Creativity strikes

I always felt that I didn't have my creativity under control. I guess that's normal to some extent — I suppose most people just can't sit down and be creative on demand. No matter whether it's about writing stories or designing web pages (or writing weblog entries, for that matter), I've never been a person who can create a steady flow of output, it's always been a case of short, intense, and sometimes quite random bursts.

A while ago, I've begun writing short stories again. I hadn't written a single short story during the past ten years or so, and now I suddenly have ideas again, which is not bad at all. They also develop well; they start out with a small idea that just keeps growing into all the details until it's finished. I like it when it works like this.

But then there's this odd thing, and I've had some of my friends lift their eyebrows or voice surprise over this, and it's the fact that I'm writing about things that readers of my previous stuff don't seem to expect, or understand, and that I myself am somewhat surprised about. The first two finished stories are both rather violent — the first one is about thugs, Russian roulette and a rather graphically described attempt at murder, and the second story led one reader to ask me whether I was into S/M, and another to comment on allegedly mysogynist content. I felt this was weird because I don't think it has anything to do with either (quite on the contrary, actually), but I agree that both stories are very different from what I've written before.

The strange thing is when you write stuff like that and realize that you didn't know you had this kind of thing in you, and it's not about positive things like love and happiness and all that, but something infinitely darker. It's like something is writing you, and producing good stories too, but it's a surprise to those readers who thought they knew you and your writing by now, and an even bigger surprise to yourself, as you realise that you yourself thought you knew yourself and your writing by now, but quite obviously didn't.