I like to kill people and as of this moment, I have killed eleven of them. Not real ones of course, but fictional ones. I don’t know that I would enjoy murdering a real person. I don’t think I would be very good at it for one thing, and for another, it just seems too messy… but give me paper, a pen and a storyline, and it’s all I can do to let anyone get off of the page alive.
I don’t know what it says about my psyche, that I so enjoy murdering make-believe people. Believe it or not, I don’t have any unusual fixations with death or violence, but it would be interesting to see what a psychologist might say about it. My best personal guess is that it derives from a childhood spent watching horror movies and reading gory books. Then again, I have to wonder what drew me to that kind of story in the first place~ so it becomes a kind of what came first, The chicken or the egg? ordeal. I don’t know the answer to that, and for the most part, I’ve given up trying to figure it out, but sometimes, something makes you stop and wonder why you are the way you are.
I was at a writing event with my friend Joe a few weeks ago, and as we introduced ourselves, we were asked, “So, what do you write?” Joe’s answer was quick and confident, but when I was asked the same question, I hesitated. “Ummm… horror, I guess,” was my answer. This awarded me some chuckles and some confused looks. “I don’t ever set out to write horror,” I said, explaining myself, “but that’s just the direction it always seems to go.” They nodded their heads in understanding and I realized I was among others who understood the strange phenomenon of fiction writing; that I was home so to speak, and it made me wonder how much of what we write is a conscious decision and how much of it just is what it is.
Although I knew that the project I am currently working on with Kim Williams-Justesen was going to be horror from the beginning, I still didn’t expect it to be quite so gruesome. And as for the one I wrote before it, I had no intention of it going so dark. It will be interesting to see what shape my next project takes on as I don’t see any way it could possibly fall under the horror genre. Still, I somehow get the feeling that a little bit of that will creep into the story, with or without my consent. The question then is, do I allow nature to run its course, or do I steer the story in a milder direction? Is horror just a part of my writing voice that I need to accept, or is it something I need to learn to control? And is that even possible? Again, I don’t know the answer to those questions, but I will soon find out.
In the meantime, I’m having a hell of a good time shedding fictitious blood by the bucketfuls and will be sad when my current project, where murder and violence are expected, is finished. To me, there is true art in (fictional) murder, and everything from the shower scene in Psycho to the contemporary and far more complex murders in the Saw movies, make it clear to me that I am not the only one who feels this way.
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Well now ya got me wondering what a shrink would say about me and my literary as well cinematic blood lust. I will add that to the list of things to panick about when I have time. The truth is, a good murder is creative, it’s a work of art in itself, and it feels good to be bad.
The interesting thing to me is that knowing who you really are, this type of writing seems so contradictory to your personality – and yet, you do it so frighteningly well! You make me nervous with the the precision with which you can execute a character! But as I have often had to tell my family – “I write fiction.” Of course, I’ve also learned that doesn’t always calm people’s fears!
I am praying that your books get published, I can hardly wait to read them.
Actually, it’s considered a form of valid therapy….it’s like anything else, though–are you just exploring the gruesome art of mixing in murder and forensics like people smear dabs of color together to see what effects they can create in addition to the colors or are you building a new preoccupation? There can be a fine line between things, like fetish and obsession, that all is a matter of how well we master ourselves even when there aren’t other people in the equation. The problem with serial killers is that they have become megalomaniacs, elevating the boundaries of themselves farther out into the world, so that they see what they do as part of themselves. The mastery of themselves is therefore an illusion, and the blind spots begin to increase. With luck for everyone else, that is what leads them to being caught. What the investigators know, though, is that the frequency of procurings/killings as well as the level of depravity begin to accelerate the longer they remain uncaught. So while it eventually gets hasty or messy enough to make it easier to find them, it also means the agony of knowing how much the suffering is increasing in the meantime.
So I would say as long as you don’t find yourself *only* able to think about horror, that you shouldn’t worry 🙂 All writers/artists do what they do because they are so compelled, and therefore is a huge does of therapy no matter what your reason. Or as some people would say, “Better out than in!” xx
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