Murder I Can't Write

I cannot write fiction. I know I have an overactive imagination sometimes that entire telenovelas play out in my mind before the characters even actually meet, but I have trouble writing that imagination down, mainly because those telenovelas suck big time. Hence the term I used, "telenovela".

Every time I attempt to write something not about my life and not true it just ends up being some bastardized version of it. Like I would change the characters' names (duh), the places (duh), and exaggerate a bit on what actually happened, but basically it's not really fiction. Like poems, I define fiction as something I cannot do. Really, I don't do poems. I cringe at my own work, especially because they rhyme.

(Digression: Once upon a time I was so into this boy and so depressed and shit because he could not see it, that I wrote these...verses, if you could call it that, and asked a friend [who will not be named] to turn it into a song. I didn't actually hear the whole thing, just snippets of it but damn it was so sad that people would have slashed their wrists. Fortunately that version of my writing did not see the light of day. End of digression.)

So anyway. I told my friend Tin that I can't write fiction, and she invited me to this group called LitCritters. I've heard about it from years ago from Dean Alfar's blog but of course I never thought to join. I joined this Saturday's meeting and we were supposed to have already read three short stories and discuss it with the group.

Because I'm delinquent, I only picked one story written by someone I'm familiar with. Lamb to the Slaughter is a short story by Roald Dahl, he of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and James and the Giant Peach. By the time I got to where Mrs. Maloney picked up the frozen leg of lamb from the freezer, the flashbacks came so fast they burned my retinas.

I was 11 and bored, and as always I looked for something to read. I picked up a tattered copy of Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone from my father's bookshelf. We used to watch the Twilight Zone every Friday night, so I figured the book would be interesting. And interesting it was. Until now I cannot go past a freezer full of frozen meat without murder entering my mind. That short story got me to read Lawrence Sanders after that, and any parent today would not let an 11-year old child touch one book of his. Especially The Third Deadly Sin.

When I was younger I couldn't connect the Roald Dahl of Chocolate Factory and the Dahl that wrote that short story. Now I realize that Mr. Dahl kinda hated children. Look what he did to the disobedient children inside the factory. One was miniaturized, the other went through giant rollers, and poor Veruca Salt with the squirrels.

Next time I attend a LitCritter meeting I promise to read all assigned stories, and now I know what to look for. Grammar not included. My brain is full today.