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An English major with a creative writing emphasis and a Japanese minor, Aiden Williams is the author of “A Real Nice Crackin’ Sound.” His short story will be included in the 2025 fall preview.

What was the inspiration behind A Real Nice Crackin’ Sound?

So, normally, I couldn’t really say very clearly. This piece is a little weird in that I know exactly what the inspiration was. Historically, I’ve written about the American West a lot. I think it’s a very interesting time and an idea of this sort of untamed, craziness to explore. But in the past four years or so, my writing about it has shifted a lot more towards horror, specifically because of a video game called Hunt Showdown, which presents the West as this dark place where all the last evils of the world are being sort of condensed as civilization expands and leaves less room for them to be, and it’s very much shifted how I’ve written about it. That game is set in Louisiana, so the Bayou full of monsters and horrors, and ever since I’ve been playing that for the past few years, I’ve really liked the idea of the West as this condensing space of what was once the nightmares spread around the world being being pulled together into smaller and smaller places. 

Do you find writing about the West through a horror genre difficult or different from just the West in general? 

I’d say it’s a little bit different, yeah. I feel like all of us raised growing up have this thing imprinted on us of, you know, the manifest destiny, you go out there, ignore all the cultural problems of it, this perception of the West as going out and being free away from the prying eyes of the government. You know, all that stuff that I feel like we’re all raised with. And I think writing it more as a horrific space, not only lets you kind of break away from that and examine it more as a space where scary things can happen, where you can more objectively consider the horrors that we tend to ignore when we’re perceiving it as this idealized place. You can talk about how Westward expansion had all these horrible effects on the people who had already lived there. It raises a lot of interesting political opportunities to think about, which obviously is not where this piece veered into. It veered much more into the pure horror, but it definitely involves a lot of breaking away from what you were raised with, I think. 

I was also wondering, why did you choose to write about cannibalism? 

It just came to me. I just thought it was a really fun idea. I was like, I wanted to write this Western horror piece. I didn’t really want to go full supernatural. A lot of the time, I feel like we tend to go towards ghouls and goblins and ghosts. Me personally, a person who is insane is a lot scarier than something that doesn’t exist. And so I just thought, a family eating people in the woods, why not? 

Can you tell me a little about your writing process? 

Normally, the way that I like to write, I find if I try to leave something out over the course of a week or so, I will never get it done. I have to kind of force myself to sit down and just write it all out as much as possible in one chunk. And this was by far the most extreme example of this, I think I’ve ever had. I started writing this piece at around 2 o’clock in the afternoon, and I wrote pretty much nonstop until dinner time, shared it with a couple of friends after dinner, got feedback within the next half hour, and then finished writing it and submitted it by 10. Normally, that is not at all how the timeline goes. Normally I sit down, I write a few pages, and then I stall, and then I come back to it a little bit later, write a few more pages, chide myself for not getting it all done earlier. But this was pretty much the idealized version of how I’d like to write. 

So, would you consider yourself a pantser? Someone that just starts writing and comes up with the ideas as you go? 

Oh, absolutely, yes. Yeah, I have no plan. I typically, I have my idea of like, this is the setting, and then I maybe have like a scene that I want to do later on. Like with this piece, I started with the character running through the woods being chased by the family, and then I had the image of him holding the door, trying to stay awake while people are outside, waiting and laughing at him. And so I knew I was writing to there. I didn’t really know how I was going to get there. I really didn’t know what was going to happen in there, but I knew a spot that I had to kind of work around, and that’s how I tend to write a lot of time. 

How did you get interested in writing in the first place? 

You know, the cliché I have been writing for as long as I remember, but I actually remember the very first thing I ever wrote. My mom is an English teacher, so she had me reading and writing pretty much as early as I could. The first thing I ever wrote was a comic about Star Wars that I had just made for fun. I think it was in first grade or something. And the reason I remember it is because at some point on TV, I had heard people saying au revoir a lot. And so I wrote that in my comic. And my mom was like, “oh, you spelled au revoir right. That’s great.” And I don’t know why that was a core memory, but immediately after I spelled that right, I thought that’s cool. I feel like that was the first time that I ever felt like I had really gotten praised for something that I actually did good. You know, as a kid you get praised all the time for everything. Oh, good job, you did one plus one. But that was the first time I was like, “I actually put effort into a thing and it was great. I want to keep doing this.” 

Do you have a piece that you’re most proud of? 

Honestly, I think it’s probably my first assignment that I did for my intro creative writing classes with Dr. Quinn last year. That was my first time trying to write flash fiction. So I wrote this very conceptual story in two pages called I’d Hate to Inconvenience You, which was kind of parable-like. And it was very out there for me, very different. Before that, I had pretty much only ever written sci-fi/fantasy with very detailed settings and characters and everything. It was very fun to try to render it all down into the two pages and I think it came out really well. 

Do you have any authors or other mediums that inspire your writing? 

Oh, a ton. I mean, I love video game narrative. I think that’s such an interesting medium that we’re only really starting to explore. And in that field, there’s the game director Hidetaka Miyazaki, who is a Japanese game director. He makes games like Dark Souls, Elden Ring, Bloodborne. These games that explore really dark and complex themes in these huge, fantastical settings, they’re full of endless lore. You can study about them for ages and still not understand them, but at the core of them all are ideas about our religion’s place in society and the issues of gender politics in Victorian England. They’re such interesting, specific ideas that he addresses with dragons and ghosts and demons and all sorts of very strange things. He is absolutely my biggest inspiration. 

Do you have any writing aspirations going forward? 

Yeah! This was actually the first time I’ve ever submitted anything for one of these magazines. I think I put a lot more weight on it than I needed to, so now that I know it went okay, I think I’m going to be trying to submit a lot more. I’m hoping to get a few more of these published, and someday, hopefully, write for a video game. That’d be really awesome.