From time to time, I get asked where my ideas for my horror stories come from.  Over and over it’s the same kind of answer: I’m not entirely sure, but it’s somewhere in my head brewing away.

Stephen King put it a lot better in On Writing:

There is no Idea Dump, no Story Central, no Island of Buried Bestsellers; good story ideas seem to come quite literally from nowhere, sailing at you right out of the empty sky: two previously unrelated ideas come together and make something new under the sun.

Yeah, that about sums it up.  And if you haven’t read On Writing, go grab a copy.

When I wrote The Cursed, before it was even called Tenebrous, I had a lot of interesting characters and ideas rattling around in my mind, but couldn’t find that one cohesive thread that tied it all together.

Then, on a dark and slightly chilly November night I was driving home in the country in Tennessee, having moved there only a scant three months before.  A dense fog was settling in across the road, it was pitch dark, and the radio was keeping me company.  I passed by a renovated Civil War mansion complete with slave house and suddenly everything clicked together.  There may have been an actual, audible pop in the car but there was no one else there to verify.

Many of my characters contain nuggets of personalities of people that I have known, including myself.  We write what we know, or at least research enough to bullshit our way through it.  And while I have seen some very tragic and often horrific things in my life, not all of those make it to the page.  They do give me a backdrop, a gauge if you will, for some elements.  Human history is rife with its own horrors that even the best writers on the planet could not match in scale or ferociousness.

I’ve also seen some beautiful and strange things with my own eyes.  Those too are the basis of elements for stories.  If all you write about is killing, blood, and guts, you quickly become like a thirsty man in a desert.

Some people have the impression that horror writers, myself in particular, are devil worshipping fiends that have no respect for life or are emotionless pinheads.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  We’re fairly regular people that just happen to have a profession that brings us some satisfaction as well as notice by others.  We’ve learned to observe things about life that others might miss, much like the stand-up comic making observational humor jokes.

I also watched (and still watch) a ton of movies.  I read as much as I can.  Fiction, non-fiction, technical manuals, wall signs, anything I can get my hands on.  Writers are as much students as they are supposed masters of their craft.  We really don’t know some magical formula or have a secret handshake for our monthly clubhouse meetings.

Although a secret handshake would be cool.