True Fiction

When I was a kid, scribbling stories in the margins of old notebooks, my parents would look at me with a mix of amusement and concern. "You haven’t lived enough," they'd say, "to write anything that matters." A little part of me believed them. I mean, what did I know about life beyond the confines of our quiet neighborhood and the occasional summer trip? But the larger, stubborn part of me knew better. Experience wasn’t my only tool—I had a wild imagination, a hunger for knowledge, and endless curiosity. I’d soak up everything around me and spin it into something bigger.

At first, my stories were for kids, colourful and simple, built on the lessons I'd learned from children’s books. But as soon as I got my hands on Stephen King and Jason Dark, things took a darker turn. My taste sharpened, my style grew teeth. Suddenly, I was knee-deep in the world of horror—specifically splatterpunk, the goriest, bloodiest corner of the genre. And let's be real, how does anyone "live" the kind of things that go down in a splatterpunk story? Life experience? No thanks—I had plenty of nightmares and a twisted imagination to pull from.

But eventually, the monsters in my stories got tired. So did I. By the time I hit my twenties, writing about creatures from other worlds felt hollow. I had read everything there was to know about the supernatural, but now it seemed like it was time to write about something closer to home, something more... real. The plan was to craft true horror, the kind that claws at your mind, but instead, I hit a wall—a massive, soul-sucking Writer's Block.

The stories that started to creep out of me were different. They didn’t focus on the horrors lurking in the dark corners of the earth, but on the horrors inside the human mind. That should’ve been thrilling, but I hated every word. It felt too raw, too personal. I became my worst enemy, feeding the block with every self-doubt until I couldn’t stand to write at all.

So I did what any writer would do—I gave up. Gave up on the dream, at least. I found a more “practical” path and enrolled in journalism school. And, as strange as it sounds, that’s when the words came back. Not the fiction at first, but the facts, the real stuff of people’s lives. Reporting in Mauritius gave me an unfiltered view into the everyday struggles of humanity. I realised, with time, that real life was stranger than any fiction I’d ever tried to dream up.

Slowly but surely, I started writing again. Only this time, I wasn’t pulling stories out of thin air. I was using real events, real people, and wrapping them in fiction. The line between truth and imagination blurred so perfectly, even I couldn’t always tell where one ended and the other began.

That’s how I stumbled into what I now call True Fiction. At least two-thirds of the story comes from actual events, the rest is laced with emotions that might be borrowed or wholly invented. But here's the trick: when done right, the reader never knows which parts are real and which are the lies. Sometimes I’ve managed to convince them that my made-up world was more real than the truth, and that’s the real thrill. What I love most is hearing their guesses. They tell me what they think was true, and why. Spoiler: they’re usually wrong.

That’s the beauty of True Fiction—it makes you question the line between life and story, and just maybe, realise there isn’t one.

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Yes, Murder at Midnight is based on true events, it is a "True Fiction"-Story.

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