By the time I finish writing my daily quota I find I'm too tired and wrung out to write this blog, so my intention to do a post a day has sadly fallen by the wayside. I may be able to pick it up again later, but at the moment I'll take the pressure off myself and write when I can.
Some things are a lot easier to write than others. All of the creative process of inventing people and situations is draining, but getting into a murderer's head I'm finding particularly exhausting. My natural reaction is to make him 'acceptable', to be a flawed character not a psychotic beast. Finding that middle road, to present his as a man without empathy for his victims and no conscience, yet still be someone human, has been difficult.
There are many shades of
murderer, from the bully whose tactics go wrong, to the child abuser, to
the jealous lover, to the avenger, to the serial killer. My murderer is seeking revenge but
ends up a serial killer. So the problem has been to get him from point
A, his beginning, to point B when he's betrayed, to point C, his first
murder, then to D when he's killing the rest. What psychology does he
need to have to get him there? I'm still struggling with that one, but I
have him growing up during the Cultural Revolution in China, joining the Red Guard as a child and over time being brutalized and de-sensitized, rather like the kids in the Hitler Youth and Khmer Rouge movements. It's hard to get into that mind set
and I've spent a lot of time trying. My imagination can take me so
far but I have to have something within my own experience to draw
upon. For me, that means opening up the dark pockets, finding something appropriate and projecting from there.
I've met a lot of criminals but I've only met one murderer. He was in his early twenties and a 'hit man' up from London. He had just been released from prison - I never asked what he'd been in for - and was in the same bail house as my daughter's friend's boyfriend. The two of them came up for a visit and I treated him the same as any other friend of my daughter. Unfortunately he had undertaken a contract whilst in prison to kill a drug dealer in Redcar, which was about 30 miles away from where I lived. He saw his opportunity to have a base and check out the dealer's movements when the other lad was coming to visit. He was polite, respectful and nothing about him indicated that in a couple of days he would shoot dead a man and his pitbull in broad daylight. He was paid two thousand pounds for the hit.
I've no idea what his past was or how he came to be like that because at the time I was more concerned about my daughter. It was frightening to think that people walk in our midst and we never know what they're capable of. If we did, then people like the Wests, Brady and Hindley would never be able to get away with their crimes for so long. They are the extremes in our society and we're fascinated with them. Enough has been written about them and their crimes for them to have celebrity status and photos make them look demonic, as if they should have a label across their foreheads saying 'I'm a serial killer'. Yet they walked the earth unnoticed for a long time because they looked the same as the rest of us; the demonization came later, after they'd been caught.
I'm still struggling to get inside my murderer's head but as I work on episodes of his past I see glimpses of how he shuts down emotionally. Hopefully that will give me the insights to drive him forward and create a believable character. Right now, I need to get back to him. Till next time.
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