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On the NaNoWriMo forums we find the question: What’s the killer’s motive?
What’s the killer’s motive?
One of my main character’s lives a normal life, but he’s also a killer.
I don’t want his reason for killing to be because he was abused as a kid.
Anyone have any ideas?
This is a very vague question and like several others have already said, we really need to know a detailed background about your character and the plot of your story, and some info about the characters he has killed, before we can actually come to any real conclusions as to why he kills them. If we knew more about him, his situations, and his victims, we could than draw on what we know and try to come to logical conclusions about him.
With the information you have given, all we are able to do is show you examples of reasons which OTHER killers have killed and not reason why YOUR killer has killed. and so that light I will give you three brief summaries of killers I use in my own stories and maybe that will help you to see examples of different reasons why different killers kill.
As for your not wanting it to be because of his childhood, think about this for a moment: Everything you do as an adult, is a result of some event that took place in your childhood.
That said, there are many reasons why a killer would kill.
One reason is that he may have a metal illness – bi-polar, clinical depression, schizophrenia, etc. which causes him to kill others for no real reason at all, other than a chemical imbalance in his brain (which is what a mental illness is – and is different from a birth defect like Autism, Downs Syndrome, etc: a mental illness can be treated with medication, a birth defect can not be treated).
Another reason is that he’s been hurt really bad – beaten by muggers whom the police let off on a technicality, so he took the law into his own hands, for example. Or jilted by his girlfriend who ran off with his best friend, so he killed them both. Or a dad who’s daughter was raped and/or killed tracks down the rapist and kills him. His dog could have been killed in a hit and run so he kills every one who drives the type of car that killed his dog, because he knows eventually he’ll kill the right driver. His wife died of cancer, so he kills her doctor for not saving her. These would be vengeance killings and you could come up with millions of them if you put your mind to it.
Megalomania – always my favorite. Though rather rare in real life, it does make for good fictional killers. Hitler is by far the world’s most famous megalomaniac, closely followed by Napoleon and Moses. Other real life Megalomaniacs have included Vlad Dracule the Impaler, Osama Bin Laden, Brigham Young, the Templar Knights, Jack the Ripper, and The Zodiac Killer. Megalomaniacs have egos the size of Juptier and think they are the right hand of God (or even think they are God made flesh), sent to earth to do God’s will and wipe out all sinners, or to quote Saucy Jack “I’ve come to clean the streets of London”, and Hitler: “The streets are now safe for our woman and children.”
Megalomanicas always go down in history in a really big way, because they go to such outlandish extremes to kill people and kill people by acting out the biggest delusions of grandeur the world has ever seen. These men spoke for God. They boldly claimed to talk to God, hear God’s word and kill in God’s name. They claimed to be making the world a better place by removing all non-believing sinners from it. They took religion fanaticism to new heights and sought out global denomination, crowning themselves as the self-proclaimed leader of the world and set out to building up private armies of religion crazed followers willing to slaughter all non-believers in there name and in the name of God.
In the world of psycho killers, megalomaniacs reign supreme. In the realms of fiction, megalomaniacs are often a bit less religion crazed than their real life counter parts, and can usually be seen running the pages of comic books under the such names as: The Joker, The Green Goblin, Doctor Octopus, ect. They also haunt the sci-fi realms under such names as: Davros, the Daleks, Darth Vader, Emperor Palpatine, etc.
Megalomaniacs kill because they are right and you are wrong and if their brainwashed followers heard your words, they might not want to follow the ego controlled megalomaniac anymore. Megalomania is a very rare and very serious mental illness similar to schizophrenia, big on a much bigger scale. Usually the megalomaniac sees himself as God, the Prophet of God, the One World Leader, or some other hugely overblown delusion of grandeur. The main differance between a megalomanic and a schizophrenic, is the shichophranic stays in his own world of delusions and doesn’t usually start killing people, while the megalomanic tries to pull the whole world into his delusion with him and nearly always kills – often repeatedly – to gain domination and will force his theologies on the rest of the world than kill any one who disagrees with him ideals.
And than another question asks:
But Why Must he Kill them?
Okay, I’m writing a murder mystery and am presently outlineing the plot. The murderer is a serial killer. The people he picks are seemingly at random. I had in mind that he’s some sort of public servant so he has a bunch of files on people and these are the people he’s killing. They are otherwise unconnected and the kind of people who’d never meet.
What I need help with is this: why is he killing? It’s obviously nothing personal, he doesn’t really know them himself. So what reason would someone have for killing people at random, especially those with nothing in common.
My first thought was:
What if he works in court, say he’s the clerk for a judge, so he’s the one who files all the cases and thus would be reading a lot of paperwork about a lot of people from a wide background. And he’s NOT actually picking the cases at random, though it seems that way to every one else.
