What's Rattling Around in Your Head?

 by Thomas Kies

Back in September, during the two nights that the local community theater troupe performed Death of an Author which was my first foray into playwriting, the emcee kicked off the evening with a monologue.  In her speech to the sold-out crowds, she described the books that I had written. It was germane to the dinner theater since the characters were all based on my Geneva Chase novels.

The first book she described was Random Road where six nude bodies were found hacked to death on an island.  The book also goes on to talk about sex clubs and swingers. 

In the second book, Darkness Lane, Geneva Chase has a brief, tawdry affair with a lascivious actor.  

The third book, Graveyard Bay, is about escaped convicts and dungeons, a dominatrix, and S&M.

By design, I was sitting in a back corner where I could view the performance, eat dinner, and drink a glass of wine.  At the point in time the emcee described the book about a dominatrix and S&M, ladies sitting at a table near me who weren’t familiar with my books were turning and giving me long, curious stares.  

This past Thursday night, I was at one of two holiday parties my wife and I attended, and the wife of one of our community leaders came up to me and told me she had read all of my books, including my latest, Whisper Room, having to do with
an escort service run by women.  She smiled at me and said, “You know, I held out your latest book and told Jim that he should read this. He won’t believe that this all came out of your head.”

I get that a lot, from friends, from clients, from neighbors.  Where on earth does this stuff come from?  Often, they’ll ask my wife, “Aren’t you concerned?”

She simply replies, “I sleep with one eye open.” 

After working for newspapers and magazines for over thirty years, I've seen some strange things, been in some decadent places, and met some scary people. So, I can draw upon that while I’m writing, but more importantly, I draw upon my imagination.  

As writers, the characters that we create might share some characteristics or bear a resemblance to people we know, but they’re figments of our imagination.  That includes the good guys as well as the bad guys.  And let’s be honest, aren’t the villains fun to write? Isn’t it a kick to be evil, even if it’s just on paper, to increase the tension and to the suspense of a story? 

The good guys, the bad guys, the peripheral characters…they're all us, the writers. Writing fiction is about as close to being schizophrenic as you can be, I think. As a writer, don’t you hear voices in your head?  The dialogue is playing out while you’re driving to the grocery store? A plot twist appears when you least expect it like while you’re taking a shower or having breakfast?

Once, a friend of ours, who aslo happened to be a fan, told me, “You think about death a lot.”

Yeah, crime novelists think about death a lot. I think we all have a lot of dark shadows lurking in our heads, rattling around in our skulls.  Mystery novelists just allow those shadows to slither out of our heads and onto a blank sheet of paper.