Why this Mother is Drawn to Writing Killers (duh)
You probably want to know how the mother of triplets and retired literature teacher started writing psycho thrillers.
Or, maybe it’s obvious: after two decades of working with teenagers and six years of parenting triplets, all I think about is murder, right? Well, no.
I see psycho thrillers as a natural extension of my background in classic literature and philosophy. In many ways, by writing them now, I’m going back to the basics, rethinking the Aristotelian methods of storytelling and how they apply to genre works, for example, the reversal. In thrillers, that often means that, to stay alive or solve the mystery, an innocent person (or victim) must become the aggressor, criminal, or even killer, a psychological problem rich with possibility, graying the lines between good and bad, innocent and guilty.
That’s not to say that writing psycho thrillers is plug-and-chug, follow-the-ancient-guide simple. In many ways, crafting empathetic psychopaths and fast, suspenseful plots that don’t feel formulaic has proven more difficult than writing my straight-literary short stories or novels, a challenge I explored in a recent blog post.
So, what does parenting have to do with this genre choice?
Parents and psychopaths might have a few things in common (not reacting is the greatest of all mom-tricks, isn’t it?), but for most people, myself included, psychopaths represent the ultimate Other, a mother archetype’s extreme opposite. They cannot love, they do not evolve, and they cannot feel fear. I find them fascinating.
Psychopath problems are also easier for me to think about than every day ones. Their fictitious stories offer an escape from my sometimes too-real days and tear-inducing essays. Writing them, I step out of my ever-responsible mom role for a bit and don characters who let the world go and never suffer doubt, continuing on their merry, I-own-the-world ways.
I like to think that writing psycho thrillers is a lot like locking oneself in the bathroom and taking a bubble bath, only the bathtub is filled with murders and lots of sticky notes.
Except, now, I’ve moved on to a new challenge, writing an amateur-sleuth mystery, and I’m almost finished with the first draft. Don’t worry: the story still includes a psychopath secondary character, but the main character is a new mother (eek). Yes, scary stuff. More to come on that…