Now, maybe it’s family court – custody battles, divorce cases, domestic violence, that sort of thing. Maybe all the victims have one thing in common – say they were all accused of abusing their children, or they all are dead beat dads who don’t pay child support, or they are all drunk mothers, or they are all on welfare but are selling their children’s food stamps to buy cigarettes instead.
Now to the outside world, all the killings would look unconnected, but in this guy’s mind, all of these people had one thing in common: they were hurting their children. And the legal system was letting them get away with it, so he took the law into his own hands and killed them to make sure they never hurt their children again.
How does that sound?
So there you have a few assorted reason why killers kill. There are of course others, but I think the ones I mentioned are the easiest to write about. And for farther examples, here are the three summaries of characters in my stories, that I mentioned earlier:
I had a serial killer once, (The Red Dragon from the Twighlight Manor series) well I still got him actually, I have used him in several short stories and he hasn’t been “caught” yet so I can keep using him, though I haven’t used him in any of my more recent stories, but anyways, he only kills people that look a certain way (certain color skin/hair/eyes, clothen style, etc). His motive is that he was in love with this woman, but she married this other guy, so he killed her and her daughters (only the ones that looked like her) years later, and after that every time he would see a woman that looked like her, he’d kill that woman too for reminding him of her. He mentally unstable as a result of lost love and destroys everything that reminds him of her, so he kills for love, or rather, he kills to forget.
I have another reoccurring killer, (Blackbird, also from the Twighlight Manor series) who is not human, but he looks human, and it’s set in our world so most humans do not believe him when they say he is not human. Anyways he’s from a “superior race” (or so he claims) and when he sees humans who are doing things that “disgrace humanity”, he kills (and usually eats) that human, for the betterment of the human race to prevent said human from corrupting the rest of the humans. He’s somewhat of a “moral” killer, though his morals are a bit radical. Also he eats humans, because they are “inferior”, he thinks of humans the same way humans think of cows – cute on the farm but tasty in burgers. His moral reasons are more to see to it that humans keep in line, stay “domesticated”, and don’t destroy themselves (via man-made sickness, environmental depletion, and warfare) so that his people don’t lose their food supply. So he wants humans good and moral, not because it’s good for them, but because he’s worried they’ll do something to wipe themselves out and endanger his people because his people periodically harvest humans for food. Think of it this way – could you imagine the panic McDonald’s would have should cows suddenly cease to exist? Yeah, it’s like that – kill to survive.
The thing of Blackbird is, that he’s not like others of his kind, most of his people blend in with humans so no one knows they are not humans, and they kill humans all the time too, but they make it look like an accident or natural causes or something else so they don’t get noticed. But Blackbird, he’s not afraid to tell people that he’s not human, and he just comes right out and cuts the human open, so the rest of the human think he”s a psychopathic nut. They don’t believe he’s not human. They don’t believe humans are only here to feed his people. They don’t believe that he’s only hunting for food. They think he’s a serial killer with mental problems, so he keeps getting caught and dragged away to a mental hospital. He’s not mentally ill, but people think he is, because they don’t believe he’s what he says he is, or that he’s just doing what come natural to his kind – killing lesser beings as a source of food is not murder, he claims, but no one will believe what he says.
Than there is the Lansquin (also from he Twighlight Manor series) and he’s a self proclaimed prophet-savior-religious fanatic who pretty much will kill any one who disagrees with his religious views, because it’s better that the sinners die than corrupt the rest of the world. He’s a multi-billionaire though, so he’s never actually killed anyone himself, he hire’s hit men (via his ultra fanatic ever devoted flock of followers) to kill for him. He went and bought the mental hospital that Blackbird keeps getting dragged off to, and than gets Blackbird out of technicalities, as long as Blackbird never kills any of his devoted followers. He ends up using Blackbird to get rid of a lot of people who disagree with his religion as a result. The prophet dude is a super crazed megalomaniac, who thinks he’s making the world a better place and will eventually (attempt to) get around to killing off all of the approximately 6 billion people in the world who disagree with his religious views, so that he has complete control over the only remaining people: the members of his church.
Okay, so, there you have my, as usual, long winded answer. (And people actually wonder how I reached 50k in 3 days last year!) Hope that helps you out some on your character building. Good luck with NaNo 09!
What’s your take on this? I’d love to hear what you have to say about this post. Leave a comment and share your views!
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Yep, that’s me, addicted to writing. So, I have once again become active on various writing forums and of course on NaNo itself, and as usual for this time of year, my Writing Blog has once again been pulled up and gone active. Off line I am surrounded by papers and note books and reference books and pens, and Moxie and I pretty much eat, breath, sleep, think, and talk about nothing but my NaNo entry for 2009.
