2003-06-05T10:58:00.000-07:00

Remember The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe? I read all those C.S. Lewis books, and loved every one of them. I remember distinctly how bereft I felt when I'd finished the last book in the series. It was like a piece of my inner world was being blocked off or destroyed, lost forever. Maybe my writing fantasy and dark fiction is an attempt to reclaim that almost mystical, shamanic feeling those books created for me. But what was so compelling about those books when I was nine years old?

I think I liked the idea of the hidden world, but I also liked the notion of children doing heroic things and having power over their decisions and actions. Although as a child I didn't immediately connect Aslan's resurrection with Christ's, I'm sure I made the connection unconsciously, so The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe probably bolstered my fledgling faith in Christianity. Over the years, I've become cynical about organized religion, but the "Holy Spirit" and the basic message of Christ still hold meaning for me, even though I'd consider myself an agnostic at best.

In reading fiction, it can be argued that you participate in a fantasy world constructed by one person's psyche; but in writing fiction, at least when you're in a state of flow, the words and images and characters seem as though they're coming from outside you, somehow, or at least from BEYOND you, that you're in fact participating in something larger than yourself. Maybe then we write to affirm that there is something within us and around us that matters deeply, but can never be fully articulated or understood in a rational way. Yet we know it exists because we experience it directly, and we manifest it, although imperfectly, on paper, in words. And maybe readers, when they really connect with a book, have that some intuition? I certainly believed in Narnia when I was nine. Perhaps I still do.

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Writing Dark Fiction