Tag: murder

Writing exercise #18 – Filling pages

~ janeishly ~ Leave a comment

On the dangers of telling someone to write what they know….

I do it dutifully, every night, and in the morning. I fill my pages as I’ve been told.

“It’s very useful. It’ll loosen you up, help you flex your writer’s muscles”, says Ken, my writing tutor, and everyone else in the class always seems to be fine with this. One of them has already had a story published, for God’s sake, that she first wrote during her daily pages. “It only took me an hour to write it. I just couldn’t stop once I’d got into the flow”, she simpered. I hate people like her, Sylvia, with her exotic looks (half Chinese, half Spanish or something), and her cute little pink notebooks with cartoon animals on them and her always perfect hair.

In class, when she announced her publication news (in a magazine I’d even heard of too – she didn’t even have the decency to be published in the Wisconsin Monthly Advertiser or something equally obscure) I’d sighed and looked down at my latest attempt to fill pages – three half sheets from one notebook and a piece of kid’s stationery found marking a recipe for meatballs in a second-hand cookery book, all framed by my equally scruffy hands; chewed nails, torn cuticles, scratched from trying to tame the feral cat that lives in the empty house down the street.

My sigh had been so loud that everyone around the table had turned to look at me and I’d had to explain that I was thinking about something else.

“Yes, remember that too folks; inspiration can strike a true writer anywhere, anytime”, trilled our tutor, and everyone laughed at me. I think it was about then I decided to kill him.

Since then I’ve actually had no problem filling my pages. I bought a tidy notebook with elastic to keep it shut when I’m not plotting his demise. Actually I’ve bought two – the ideas just come thick and fast, just like he always said they would. And I’m struck by plot ideas all the time – on the subway, hanging upside down during my pole dancing class, under water in the swimming pool (injection of air into a vein, strangulation, drowning). So I suppose just because a lot of his trite ideas did finally come true I should let him off. But I’m not going to. “Write what you know”, he says, over and over again. Well I want to write a book about a murderer and I don’t know how my character feels as she kills her victim. So he’ll just have to die for his craft.

Writing exercise #7 – Leaves

~ janeishly ~ Leave a comment

The start to another “adultery leads to a murder plot” story. I do know where this one’s going too; the final line is Laura walking down the path from her house to where a large black limo awaits, thinking “Eats, shoots and…”

Laura scooped up the last of her ramen and thought about words. Of course as a translator she was pretty well always thinking about words. Syntax, grammar, lexical shifts, onomatopoeia, grammar, puns, punctuation, grammar…

It was words that had finally made her decide to kill Kenny. No, not those words – although of course she’d been tempted on some level from the very first time he said his name. No, it had been the words he’d used in a text message that had sealed his fate. A text message not even intended for her, but that he had written – thumbed? – in her presence. As though nobody had ever managed to read someone else’s texts were following the movements of their thumbs over the screen.

Not that ‘I luv u’ really needed much deciphering, of course. After that it had been the work of but a moment to log into his mobile phone account; his password was the same for every account he had – “N0ttsFore5t”, which in itself ought to have been warning enough – and find out which number he’d been ringing most often. She’d recognised it instantly. It was probably the number, other than Kenny’s, that she rang most often too. Melissa. That bitch. Her own sister!

It had taken a while to get over that particular discovery, but once she’d recovered her equilibrium it was pretty obvious what she had to do. Kill both of the adulterous bastards, preferably during one of their repulsive fornication sessions.

She’d found it quite easy to get hold of the gun – translators are pretty resourceful when it comes to research – but finding an opportunity to use it so that she wouldn’t immediately be banged up herself had proven more delicate.

Then she started doing regular interpretation gigs for the Tunisian Embassy. Soon she started travelling abroad with the ambassador or various diplomats. And they always travelled on a private jet and they never had their passports checked. Laura just had to pick her trip and she knew she could kill Kenny and Melissa and climb on a plane to Tunisia, a place she’d loved ever since she first visited as a student – and coincidentally a non-extradition country. Once there she’d jump ship and settle back down to continue her peaceful life translating medical leaflets. She reckoned most of her clients wouldn’t even notice she’d moved to another country, still less become a double murderess.