The challenges of creating relatable murderers

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https://steemit.com/freewrite/@mariannewest/weekend-freewrite-9-15-2018-part-1-the-first-sentence

I saw this prompt and remembered a story I wanted to write from a long time ago. It's a bit hard to write, though, it requires to get the reader a certain level of intimacy with a whole population. The population, however, can be developed as a character.

The general gist of it is that there is a group of space scavengers who are looking for resources on another planet, but those resources are held by living, sentient beings, much like humans. It's something like space piracy, I guess, but really digging into how despicable the main characters can be.

I don't think I've ever accomplished writing about a despicable character and making the story relatable. There was one I did about a serial killer of children. It was a long time ago, but thankfully all my posts are indexed on Google, so a simple search retrieved it.

The reason why I say that it is a very hard story to write is that usually, in writing, you want a very limited pool of characters. You have to develop one character for a reasonable time, then introduce the next one, and so on. Sometimes you can do two, but I don't think it's very feasible to develop three characters at the same time and have a storyline at the same time. It would be a challenge and I'm sure it can be done, but it's not optimal.

And the idea of having the main character hunt a group of relatable people is challenging because, in theory, stories try to have a limited character pool, whereas the relatability usually comes when you develop each character as a person.

There are a few challenges that I think this story could have:

Making a group relatable

Usually, in order to make a group relatable, writers rely on a common identity, common history, things like:

They were born to the south of the Vima Plains, where there were abundant crops and a small river. Mammals often fought for land and constantly moved, but these bipedals found a permanent environment to grow in comfort and become sentient over the centuries. When they realised that they existed, they called themselves Vima. They grouped themselves in families and protected each other while soft competition emerged for the development of technologies.

The problem is that a very short story cannot often depart from the main description and take the reader into a train of identifiability for a secondary character. It's just not affordable, even when it's the main purpose.

If you've read most of my stories, you'll have noticed that I have not written a story that has more than around 1500 words. These stories are condensed blocks of information. One block. If you depart from your main narration and start another one, there are more blocks. Subordinate blocks are more common in novels.

I have not read traditional short stories, but I don't imagine they do this often either. In fact, I usually get bored when a novel tries to introduce more unrelated characters into the narration.

I would need to think about this for a while because for now, I cannot conceive how to do this. I'll also have to find other writers who have done this and read their works or their opinions on the topic.

Making a serial murderer relatable

I think that it's easy to understand that murderers don't get much empathy from people. Serial killers get death sentences in the US and in many other countries, and maximum sentences in the rest. They are almost always shunned, even if people are also passionate about the research of these "peculiar" minds.

The difference between a "serial killer" in the modern sense of perverted minds that find murder sexually appealing, and the "serial killers" that are pirates, gangsters and the lowest of the criminals, is that the second are inhibited, disassociated, from what they do, and the first ones do it with a passion.

The challenge here would thus be how to make a dissociated person relatable. Dissociation implies that all feelings about a certain matter are blocked or don't have the opportunity to appear. Victims of various crimes often dissociate the events that are happening to them as a form of mental defence. Many victims of crimes describe the events as if they had happened to someone else, as if they were mere spectators.

The same could be said of the most prolific murderers by need. These professions are often filled with people who are later diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (soldiers, cops and gangsters are equally prone to this mental condition), but those who are most successful at it are often those who are completely desensitised, those who are described as sociopaths.

Sociopaths don't see what they do as right or wrong. They do things for a purpose and they can do anything as long as they deem it worthy of their usually bigger egos. The question to answer would then be how to make a narcissistic sociopath emotionally relatable while also emphasising the fact that they are doing something as despicable as committing genocide for a small economic interest.

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This is a scenario I want to write about because it is a very difficult challenge that goes against the norm in contemporary writing. Perhaps it's just a show of post-modernism, but I don't mind the adjectives. I just want to explore the extent of the abilities of words.

It's also my grain of sand in my personal fight against circumstances like the one I described yesterday. When people like this are described, they are romanticised. They would not romanticise themselves.