I get this question all the time. People, based upon the messed up stories I write, assume I'm sort sort of psychopath on the verge of going on a kill-crazy rampage. I'm not. Trust me.
Long ago, I came to the conclusion that creativity is a social construct. There is no such thing as creativity. What people think of as creativity is the ability to express one's self after having consumed a shitload of culture... the culture that I consumed to have this awesome power of creativity was almost exclusively comprised of horror and science fiction.
As a young lad, I had parents that allowed me to watch whatever the hell I wanted to watch, as long as there wasn't a bunch of sexual stuff in it. No, boobs didn't count as sexual stuff. Boobs were just part of the female anatomy. I consumed horror movie after horror movie. As I got older, I read every horror book I could get my hands on, which actually wasn't all that much. When I was growing up, horror novels consisted of two people. Koontz and King. I didn't like Koontz, so I read a bunch of Stephen King and a bunch of books I found in my elementary school about movie monsters.
When I got older, and I began to review movies, with the hopes that I would "get rich quick," I began to watch everything, further expanding my horizons and tapping into the world at large. News and media and popular culture fuel my madness as well.
In the end, I became a knowledgeable human being with a fair amount of life experience, some good and some bad. This is the greatest thing you can do to be creative.
So let's take a look at some of the inspiration for some of my works.
Unmade: A Neo-Nihilist Vampire Tale: This was my earliest book. It was about a dude who may or may not have been a vampire. It was inspired by Henry James' "The Turn of the Screw." I wanted to write something that was ambivalent, and I wanted to gross people out. At the time, Twilight was popular, and as a movie reviewer and someone who recognizes crappy fiction when I see it, I wanted to create something that was a literary slap in the face to those abysmal books, and Unmade was born. It's a trifle immature, as I was at the time, but it's good. I look back on it now and wonder who exactly that person was.
This Rotten World: I love zombie movies. Always have, even since I was a little kid. I wrote a zombie screenplay first, wasn't happy with it, and then decided to write my own zombie epic. I wanted it to be like my favorite book, The Stand, so it was always planned to be long and epic. I had also just seen the beginning of The Walking Dead TV series, which I found to be a total cop out. We miss out on the world dying... and to me, that's the most interesting part of the whole zombie thing. This Rotten World was my response to that rotten storytelling they did in the first season of The Walking Dead. That's not storytelling... This Rotten World... now that's a story.
The Enemies of Our Ancestors: Initially, I was planning to write a story about some evil scarecrows. As I was thinking about their backstories, I stumbled across an image of an abandoned Native American village built into the side of a cliff. I decided to ditch my modern setting, and write about the story of how that village came abandoned. This is probably the most unique of my stories, and while I'm sure many of the twisted creatures in the story come from somewhere, I'm not quite sure where.
The Abbey: This one is built upon a very vivid nightmare I had in my twenties. In that nightmare, there was a creature with a face that never stopped moving, so I couldn't see its face. When it stopped moving, and I saw its face, every bone in my body broke, and I became a pile of broken bones and skin... it stuck with me, and I crafted the story of an old abbey filled with an ancient evil. Now, the end of that story is pure WTF material. I have no idea where it came from, but I love it as well.
As I finish writing my thoughts, I realize that something has happened. There are creative elements in my stories that I can't quite explain. Does that mean that somewhere inside me is a magical "creativity" gene? I'm not quite sure. I still feel as if that creativity was induced by the life around me, the things I was exposed to, but the connections are as mystifying as the idea of thought itself.
Anyway, here is my recipe for crafting a creative child:
Step 1: Don't shelter them from the world.
Step 2: Don't be that "We don't watch TV or listen to contemporary music" family. This stifles creativity and makes your child a social freak.
Step 3: Take them places with lots of history, exposing them to the idea that everything has a story and allowing them to fill in the blanks.
Step 4: Drown them in creative works, books, movies, music, art. The more they experience, the more they will want to create.
Step 5: Don't limit them. Never say they can't do something. Encourage them to try and fail, and when they fail, give them a hint or two about what they could have done better.
Step 6: Scare the hell out of them every now and then. A terrified child is a well-rounded child. One that knows about fear, as well as your more typical emotions, is better able to understand the human condition, thus preventing a bunch of stories and art about invulnerable hero archetypes. We have enough of those, and the people that follow that stuff need to know that they are fragile, not special, and capable of dying at any time. If we all accepted our own mortality, the world would be a better place. You're going to die. Your child is going to die. The sooner they realize that, the sooner they'll want to leave their mark.
Step 7: Don't forget to feed, water, and clothe your child.
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