Clinical insight,
Dark fiction

Working as a therapist is an advantage for a writer of dark fiction, because it gives me a deep well of human experience to draw from. And since my methodology is Applied Strategic Therapy, I would often see clients for just a few sessions, which meant I got to witness a wide variety of human struggles and stories in a condensed timeframe.

But it also comes with challenges. I’ve found that writing about the human psyche can be a double-edged sword: it enriches my storytelling, but it can also blur the lines between my professional and creative lives. I’m always navigating that balance, striving to create compelling narratives while respecting the confidentiality and ethics of my therapeutic work.

I wrote my first story in 1985, right after reading Huckleberry Finn. My nine-year-old brain produced a nearly identical Tom Sawyer character who had an older friend. Original, I know.

At fifteen, I discovered that girls liked boys who played guitar. So I picked one up and wrote a song to impress a girl I had a crush on. It worked. She became my girlfriend. From then on, songwriting was my thing.

The habit stuck.

Somewhere along the way, writing stopped being something I did and became the way I think. I never owned a TV. Never had social media. Writing was how I entertained myself and how I figured things out.

By day, I work as a psychotherapist, which is just another way of listening for what people aren’t saying. The subtext. The hesitation. The careful selection of words. It leaks into the fiction. I’m less invested in what my characters do than in why they can’t help doing it.

During Covid’s lockdowns, I started digging through old boxes. Notebooks dating back to elementary school. Most of it was cringey and best left buried—the kind of prose that seemed like genius at the time. But I also found gems. Tales and tunes I hadn’t thought about in years, their source and impact rushing back the moment I saw them.

Those are the ones I chose to share with you.

My stories are psychological thrillers about the conflicts we carry inside our heads—ordinary people in extraordinary corners, making choices you’ll second-guess long after the last page. My music is emotional, usually written like a soundtrack to a scene that hasn’t been filmed yet. Sometimes a story starts as a melody, or finds one later, which is why an occasional track appears alongside a novella.

I’m a pantser. If I knew ahead of time how the story was going to unfold, I wouldn’t bother writing it. I write to discover the plot and the characters, to be surprised, sidetracked, and moved. I am simultaneously the author and the first reader.

I like tight, propulsive narratives with no place to hide. Minimal furniture. No secret codes or shadowy cabals. Just people, pressure, and the small decisions that change everything.

I grew up before personal computers were affordable, so I still write my first drafts by hand—always on yellow legal pads with a Pilot Gravity pen. I go through about 50 pads a year. Once the story is solid, I dictate it to the computer for the first “official” second draft.

I chose the pen name S. Ulliel—my mother’s maiden name—to keep a boundary between my clinical work and my fiction, while drawing from the same obsession: the strange, skewed logic that drives people at their worst.

Every book I finish leaves behind three I haven’t started. Every song I record makes me hear two more. I’m not sure if that’s a gift or a condition—but I stopped trying to cure it a long time ago.

Thank you for taking the time to enter my world.

—S. Ulliel