So You’re Considering Writing About the Violent Murder (Which You Commit) of a Somewhat-Well-Known Online Personality Who May or May Not Fit The Definition of a “Public Figure”
Hello! As writers, everyone is in your position from time to time: you have a great idea for a story, and you’re trying to put it into something that’s thought-provoking and fun to read. In your specific case, what you want to write is about some person on the internet that you dislike, probably a lot, and specifically, you want to write about them being murdered, and even more specifically, write about how you are the person who is murdering them.
As you probably already know: it’s a tricky topic! You could end up retreading territory already gone over by many other writers; you could also get thrown in jail for publicly posting a death threat. You’re going to wish you had better-monetized those “claps” when you’re working in the cafeteria for $0.50 an hour! Also, it’s illegal to make money from anything you write that ends up being criminal. So really a lose-lose, that prison thing.
Let’s go over some ideas for how to avoid any narrative or criminal pitfalls:
1. Make it ambiguous who you’re fantasizing about murdering
In Geoffrey Household’s classic 1939 thriller “Rogue Male,” the protagonist is trying to escape after attempting to assassinate Hitler. But Household, brilliant writer that he is, left the target unnamed in the text: then, as now, implying that Hitler is bad is a controversial stance.
You can use this technique to keep your readers guessing and speculating. It can be more powerful to let them fill in the gaps. For example, if you write:
“I then shot in the head the lead designer of the latest World of Warcraft expansion, because it was boring and I wasted a month on it.”
…that soon-to-be-dead guy could be anyone. Don’t just use your imagination…. use your reader’s, too.
2. Move the perspective to third person
What’s the difference between “I want to fuck my students” and “the greying middle-aged professor wanted to fuck his students”? The first one is a creepy confession; the second one is the bulk of serious contemporary literature. It’s not you that should commit this disgusting (though perhaps justified?) murder, it’s a richly-defined character that you describe as being just like yourself.
Even better, the change to an omniscient narrator allows you to write the dying thoughts of your target. For example, when “someone” kills someone else:
“Oh heavens, it’s a shame that throughout my life, I have just sucked so very bad. I definitely deserve all the things this handsome and justified character that is not the author is doing to me.”
The “victim’s” dying statement made sense to his killer at that moment: without his editor that he hired and overproduced talk-radio-style audio that sounds like shit anyway, his words aren’t even very good in the first place and he never really deserved all that Patreon money.
That’s called worldbuilding, folks.
3. What if it didn’t happen?
Saying that things happened is an outdated way to tell a story. Instead, just slightly imply that certain aspects might have happened… or did they? Maybe this story about murdering some guy is really about the fallibility of memory, like Memento, or maybe you’ll trick people into enjoying an incomprehensible mess, like Primer. How can you get arrested for threatening murder, when maybe no murder happened in your “threat?” You can’t, probably.
If you decide to ignore my advice and make it a first-person story, make sure to include an unreliable narrator. This is easy to establish early on, before the action even kicks in:
A beautiful woman walks into the room in a shimmering red dress. She walks up beside me at the bar and flirtatiously says, “I sure do love this matte dark blue shirt that I’m wearing, right now, with jeans and no other visible clothes.”
Conclusion: I’m not specifically threatening you.
If, at any point in time, it has seemed like I have made a credible threat against your life, in this or any other piece of my writing, I would like to reassure you that I have not. In those works of fiction, the target was not you getting killed, and it wasn’t me killing you. In fact, in at least one of my unpublished stories, it seems pretty clear that you’re the one trying to murder me, so, we’ll see who gets a few visits from the FBI this time.
