuineness, but chances are, many of them will connect with it, too.
Personally, when I go to write something new and am once again faced with a blank page and the daunting task of finding a new story, I ask myself a simple question: what scares me? For me, I write as a way to process, as a way of interacting with the world around me. And I find that writing about what scares me does two things. For one, it forces me to face those fears and find a new way of looking at and understanding them, and I often find that naming fears takes away some of their potency. But secondly, I find that fear is often one of our strongest emotions, and there is always a reason for it. Those hidden roots of fears are where endless potential for rich and tangible stories can be found -- stories grounded in real, raw emotion.
Fears have a way of haunting us. And if something is insistently haunting you, maybe there’s a good reason. Maybe it has a forgotten origin story that needs to be addressed. And what better way to find that story than to write?
So as we indulge in the cold fall months as the dark comes earlier and earlier, take the Halloween season as an opportunity to face the haunting ghosts in the back of your own mind. Write those ghosts. Write those monsters. Write what scares you.
Happy Halloween, and keep writing!