Before I Built the Grimoire - By Sabiha ATTURKHAN

Written By: Sabiha ATTURKHAN

Category: Creative Non-fiction

Competition: Global Poetry and Creative Writing Competition 2026

In her captivating creative non-fiction essay, "Before I Built the Grimoire," Sabiha ATTURKHAN invites readers into a profound exploration of her enduring love for vampires and the transformative journey of crafting a thesis. Presented in the Global Poetry and Creative Writing Competition 2026 by Hashtag Kalakar, this work illuminates the intricate dance between passion and accountability, tracing how an early fascination with the vampire myth evolved into a scholarly pursuit that asked hard questions and sought deeper truths.

About the Work

The essay delves into the complexities of love, myth, and personal growth, weaving an intricate narrative that explores the implications of choosing vampires as a thesis subject. It navigates themes of identity, transformation, and the weight of historical narratives, offering readers a reflective meditation on the intersection of personal passion and academic rigor. Through evocative imagery and introspective prose, Sabiha crafts a narrative that resonates with anyone who has ever questioned or sought to understand the core of their own obsessions.

Before I built the Grimoire

Original Submission by Sabiha ATTURKHAN

BEFORE I BUILT THE GRIMOIRE

A Creative Non-Fiction Essay

by Sabiha Atturkhan

This is an essay about what a thesis does to a love. Not ruin it — that's not what happened. Something closer to making it accountable. I have loved vampires since before I could explain why, the way you love something so early that it feels less like a preference and more like a fact about yourself. For years, that was enough. I read, I was frightened, I closed the book satisfied, and I never asked that love to justify itself. What follows is the record of what happened when I finally had to explain it — and of everything I built once the explaining was done.

Section 1 – The Before

Before there was a thesis, there was only the reaching. I was the kind of reader who went looking for teeth on purpose — who picked up a book because the cover had a throat in it, who watched a series for the one scene where a mouth opened wrong. I don't remember a version of myself that didn't do this. Fantasy first, then mythology, then, without ever consciously deciding it, vampires specifically — over and over, long before I had a word for why.

I had other ideas for the thesis. I remember sitting with them the way you sit with clothes you're not sure fit — a folklore project, something on female archetypes, something safer. I brought them to my professors the way you bring options to someone you trust to tell you the truth. It was in that conversation, not in some private epiphany, that vampires became the subject. My professor didn't discover an obsession I'd been hiding. He simply noticed the one I'd never stopped having, pointed at it, and said: that one.

So the thesis didn't begin as an argument. It began as permission — permission to finally do, with rigour and citations and two years of my life, what I had already been doing for free since I was a child with a library card.

What I didn't expect was how much the rigour would cost.

— ✶ —

I had spent years loving vampires the way you love something you never have to defend — no one asks you to justify a taste, only an argument. Once I chose the subject, that love stopped being entirely private. I had to go looking for where these stories actually came from, and somewhere in those first weeks I realised I would not come back from what I found unchanged.

— ✶ —

Section 2 – The Cost

I had watched Dracula Untold before I opened a single academic text. I remember the feeling it left — not quite sympathy, not quite unease, something in between that I didn't have a word for yet. The film's Vlad is a man who becomes a monster deliberately, out of love, to save the people he is responsible for. He makes a deal with darkness because the alternative is watching his son taken as a hostage, his army destroyed, his country consumed. The horror of the film is not what he does. It is that you understand why.

I carried that feeling into the archive without knowing I was carrying it.

Vlad III of Wallachia was born in 1431 in Transylvania, the son of Vlad II Dracul, a member of the Order of the Dragon, a Christian chivalric order associated with resistance to Ottoman expansion. The name Dracul was tied to the dragon and, over time, also gathered darker associations with the devil; Dracula meant 'son of Dracul'. Vlad's youth was marked by captivity: sent as a hostage to the Ottoman court, he spent years among the people he would later fight. When he returned to Wallachia and took the throne, impalement became one of the brutal methods associated with his rule. Bodies on stakes, arranged to be seen from a distance, became warnings as much as punishments.

The archive does not let you look away. It gives you dates, names, the flat administrative language of atrocity. There is no score swelling underneath. No camera pulling back to make the violence beautiful. There is only the document, and what the document says, and the fact that you have to keep reading.

