Getting into the Head of a Serial Killer.

• Author: Weir, R.
• Position: LITERARY SCENE - Fiction writing

AS AN AUTHOR who writes fiction, part of the creative process is coming up with an interesting and riveting storyline for the next book--something that will grab the readers and not let them go until they reach "The End." I, for one, do not outline my books in advance, or even during my writing process, but I do come up with a basic idea, massage it in my mind for many days, and start writing from mere, fleshing out the story wherever it takes me as I type.

For my protagonist, private detective Jarvis Mann, I needed a new case and plotline for the seventh book in the series. He had faced off against lying clients with checkered backgrounds, loan sharks, gangsters, greedy corporations, Russian mobsters, and Chinese government thugs. For my next book, I wanted a new and challenging--in a different way--antagonist, deciding pretty quickly on a serial killer, but before I could develop the story fully, I needed to educate myself about serial killers.

A little background on my novels: my Jarvis Mann PI series is patterned like many of the classic private detectives, with the narrative seen through his eyes, a first-person point of view. When writing, I am Mann. Like an actor, I get into the role and detail all that is going on around my character. I transform into Mann, needing to experience what he experiences--joy, laughter, anger, pain, love, and lust; having him put it all on the line when the situation calls for it, though thankfully those bullets ricocheting around him are not really being fired at me. Still, I need to create the emotion of each moment, live it enough to bring the scene to life for the readers so they can be transported into the drama. I now had to be the detective, much like Mann, and learn all I could, delving into some historical data about these gruesome murderers.

Examining the background of various serial killers is not fun research. Let's be honest--it is soul-sucking. However, to make my story believable, I needed to dig in--time to start investigating and put my private eye fedora on.

With the Internet at our fingertips, using the web for fact-finding can make it simpler. Google is a researcher's friend, but there also is a lot of faulty information out there. With a simple search string "serial killers," Google found more than 3,300,000 results. It would seem a lot of people spent an inordinate amount of time posting to the Internet stuff about them. At the top of the list are several well-known names: The Zodiac...