Zarina Docken

Question:
I read that you grew up in a haunted house. How has writing "what you know" or writing based on experience affected your creativity/ imagination?

 
Answer:

Growing up in a haunted house becomes a double-edged sword when writing about the paranormal.  It's almost a chicken and egg question in that I honestly don't know if I am obsessed with the subject because of where I lived, or if I was more in tune to where I lived because I was obsessed with the subject and read everything I could find.  Aha!  some people are probably thinking.  The disturbances in your house were really all in your head!  Nice try, but too many guests and one-time visitors had experiences in that house for me to honestly believe that.

 

When I first started writing about this subject, I probably drew a lot on what happened in my house.  That meant things like unexplained noises, cherished objects disappearing for weeks at a time and returning again to be found in the most obvious (and frequently searched places), lights and radios going on by themselves, voices, a baby crying, footsteps.  My house was a veritable cliche for a haunted house, and therefore, to write about it without doctoring it somewhat would have made my stories very cliched and probably quite boring.  So I was forced to take those experiences and change them just a bit.  That was good for the creativity, I suppose.  For example, I would sometimes hear a voice call me by name in my bedroom.  Good.  What could I change that to in my story?  Suppose that voice cried out to the character, not only by name, but in obvious distress, or terror?  Suppose that voice was the same as the voice of someone the character had just seen buried weeks before?  I guess the hauntings I experienced are a good point of departure, but they can't, for the most part, be transferred from life to the page without some work.

 

Did it affect my imagination?  I think that having that sort of thing in my life forced me to be more open minded about all sorts of things across the board. I am not comfortable nay-saying a story told to me as true just because it is outside my own experiences and I can't believe something like that could happen.  I think having lived in that house gave my world view a particular spin that leads me to listen and then think, "Well, why couldn't that have happened?  What law says that something like that does not exist?" So the more I read and write about this subject, the more leads there are to follow.  Doing lots of reading led me not only to the wealth of hauntings existing in this world, but to a whole different slew of other-worldly ideas: thought photography, psychometry, the arts of divination, the world of creatures that exist in a gray area and yet seem to be universal. Why does everyone have vampires, ghosts, and shape shifters?  Why are dragons and mermaids found all over the globe?  And what about Sasquatch/the yetti/the abomidable snowman/the alma?  Why is he in so many countries and on so many continents?  Stories like these put my imagination to flight.

 

I write YA because I like to think that I help readers keep their doors open to possibilities.  Kids are wide-eyed and accepting.  They don't question things like the playmate no one else can see or the fact that Grandma came to visit (even though Grandma passed on some time ago). They don't learn that things like this aren't supposed to be part of the real world until they get much older.  I hope that books written from the sort of world view I have will help these kids reach adulthood without completely closing off to the idea that there are many, many things in this world that have no sane, rational, three-dimensional explanation.