On writing (alternate: that poor dead horse)

I love to write--as is evidenced by my adorable optimism that anyone's going to read this blog.

More specifically, I love to write because I love to explore.

A lot of my work centers on darker themes--murder, rage, insanity--and as a result I'm often instructed to "write something happy for once, Chez!" But that's the thing: plenty of writers have gone forging through that particular section of the human psyche, where everything turns out alright and nobody gets hurt. There's a lot to like about that line of thinking, too--it's comforting to think that, despite all the rainy days and cancer patients, there's still something in the world that works, right?

But then we have the other side of the mind, metaphorically speaking. People, despite their best instinctive efforts to the contrary, occasionally have thoughts of a rather more crimson nature. In rare, tragic cases, they sometimes act on these impulses, despite years of social conditioning not to kill or hurt people. Whether it's because of rage, or insanity, or something else altogether above my meager comprehension, these people break themselves almost completely down and kill another human being.

Given that I could never do it, this sort of thing astounds me, intrigues me in the same way a coroner might approach a massive car wreck: certainly the subject is horrid, but it's curious how people managed it.

Of course, right up there with murder on my favorite list of subjects is insanity, and not just the go-nuts-with-a-kitchen-knife-and-make-the-wallpaper-red type, either. There's a million kinds of crazy--dementia, schizophrenia, multiple personality disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder, foile a deux, so on--and while a lot of writers make these characters the bad guys, the antagonists and the murderers, I've always thought they made for more interesting narrators, or protagonists. Fight Club, A Clockwork Orange, A Beautiful Mind--all of these movies explore the idea of sociopathic or insane individuals through the individuals themselves, instead of the more clinical study from a third person perspective, and they're more engaging as a result.

Insanity, as a character trait, forces me to look at the world from a different place entirely separate from normal mental vistas--I'm driven to create entirely new systems of logic for my characters (some of which make too much sense, which frightens me) in pursuit of making the psychosis complete and believeable. We don't often get to see this section of the mind in action--a lot of writers shoot more for relatability and realism, and there's nothing wrong with that. These writers will likely be more successful than yours truly--but success has never been the intent with me. It's always been about shining some light on things we don't often talk about, partly out of interest, and partly just because, well, we don't talk about them.

I suppose you could say I'm less interested in beating the dead horse, and more interested in finding out who murdered the poor bastard.