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AOTW: It's easy to scare other people; jumping out from behind a door, a black rubber spider in a running shoe, the list goes on and on. You have made a living by scaring people who encounter you on a page of print. Do you ever come up with anything so wild that you scare yourself, that leaves you wondering where that came from?
David Searcy: Not scare exactly, nothing that interesting. Dismay perhaps.
Whitley Strieber: It is hard to scare other people. You have to understand the darkness in the human heart to do that. I have had a great deal of absolutely incredible fear in my life, all of my life. I did not come up with the wildest, scariest thing I have ever known. It came to me in the form of my close-encounter experiences. One night I woke up in the middle of one of my own horror stories. It was as if my imagination had turned itself inside out. But, at the same time, traveling the same path, there has been a continuous wonder. I have never known exactly what my encounters were, but I know what they meant for me: horror had become for me a window into the deepest mysteries of the soul and the mind. I was left wondering not just where in the dark my visitors come from and what they are, but more than that, what we human beings really are...
Tananarive Due: I long ago gave up on wondering where anything "comes from" in terms of my strange imagination. I do remember, however, that while I was writing The Between, I often wrote late at night because I had a full-time job as a reporter...and I often sent myself to bed absolutely spooked. After all, I wrote The Between because of my own fears of death, and then I had to live in the head of a character who was literally being chased by death every time he went to sleep. Brrrrr.
Darren Shan: I don't actually scare myself with my imagination --- but I do sometimes worry about where all these dark, gruesome images are coming from!!!
Christopher Schildt: When I go to bed the thing I fear most is the capacity of the fraternity of Homo sapiens, of which I am a member, to do so much evil and harm to one another. What people do in reality is so much worse than what I can come up with in my most hideous nightmares that it leaves me shaken in the morning.
Kelley Armstrong: An idea so wild that I scared myself? Well, after having three kids (including two in the past two years), I'll admit to one terrifying moment of insanity where I actually thought 'you know, four kids wouldn't be so bad.' Fortunately, the moment passed and I'm content with three.
R.L. Stine: I always wonder where every idea comes from. It's such a mysterious process. They seem to appear from out of nowhere (thank goodness!). I've made myself laugh from some ideas --- but I've never scared myself.
Douglas Clegg: I enjoy every scare I encounter in fiction (not in life). So when I'm writing something that feels especially disturbing or unnerving, I definitely enjoy the process. In real life? Can't stand terror. I shut down or go into denial mode. But in fiction and movies? Love it. The scariest thing to me in both fiction and real life is just uncertainty. I never really wonder where things come from in my novels --- I just go with what comes to me.
Ameilia Atwater-Rhodes: Frequently. The summer after my sophomore year in high school (summer, 2000) I wrote what would become the first book in a new series. The characters were more vivid than any I had ever written, and the subject matter darker. After I finished, and even while writing, I frequently thought to myself, "What am I doing? Is this really me writing?"
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