Gary Kassay: Where does it all come from? (guest post)

Today, Gary Kassay, author of Murder in Silence, stops by Girl Who Reads. Gary is a retired law enforcement officer who currently resides in Casper, Wyoming. Have you ever wondered how an author gets an idea for a story? This questions intrigues Gary and he shares how he came up with the story for Murder in Silence.

Where does it all come from?

I would like to thank Girl Who Reads for inviting me to write down a few thoughts. Sapphire Star Publishing released the first of the Duke Becker Series, Murder in Silence this past July and Girl Who Reads will be reviewing it shortly.

Today I would like to ask you to think about a subject that intrigues me a great deal. How do authors write about, well, what they write about? To be more succinct, does an author that writes about romance need to have had steamy affairs, been swept off their feet by a male or female god or goddess, be a beautiful sexy woman or man for that matter? What about the action adventure writer? Must that person have had a life filled with narrow escapes, running from criminal gangs, discovering treasure maps and saving a beautiful heroine…at least once a week to write their novel? Does the horror author live in a haunted house, see ghosts everywhere, been the target of a voodoo king or witch?

Then we come to those who write in my genre, murder mysteries. Being a retired Police Officer from New York City definitely helped me in creating a realistic setting and of course many stories, some closer to the truth than you might imagine. But as an officer of the law, I was sworn to uphold it, to protect and serve, to run in the opposite direction of everyone else at times of an emergency. My thoughts were never criminal in nature and as far from homicidal as possible.

So I ask you, how is it that I can write about cruel and unusual murders. How do I get into the mind of a killer and realistically portray his or her every thought and diabolical action? Is there a killer buried deep within my soul and writing a form of exorcising that particular demon? Does the written word release the evil thoughts within so as to keep me from actually carrying them out? Is it what we all simply call…imagination?

Imagination is something that is solely attributed to humans, or at least that is what we believe. But what is imagination really? Is it a compilation of past events, mixed and tossed about in our subconscious mind until finally, one day, one moment in time, we have a thought, what we think of as a new idea? Or is it truly a new thought, possibly something that no one on this planet has ever thought before.

To tell you the truth, I don’t know. I know that for me it isn’t a demon waiting deep inside of me. I have served the law for too many years and have seen what evil looks like. And yet at times I wonder where the plots, the characters and the things that they do come from. Perhaps it is a mixture of all of these things and then again, maybe it is simply…none of them. As a writer my job is to entertain you, make you ponder things, scare you a little and possibly take you to a new world that you can revisit at any time by simply reading and rereading a favorite story. I sincerely hope that this short writing and of course, my novels if you should choose to read them, will do just that.

Find Murder in Silence at Goodreads, IndieBound, and Amazon.