The Abhorrent Things Writers Do In The Dark

Fellow writers, it's time to cleanse the soul. It's time for a confession. Writers sometimes have to do abhorrent, awful, and evil things.

Some will do the unthinkable and share things contrary to the opinions of half the people who might find their work. How dare they? Writers come from all walks of life, not just one side of the tracks.

They all go through the same things. They explore the thoughts and feelings, sensations, passions, sensitivities, and fears.

Enter those who are delving into fictional works, and they are the ones to fear the most. For what goes on in their minds that brings them to the things they put on paper is sometimes horrifying, if not genius. Can you plan out a murder in intricate detail, adding little bits that stump the mind?

What about a savage act of violence? It might be something sadistic, evil, and unthinkable to the imaginations of some. It may be rooted in the horrors of the human imagination. And it might be so horrifying, so deeply disturbing, that it earns you some moniker for your work.

Imagine being called the Midwest poet, or having a work called reminiscent of something great, or being the new master of horror. The moniker would mean you have achieved something profound. But you'd have to get it noticed by the masses, and that's a tough nut to crack.

Even the greats must suffer from the struggles in their minds. Coming up with new and creative ways to fashion a murder mystery, or a horror classic. Mystery writers who delve into murder have a strange job.

They Kill People For A Living

Think about that for a moment. That's an actual part of the job when crafting mysteries.

You need a world for your mystery. It's where all the action unfolds. It's where your characters' lives are anchored. That part isn't the hardest.

To pull people in, the world has to be rich, vibrant, or gritty, and the characters must have lives worth following. Each main character has a story of their own.

But now, you have to explore the darkness, the underbelly of the world. Because murder isn't easy, and some struggle to imagine the rawness of such an act. Motivations are easy, but the carrying out of the act- that's hard. What it does to people who take a life is only truly known by the ones who take lives, or those capable of killing.

To really delve into the mind of writers who create such events, such worlds filled with evils and monsters, killers and true villains, takes a particular kind of person.

Stephen King

Clive Barker

Wes Craven

Dean Koontz

Mary Shelly

Edgar Allan Poe

HP Lovecraft

Anne Rice

Richard Matheson

John Carpenter

What King brought was some of the more mind-boggling works. The anticipation of what was possible in The Shining, the mystery of the bizarre and what it would do to people's humanity in Under the Dome. They were deeply thought out, the psychology explored, and frightening from two different angles.

Think of the works of Bram Stoker, and how the enduring legends grew from his original exploration into the lore of vampires, through his telling of Dracula. The idea endured, and it spawned other such boogeyman-like creatures.

Each explored the unthinkable destruction of humanity, the snuffing out of human life, at the hands of something monstrous. They created stories and worlds, in their minds, that horrified us on paper and then, in theaters.

Writers can delve into an abhorrent, dark, twisted place and plan, and then carry out the most insidious of things.

I realized this as I sat, unable to sleep, struggling with pain, and accompanying darkness, in the middle of the night. My fingers crafting another piece of a story, as one person experiences the unthinkable and struggles with the future that won't be, and another's life is snuffed out by an as yet to be identified suspect, a suspect that only I know.

Delving into the darkness, while it may not be a living as of yet, writing mysteries allows for someone to get into gritty descriptiveness, or artistic deception, that leads to them being able to say...

I Kill People