A lot of my piece was influenced by Chris Carter’s Robert Hunter series, which focuses on homicide detective Robert Hunter and his team as they try to catch the serial killers terrorizing Los Angeles. While reading this series I began to wonder what a story would be like if it was written from the killer’s perspective. As I continued reading and various killer’s motivations and methods were expanded on, I expanded on this idea of writing from a murderer’s viewpoint, particularly when I read The Executioner. In the novel, the Executioner kidnaps and murders a select group of people in a very particular way. He uses the thing they fear most to kill them. Originally I planned for my piece to follow this idea of being ‘scared to death’
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Throughout the Robert Hunter series Carter uses very descriptive language and imagery to make the scenes feel real to the reader. For example in the opening chapter of The Executioner, Carter writes ‘”And I really do know what I’m doing. Allow me to demonstrate.’ [The Executioner] stepped on the bone protruding from the victim’s fractured ankle, bent over and quickly fired three nails into the man’s right knee. Intense pain shot up the victim’s leg and sucked the air out of his lungs, blurring his vision for several seconds. The nails were only three inches long. Not long enough to puncture through to the other side, but sharp enough to shatter bone, cartilage and ligaments.’ This shows the amount of detail Carter puts into his writing, from the noise of the victim’s kneecap shattering to the length of the nails shot through them. I attempted to emulate this level of detail in the recounted murder of the doctor, saying ‘I dug the kitchen blade into his abdomen and stabbed my way upwards. Creating a bloody door through pasty skin and muscle. I caught a glimpse of a few ribs in the process, exposing them to the artificial light’. While it is not as shocking and graphic as Carter’s work, I feel as though it bears a strong resemblance to how he …show more content…
A novel which focuses on the struggles of a would-be author and his secret fact that his novel was written by his roommate and stolen upon his accidental death. As I read this novel I found I was drawn more and more to this idea of an author becoming a murderer, and from this I spawned the idea of writing from a murdering author’s perspective, and possible using the murders as inspiration for novel writing. Bridget Jones’ Diary was also a major help in figuring out how I wanted my piece to look. As it was a diary, I wanted it to look as though it had been ‘lived in’ while making it easy for the reader to follow the passage of time. I mimicked Helen Fielding’s style of writing a diary, clearly showing the date, time and location of the
Throughout the Robert Hunter series Carter uses very descriptive language and imagery to make the scenes feel real to the reader. For example in the opening chapter of The Executioner, Carter writes ‘”And I really do know what I’m doing. Allow me to demonstrate.’ [The Executioner] stepped on the bone protruding from the victim’s fractured ankle, bent over and quickly fired three nails into the man’s right knee. Intense pain shot up the victim’s leg and sucked the air out of his lungs, blurring his vision for several seconds. The nails were only three inches long. Not long enough to puncture through to the other side, but sharp enough to shatter bone, cartilage and ligaments.’ This shows the amount of detail Carter puts into his writing, from the noise of the victim’s kneecap shattering to the length of the nails shot through them. I attempted to emulate this level of detail in the recounted murder of the doctor, saying ‘I dug the kitchen blade into his abdomen and stabbed my way upwards. Creating a bloody door through pasty skin and muscle. I caught a glimpse of a few ribs in the process, exposing them to the artificial light’. While it is not as shocking and graphic as Carter’s work, I feel as though it bears a strong resemblance to how he …show more content…
A novel which focuses on the struggles of a would-be author and his secret fact that his novel was written by his roommate and stolen upon his accidental death. As I read this novel I found I was drawn more and more to this idea of an author becoming a murderer, and from this I spawned the idea of writing from a murdering author’s perspective, and possible using the murders as inspiration for novel writing. Bridget Jones’ Diary was also a major help in figuring out how I wanted my piece to look. As it was a diary, I wanted it to look as though it had been ‘lived in’ while making it easy for the reader to follow the passage of time. I mimicked Helen Fielding’s style of writing a diary, clearly showing the date, time and location of the