Framing People for Murder: Another Perk of Creative Writing

Greetings, happy hobby slayers! Got your binders of bodies ready? Great! In this third writing guide, we'll be covering your butt and taking you out of the picture. So now the fuzz will stop breathing down your neck about all those dead bodies. In the first writing exercise, I told you to kill people, and you did. (You cad!) In the second writing exercise, I told you to locate the evidence that would lead to you being caught. Now in part three, I show you the real beauty of creative writing. That's right, it's time to shift the blame for your murders to somenone else, allowing you to get away without consequence to kill again and again, and...you get the idea. So in this writing guide, we'll be taking all the blame off of you, and we'll be placing it on a fictional "monster."

Before we begin, if this is the first writing guide of mine that you're reading, this exercise might not be useful if you don't start at part one and work your way up. So, if you're willing to indulge me, search through my articles for Killing People You Don't Like, and Other Benefits of Creative Writing. If you work through parts one and two, you'll have a lot of extra material to work with in this third exercise.

Okay, so let's break this exercise down to find your motivation. Imagine that you have to deliver a witness report to the police. They've uncovered the body, or the witness fingered you. But now you have to make up a killer to throw them off your trail. So, you want to clearly describe the killer you "saw" fleeing from the scene of the crime. Obviously, you'll want to keep your story short, so it is harder to make mistakes when you have to repeat it a few times. But if you get too simple, the cops (AKA: the readers) will get suspicious. So you can't just say, "Some scary dude did it." Your half page description really has to convince the cops that the other guy did it.

The purpose of this exercise is to hone your ability to describe characters, locations, and actions. As with the two previous exercises, you may be tempted to try and explain why your killer vampire was at the grocery store in the first place. But in this exercise, you're moving into the role of the accused killer who is trying to describe the "real killer" to the police. So, what did he or she look like? How was the killer dressed, and which way did they run after they completed the foul deed? Your description won't follow the killer up the street and around the block to his getaway car. Your position in the eyewitness point of view prevents you from following the killer more twenty yards without making your story sound bogus to the cops. For this exercise, you are also remaining in the same point of view, making this a "POV pure" scene. Your main goal for the finished length should be around half a page.

So, what kind of killer is our straw man? Is he a human? If so, what race is he? Is he tall or short? Fat or skinny? What shape is his face, generally speaking? Short hair, long, or bald? What is he wearing? Imagine that a cop is rapid firing these questions at you, and then answer them like you're taking the bad cop routine seriously. Because if you can't convince that cop, then he's going to lock you away for all those people you killed. So really make this description strong and memorable. It all happened so fast, everything was blurry, but you do remember the killer as he fled. Well, of course you remember the killer...hypocrite. But you don't want to face the music, have the book thrown at you, sail up the river, or live through any prison shower clichés, either. And if you do, it's proboably better if we get those freaky fantasies out in a fictional version. In which case, this all counts as therapy, and you owe me $75. I take Paypal, and you can pay at the door on your way out.

Ahem, let's move along, shall we?

If you go with a supernatural creature as your straw man, then you have to pretend that in your fictional world, the cops believe in monsters. So when you say that you saw a vampire, the cops believe you. But, they still want a clear visual description of the vampire. They also want a plausible chain of events from the moment that the body hit the floor to the point of the killer hitting the door.

This kind of exercise is meant to strengthen your ability to describe scenes clearly, while at the same time trimming the number of words you use to convey scenery in an action sequence. By this third exercise, you might be asking how these random exercises can tie into a full book. In theory, you could link together four or five similar death scenes to five solutions, and then link all of those clues back to one killer. Toss is some heroes, a few subplots, and a fight, and soon you've got a novel on your hands.

But the purpose of these exercises isn't to end up with a completed book. Instead, each exercise will hopfully inspire you to work your writing as individual skills. Instead of trying to figure out how to make a novel out of nothing, these exercises help you work on developing bits of a puzzle that you will later be able to assemble into a bigger picture. Once you've strengthened these skills with practice, filling in the blanks between the exercises will be easy for you.

By the end of this series, you should no longer sit down and stare at a blank word processor window with nothing to say. Inspiration will be easier to find, and once you find the "hook" that pulls you into a story, you'll find that these analytical exercises can help you link each scene to the next in credible and emotionally effective ways.

At the conclusion of this third guide, you now have a stack of dead people, another pile of assorted clues, and a set of eyewitness accounts of the killers fleeing the scenes of their crimes. Your ability to describe what you see in a scene should be stronger, so the next writing exercise won't be too challenging. And with that in mind, I hope you'll be coming back again next time for the big fight scene!