How I Wrote ‘Murderous Habits’
Observation
One morning the coffee really was gurgling in its pot like a pierced lung, not that I’ve ever heard one. At this time I was trying to write flash fiction using ‘found’ pieces as an experiment, keeping it easy and light, but as with everything I write my original intention quickly upended itself. I thought the gurgling lung of coffee was nicely sinister; I often think about how I kill things just by being a big clumsy human. Snails with a death wish crossing wet pavements…it might not be murder but it’s still a kind of slaughter, and many a snail has found himself transported to the other side by a seemingly omnipotent being (which led to a different story about galaxies trapped in melting slivers of ice).
Cultural fears
I’d recently read an article about robots and wanted to play around with the fears about AI, particularly the ideas in Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari and How to Be a Machine by Mark O’Connell. It’s not AIs we should be worrying about but the rich, who’ll evolve themselves into human-robot hybrids and leave the rest of us behind.
Personal hang-ups
For a while I couldn’t get any further than these loose ideas. Probably I was trying to be too responsible, having worked for years on public health sector projects. When I find that I’m taking myself too seriously the answer is always to laugh at myself, so I thought of my own earnest attempts to steer plans in what I thought were more ethical directions and saw my own misguidedness. Thus the overly-anxious Ben was born.
Complications
From there, the conversations with the pragmatic boss Dave came all too easily and when I pondered how to further complicate Ben’s dilemma, his great-aunt Maud, named after my own, arrived on the scene. She wasn’t like my great-aunt, more like an older version of me, and this meant this rest of the story flowed as I allowed myself to be as provocative as I liked, using conflicting ideas from the cultural consciousness. I enjoyed weaving in observations made on the South Bank in London that I’d found in a notebook from three years earlier. And when I was dive-bombed by a flock of seagulls on Eastbourne High Street while eating a bacon roll, I couldn’t resist putting it in. As often happens with the ideas you throw in randomly just to make yourself laugh at that moment, the seagull ambush knitted the whole piece together in my mind.