And yet, I kept thinking about the hostage child. The years spent at the court of the power that would become his enemy, learning its language, customs and ways of thinking — and carrying all of that back across the border into a country he would later rule. The violence of his reign was real. It was also political. Calculated. That did not make it less horrifying, but it made the story harder to flatten into a simple tale of a monster.

The film had reached that complication before I had the language to argue it. Vlad was not misunderstood in the simple sense — not innocent, not redeemed. But the version of him that survives in popular culture was constructed. A historical ruler with a context, a logic and a set of brutal choices became, over time, something larger and darker than the man himself. Gothic storytelling needed monsters; later retellings found one in Vlad. Dead for centuries, he could not object to what the myth made of him.

I lost something in that archive. I gained something too. I lost the ability to receive a monster at face value — to take the fangs and the cape and the castle and not ask what was underneath. I gained the obligation to ask, every time now, who built this, and why, and whose story got flattened to make room for the myth.

— ✶ —

I lost something in that archive, and for a while I thought that was the end of the story — that the cost was simply the price of finally knowing. But loss, it turned out, was only the entry fee. Underneath the history I'd been reading for, I began to notice a structure I hadn't expected: the same handful of powers, granted and paid for in similar ways, across very different stories. I hadn't gone looking for a pattern. The pattern seemed to be waiting under everything I'd already read.

— ✶ —

Section 3 – The Powers

Across the vampire traditions and stories I studied, the same handful of powers kept returning, dressed differently by century and culture: strength beyond human limits, the ability to compel, transformation, and underneath all of them, the one the others seem to circle around — immortality. The refusal to end.

Compulsion appears again and again once you start looking for it — the vampire who cannot enter uninvited, who must be asked in, and who still finds a way to make you want to ask. Strength appears as a kind of quiet violence, restrained until it isn't. Transformation is rarely just a costume change; it often feels like a small death and a small resurrection, the body relearning what it is allowed to be. But all of it — strength, compulsion, the shifting shape — seems to serve the power that matters most. Immortality is not a bonus feature bolted onto the myth. It is the myth.

I understood that one before I could name it. I had always been drawn to the immortal vampire, not because living forever seemed glamorous, but because it seemed true to something — some hunger I recognised without being able to locate it precisely. It was only in the archive that I found an argument for the feeling. Again and again, the vampire myth returned me to the same axis: the terror of death and the equal terror of what it might cost to escape it. The vampire lives forever. The vampire also watches the people it loves die. Those are not separate consequences. They are the same consequence, seen from two angles.

But immortality alone is not what the vampire is really carrying. What the thesis kept returning me to was the weight of the in-between. The vampire is not simply evil. It is not simply good either. It exists in the space where that distinction becomes difficult to maintain — where survival can also be harm, where protecting the people you love can require becoming the thing they should fear. Again and again, the vampire is asked to hold monstrousness and devotion at once, without resolving neatly into one or the other. I came to think that this was not just a narrative accident repeated across stories. It was one of the most human things the vampire myth had to say.

And then there is prophecy — or, more broadly, destiny. In many of the stories I studied, the vampire carries a role that seems to have been written before they understood the terms. They did not choose the bite. They did not choose what the bite would make them. They wake into a life already half-decided and spend the rest of it navigating the gap between what they were told they are and what they actually feel themselves to be: between the monster the world sees and the person still living somewhere underneath it.

I found versions of this pattern again and again: the doomed bloodline, the family curse, the child born under a bad star and raised to fulfil it. Destiny narratives can make violence feel inevitable rather than chosen — if the monster was always going to become a monster, the story does not have to linger quite as long on what made it one. I understood the mechanism. I also understood, uncomfortably, why it still worked on me every time. There is something almost merciful in a story that tells you your worst self was written before you arrived, that you are not fully to blame for the thing you became. It is a lie, mostly. But it helps explain why the myth refuses to die.

If I am honest — and this essay has been asking me to be honest — I recognise all three of these from the inside. Immortality I understand as grief made permanent: I would want the time, and I would pay for it in loss. The tension between good and evil I understand as the negotiation of anyone who has ever had to become something difficult in order to protect something precious. And prophecy — a life half-decided before you arrive in it — I understand the way anyone does who has been told, by circumstance, family or expectation, what they are supposed to be, and then spent years quietly becoming something else. I think of the years I spent being told, gently and not so gently, what a serious course of study looked like, what a safe subject looked like, what a woman with my background was supposed to reach for when she finally got the chance to reach — and how none of it looked like teeth.

