RSSI Like To Kill People
May 31, 2012
kosmo - See all 763 of my articles
I kill people. I do it for pleasure. Rarely does a month go by without me killing someone. Often, I’ll kill several people in the course of a single day. My weapon of choice is a knife, due to the up close nature. When I use a gun, it’s always a Glock. Sometimes I’ll use other methods to kill.
I’m not a violent person. The killing I do is within the pages of my fiction. I first create characters, and then kill them off with just a few clickety clacks of my keyboard. I’ll admit that I love writing murder scenes, and I think I’m pretty good at it. An acquaintance once told me that a story of mine gave him a bona fide nightmare. How great of a compliment – a story of mine actually made its way into his subconscious, where it waited for the opportune moment to scare the hell out of him.
In “real life” I’m a pretty mild mannered person. I could never exhibit the type of brutality that some of my characters do, nor could I cut someone’s life short by plunging a knife into their heart. When people learn that I write pretty violent crime fiction in my spare time, it often comes as a shock.
When I’m in a particularly mischievous mood, I comment that the murderous energy must come out of me in one of two ways – words or actions. I choose words, simply to avoid the bloodshed.
My thought is that every person has a dark side. At some point, the energy from the dark side needs to be releases, or it will build up into a violent climax. My stories give my dark side a place to come out and play. The dark side can maim and kill, without causing any damage to the “real world”
The Oracle of Key West, Jimmy Buffett, once said “Therapy is extremely expensive. Popping bubble wrap is radically cheap.” Like bubble, writing is a very cheap way to exorcise some internal demos. It costs almost nothing to start. Grab a pen and and a sheet of paper, and you’re good to go.