Catching Yourself, and the Challenge of Keeping Your Writing Real

In my last how to guide on writing as a hobby, Killing People You Don't Like, and Other Benefits of Creative Writing, I suggested that you should kill everyone who pisses you off in a set of writing exercises. I also advised you to keep those dead people stored in a binder for future reference. If you haven't shown that binder to anyone, you are not in custody yet, and we can move on to another fun writing exercise.

This next challenge will build on those early deaths, so if you haven't done the first writing exercise at least two or three times, this new exercise won't have much to offer you. And really, since the first exercise is killing people in creative ways, you should have fun with the theme for at least four or five times before it starts to get repetitive. But you know what? Five deaths is enough victims to make one novel, so you've already killed enough people to start a book, even if there's no plot or characters to link the victims yet.

In the last writing guide, you should have been killing people without focusing on why. Your real goals at this stage should be who, how, when, and where. You aren't trying to write a novel, but a few paragraphs about someone getting killed. Those exercises probably didn't take you long to complete if you stuck to a half page or less for your death scenes, and you might think many of them stunk because they were just random violence.

Only, they weren't random violence, and your scenes didn't happen in a vacuum. For your next exercise, you're going to write a scene about how the killer got caught.

At the beginning of this exercise, you may feel tempted to write a scene about a tall, handsome detective with a history of drinking problems and a divorce still pending from his sharp-tongued ex-wife, Ima Bish. Stop. That will all come later on. (And we'll discuss your drunk detective again in a future article about why you really shouldn't make up such a terrible walking cliché.) This is just a writing exercise to link a crime to a specific piece of evidence.

If you used my suggestion in the last writing guide, you killed a sacker by suffocating him with a grocery sack. Way to go, Slugger! Now how did you screw up and get caught? For this exercise, you will look at your past death scenes, and you will catch yourself using details from the scenes. In effect, you're building off of what you've already accomplished.

You could write a scene with a cop interviewing a witness who was in line behind your killer. You could write the scene as a medical examiner finds your spittle on the outside of the bag. You can have the detectives watching the security video that recorded the brutal attack. Or maybe one of the guys in line is recording the act on his cell phone, and you can switch the point of view (POV) over to him to tell the scene all over again from a different angle.

You don't have to write about a chase scene, or the arrest, or the following interrogation and confession. You don't need to make your killer uber-cool and too brilliant to catch. In fact, the whole point of this exercise is to look at each random death, and then ask yourself, "Where did I go wrong?"

Don't always go for the most obvious answer either. If you poisoned the coworker who was stealing your lunches, then the obvious answer to catch yourself is that the poison shows up in a toxicology report in the ME's lab.

If you get writer's block, that excuse is good enough, because it's plausible, and readers could easily accept it as a fact. So if you can't come up with anything else, you can write a few paragraphs to describe the collection of the evidence as actions done in the lab by a medical examiner, or you can handle the revelation after the fact as dialogue between your ME and your detective character. But, you might also consider having your detective interview a coworker and get the truth through them. Or, if you wanted to be somewhat silly, you could have the detective notice that half of the poisoned sandwich is still clutched in the victim's hand. It's a chicken sandwich, so the detective rightly suspects fowl play.

As with the exercise before, this kind of analytical writing will serve you well in many different genres. Of course mysteries and horror stories leap to mind immediately, but your science fiction and fantasy stories will probably have some dead bodies in them too. Unless you're planning to write children's stories about cute, harmless woodland critters, these skills can apply to most anything else that you might want to write about.

Let's expand more on this exercise and its goals. For our previous example of the boss who got stabbed with a fountain pen, you can do a scene where a coworker walks in immediately after the act. Then there is no need for evidence or detectives. The killer just gets caught. Easy right? Eh, maybe not.

What you choose to focus on describing in this scene will determine what kind of story you make. If the coworker can only see the blood and the gruesome wound, then you're aiming for horror. You can add lots of details about the coworker's reaction, or you can add details about what they look like, or what the killer looks like. The more details you add, the more you will tend to back away from the body and the wounds. But you have to avoid backing too far away and making the description too ambiguous. You also have to avoid being purple and over-describing the scene, which will drain the sense of tension and energy away from the moment of discovery. If you go past one full 8"X11" page in describing the scene, then you're getting really purple, and you've gone too far. You might want to back up and edit that scene down to a half a page.

Always remember to show your readers what is going on instead of telling them directly. Don't just tell them:

The coworker walked in and saw the killer standing over the body.

This is a summary of a scene, and your finished work should never be just a quick summary like this. Where's the tension and drama? How does anyone connect with a boring sentence like that?

Describe the scene as the door opens, and the coworker walks in. Why were they coming in? Were they arriving to deliver the latest field reports from the sales staff, or was it time for the boss' 3:00 PM diaper change? What is the coworker wearing? Are you, as the killer, still panting? Was the kill clean, or did you get some blood on your shirt? Is the body slumped over to hide the wound, or has the boss been pinned to the seatback by the pen? How damning is the evidence of this scene against you?

Also remember, my examples are only suggestions, so if you came up with a whole bunch of different victims for your binder, my examples in this article might not apply to you. If you have killed a lot of people, this second round of writing exercises might prove to be just as much fun for you as the first ones were.

No matter how many death scenes you've stacked up in your binder, complete a solution for all of your "victims" from the first writing exercise. Then stack your work together in the same binder. Now you can show it to good friends without worrying about the cops. If the cops do show up, just flip to the answers pages and prove how you just write as a hobby. Of course, you could hold off until you've completed a few more exercises before you show your binder to less familiar acquaintances, or to people you've killed in your stories. Before you show it to them, you might want to build up the proof in your favor with a few more execises. So for now, I'll advise you to keep hiding the binder unless you really know someone. I mean, would they kill for you? If they will, then yeah, show them the binder. They're cool.

And that's it for the topic of solving your murders. Tune in next time, when we'll be broaching the sucky topic of describing vampires and other killer-type monster thingies.