DL Richardson on writing YA paranormal fiction

I’m your average good triumphs over evil kind of person. Growing up my favourite books were fairy tales. Brothers Grimm in particular. Rapunzel. Rumpelstiltskin. Stories of bad things happening to good people, only with the happy ending we are deprived of in reality.

In fairy tales, it was always a witch or a monster who was the bad guy. I grew up believing that humans were good and monsters were bad. I never stopped believing in monsters, but I did stop believing they were always the bad guy.

There was never any money growing up so most of the books I read were from the library. When I started earning an income one of the first books I bought was a Dean Koontz novel, “Funhouse” I think it was. This is when I fell in love with horror fiction. Books by Dean Koontz, Stephen King, and Anne Rice began to line my shelves. I was seventeen and pissed off at the world. In the real world, bad things happened to good people and there was no such thing as a happy ending. There was no good triumphing over evil. Justice was Evil’s bitch.

(Note to reader:  picture not of actual house grew up in, just house wish did grow up in as looks more interesting than childhood home)

The world was rotten. I escaped into the world of fiction. I especially loved doomsday books where humanity wiped itself out. If I could have met anybody in my life back then it would have been Stephen King. He was good at wiping the human race off the face of the planet (“The Stand”, “Cell”).  I used to dream that Stephen and I would sit on the top of a hill and watch the world come to an end.

Probably explains why the first novels I ever wrote were horror. The story lines were good (I’m currently reworking one at the moment). But the writing wasn’t. Thank god none of these books were published because reading them today, they weren’t just horror, they were horrorble. lol.

When I really got serious about writing a few years (okay it’s more like ten) ago, the advice I kept hearing was “write what you know”. I thought, I’m a woman who’s not so pissed off at the world anymore, maybe I can write chick-lit. My writing improved but I knew deep down if these books got published I’d have to write a genre I didn’t love.

The advice shouldn’t be “write what you know”, it should be “write what you love”.

So I returned to writing horror fiction. Only now I write for a younger audience though I’m not ruling out writing horror for adults. I hope I can spook you into joining me.

D L Richardson