That is not a superpower. That is the oldest story we have.

— ✶ —

Gradually, I noticed that I had stopped only taking notes on other people's vampires and had started building my own — a grimoire, a bloodline, a girl who is werewolf and vampire and witch at once. The threshold creatures I was reading about kept refusing to be only one thing, and my own characters began doing the same. I kept giving them the qualities I could not stop thinking about — immortality, the impossible moral position, the destiny they did not choose — and watching what they did with them. Maybe that is the most honest answer I have for why we keep making vampires: not because we want to be them, but because we need somewhere safe to think through what we would give up if we could.

— ✶ —

Section 4 – The Turn

The turn came somewhere in the second year. It wasn't dramatic. I had been writing fanfiction long before the thesis, but at some point the fanfiction stopped feeling separate from the research. It became the place where the research went to keep living after the footnotes ended.

It started small and stayed small for a while — a spell here, a name there, borrowed rules I hadn't yet made my own. Then, slowly, it stopped feeling borrowed. I found myself writing a bloodline with its own logic, its own four hundred years of history, its own grammar of who could carry what and why — and, eventually, a girl who carries three natures at once, none cancelling the others out, all of them true at the same time. I was not decorating my fiction with research anymore. I was thinking with it. The distinction matters more than it sounds like it should: decoration sits on top of a story and can be peeled away without damage. What I was doing by the second year could not be peeled away. The thesis had become load-bearing.

I understood, finally, what I had been reaching for all along. It was not only that these creatures were frightening. It was that they refused the premise of the question — alive or dead, human or not, one thing or the other. I had spent my whole reading life drawn to characters who would not pick a side, without ever asking myself what that said about me.

I think now that I was practising something all those years without knowing it. Every threshold creature I loved — the vampire who is neither living nor dead, the werewolf who is neither human nor beast, the witch who works with forces the ordinary world insists are not real — was quietly teaching me that refusing to resolve into one thing was not a failure of clarity. It could be its own kind of coherence. I still do not have perfect language for why that mattered to me personally, and I am not sure I want it. Some recognitions do their work better when they are left slightly unexamined.

The thesis asked. I still don't have a tidy answer. I'm not sure I want one.

I can point to the moment it stopped being only research and started becoming mine: an afternoon when I was reading about Vlad and thinking again about the film's compact with darkness — the deal its version of him could never make cleanly. I closed the academic text, opened a blank document and started writing her: a girl who carries three natures at once, none cancelling the others out, all of them true simultaneously. Nobody assigned me that. Nobody cited it. It simply arrived, the way things sometimes do when two years of reading have finally metabolised into instinct instead of information.

— ✶ —

Conclusion

Here is what those two years left behind: I used to love stories the way you love something you're given. I read, I was moved, I finished the book, put it back on the shelf and waited for the next one to find me. I don't do that anymore. Now, when something moves me, I build on it. I don't just visit the vampire's world; I make my own — grimoires with pack bonds and blood magic, a girl who carries three natures instead of choosing one, a whole architecture resting on ground I spent two years excavating instead of simply walking across.

I defended my thesis in June 2025, online, before a committee that asked good questions. I received my degree without leaving my chair. Somehow, it felt exactly right and completely wrong at the same time.

The love did not disappear. I still go looking for teeth on purpose. What changed is what I do when I find them. I used to be a reader who loved vampires. Now I am a writer who builds with them.

End

Category: Creative Non-Fiction

Author: Sabiha Atturkhan

About the Competition

The Global Poetry and Creative Writing Competition 2026, hosted by Hashtag Kalakar, is a prestigious platform that celebrates the voices of writers and poets from around the world. This competition provides a space for diverse narratives and innovative storytelling, encouraging participants to share their unique perspectives and creative talents. It is an opportunity for writers to engage with a global community and showcase their work to an appreciative audience.

We extend our heartfelt gratitude to Sabiha ATTURKHAN for her insightful contribution, "Before I Built the Grimoire," to the Global Poetry and Creative Writing Competition 2026. Her essay not only enriches our understanding of the vampire myth but also highlights the personal evolution that accompanies rigorous scholarly inquiry. We look forward to seeing how her journey as a writer continues to unfold.

About Hashtag Kalakar

Hashtag Kalakar is a creative platform dedicated to providing artists, writers, singers and other creative talents with opportunities to showcase their work and reach wider audiences through competitions, features and creative initiatives.