Flex Like Carrie

For this Halloween, I'd like to celebrate how I became a writer. It was mid-2001, and I was a 13-year-old high school freshman. Unknowingly suffering from depression from near-constant school bullying since age 5, art was my release. But besides drawing for leisure, I was in love with reading. I was also a budding writer at the time. I didn't know it back then because I didn't know that it was actually difficult for some people to express themselves in writing when, in my mind, all I really have to do is use proper grammar, mind my spelling, and use slang with care, and adopt minimal profanity. I was an avid reader, and I might have read most literary classics if it weren't for my depression draining me of energy and enthusiasm for doing the things that I love.

This makes me extremely thankful for a friend of mine for recommending Carrie by Stephen King to me. I was unfamiliar with Stephen King at the time, and until Carrie, the only novels I've read were the Harry Potter books. So, Carrie was a refreshing read for me. The false document style of the novel was ingenious work, quite an achievement for somebody's first novel. Most importantly, as someone who was made to be a social outcast at school, Carrie White was my hero. Reading about how she destroyed the prom and almost everyone there gave me the most satisfying feeling. The prom scene from the 1976 adaptation starring Sissy Spacek did not quite do it justice. 37 years of technological advancement in filmmaking did the trick. When I watched the 2013 adaptation starring Chloe Moretz (who also looked like Carrie from the book), the experience was exactly how I read the book.



Watching this brings me back to that day in the library when I read this scene from the book and just felt so exhilarated that I had to write my "version." Instead, I got a better idea: I wrote an entirely different novel around the idea of a bullied schoolgirl with a supernatural ability. I will not disclose any more details about my novel. The point is that Stephen King's Carrie introduced me to a genre that I love. Beyond just horror, he adopts a degree of magical realism and combines horror elements with prolific storytelling inspired from Alfred Hitchcock and film adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe's works. Stephen King's novels and adaptations of his works don't need many Jump Scares, if any at all. Carrie and The Shining are two of the most effective horror movies where the scare is entirely in the storytelling.

I might not be able to move objects with my mind, but I can write stories well. And perhaps, like Stephen King, I can inspire others, too.