A Little Mad, a Lot Curious, and Constantly Contemplating Murder.
I've heard people say that anyone capable of dreaming up fictional murders, elaborate crimes, and deeply disturbed characters must be a little mad themselves.
And, well.
I can't entirely argue with that.
I have spent a rather impressive portion of my life existing somewhere between reality and the elaborate, occasionally unsettling worlds I've constructed inside my own head.
It's not that I dislike reality.
Quite the opposite, actually.
I find the world endlessly fascinating. People, their behaviors, their peculiarities, their motivations, and the extraordinary things they're capable of doing.
But everyday life can become a little predictable.
Wake up. Make coffee. Get the kids ready. Drive somewhere. Buy groceries. Wonder what the hell to make for dinner. Repeat.
And somewhere between the mundane responsibilities of adulthood and the never-ending collection of things demanding my attention, my imagination tends to wander.
Sometimes it wanders somewhere lovely.
Other times?
Well.
Someone ends up dead.
Fictionally, of course.
I recently came across an article discussing internal dialogue and the fascinating differences in how people experience their own thoughts.
Apparently, not everyone experiences an ongoing internal conversation in the same way.
Some people describe their thoughts as a continuous stream of words, almost as though they're narrating their own existence.
Others think more visually, through impressions, sensations, or concepts that don't necessarily arrive wrapped in language.
And some experience a combination of all of those things.
This was news to me.
Absolute fucking news.
Because I have always had an extraordinarily active internal dialogue.
My brain is essentially a room full of opinionated people who have all decided to speak at once.
And none of them have any intention of waiting their turn.
There's the practical voice, attempting to organize the day's responsibilities.
The anxious one, enthusiastically identifying seventeen things that could potentially go wrong.
The curious one, interrupting everyone to ask an entirely unrelated question about human anatomy.
And then there's the creative one.
The one quietly sitting in the corner, looking at an otherwise unremarkable situation and wondering how it might become the opening scene of a murder mystery.
It's a crowded fucking room.
And apparently, I've been living in it my entire life.
Now, to be clear, I'm talking about my own thoughts. That familiar internal back-and-forth, the conversations I have with myself, the hypothetical arguments, the imaginary scenarios, and the endless stream of questions.
But until recently, I genuinely assumed everyone experienced their thoughts in essentially the same way.
The discovery that other people might have a very different internal experience left me fascinated.
What does that feel like?
If you don't experience a constant verbal dialogue, is your mind quieter?
Is there more room?
Do your thoughts arrive with greater clarity, less clutter, fewer competing interpretations?
Or is the same chaos simply expressed in an entirely different form?
I wonder whether a person who thinks primarily in images experiences memories differently from someone who thinks in words.
Does emotion arrive before language?
Do ideas appear fully formed?
Can someone simply contemplate what they want for dinner without mentally hosting an emergency meeting involving twelve conflicting opinions?
I have so many questions.
And there go the voices again.
Fuck.
I suppose this is part of why writing has always felt so natural to me.
My imagination doesn't require much encouragement.
In fact, it rarely asks for permission.
I can be walking down an ordinary residential street, enjoying the weather, admiring someone's landscaping, and generally minding my own business when a car begins moving unusually slowly along the road.
A perfectly normal occurrence.
Perhaps the driver is looking for an address.
Maybe they're admiring a house.
Maybe they're lost.
But does my brain begin with any of those perfectly reasonable explanations?
Of course not.
Why are they driving so slowly?
Are they watching someone?
Could they be a predator?
What if they're looking for a particular house?
What if they're planning something?
Is this how a drive-by shooting begins?
And suddenly, an otherwise uneventful afternoon has become the opening sequence of a crime thriller.
All because someone had the audacity to drive fifteen miles an hour through a neighborhood.
I then have to remind myself that there are approximately a thousand ordinary explanations for what I've just witnessed, and very little reason to believe anything sinister is happening.
Most likely, the poor person is just trying to find the right driveway.
Meanwhile, I've mentally constructed an entire criminal investigation.
Evidence.
Witnesses.
Potential motives.
The inevitable interview with the neighbor who insists she didn't see anything but somehow knows everyone's business.
And all of this happens in the span of about thirty seconds.
It's ridiculous.
But it's also fascinating.
Because I don't necessarily believe the person is dangerous.
I simply recognize that there are possibilities beyond the obvious explanation.
And once my imagination discovers a possibility, it has an unfortunate tendency to investigate it.
The same thing happens in restaurants.
Shopping malls.
Coffee shops.
Pretty much anywhere people gather and behave like people.
Someone sits alone at a table, repeatedly glancing toward the entrance.
Most likely, they're waiting for a friend.
But my imagination wonders whether they're waiting for someone they don't particularly want to see.
Perhaps they're nervous.
Perhaps they're hiding something.
Perhaps they've arranged a meeting they already regret.
And perhaps, somewhere in the fictional universe that has just spontaneously materialized inside my head, that person is about to disappear.
I don't actually know anything about them.
That's the important distinction.
I'm not uncovering hidden truths about strangers or detecting some extraordinary criminal instinct beneath their ordinary behavior.
I'm imagining.
Taking a tiny fragment of observable reality and constructing an entirely fictional world around it.
And I think that's one of the things I love most about storytelling.
The distance between what we observe and what we imagine can be enormous.
A glance becomes a secret.
A hesitation becomes a lie.
An ordinary object becomes evidence.
A perfectly mundane interaction becomes the beginning of something catastrophic.
Not because those interpretations are necessarily true.
But because they could become true within the world of a story.
And that possibility is intoxicating.
I've always been particularly interested in the psychology of human behavior.
Not simply what people do, but why they do it.
What drives someone to make a decision that seems entirely irrational to everyone around them?
How does an ordinary person justify something extraordinary?
At what point does fear become desperation?
When does ambition begin to erode morality?
And how does someone reconcile the person they believe themselves to be with the things they've actually done?
Those are the questions that fascinate me.
Because I don't think human beings are nearly as simple as we sometimes want them to be.
We like categories.
Good people.
Bad people.
Honest people.
Liars.
Victims.
Villains.
There is something reassuring about placing people into neatly labeled compartments.
It gives the world a sense of order.
But people rarely fit so comfortably into those boxes.
A person can be extraordinarily generous and profoundly selfish.
Someone can love deeply and still cause tremendous harm.
A person can be courageous in one moment and consumed by fear in another.
We are complicated creatures, capable of extraordinary tenderness and astonishing cruelty, sometimes within the same lifetime.
And I find that contradiction endlessly compelling.
It doesn't mean every behavior is excusable.
It doesn't mean that understanding someone's motivations absolves them of responsibility.
But I do think there's a difference between understanding why someone did something and believing that what they did was right.
That distinction is particularly important to me when I'm writing crime fiction.
I don't want every villain to be evil simply because the story requires someone evil.
I want to understand the choices that brought them there.
The experiences that shaped them.
The fears they concealed.
The desires they couldn't control.
The lies they told themselves long before they began lying to everyone else.
And sometimes, the most unsettling characters are the ones who genuinely believe they're doing the right thing.
Because how many terrible decisions have been made by people who convinced themselves their intentions were good?
How often do we reshape the truth to make our own behavior easier to live with?
How much of what we call morality is influenced by circumstance?
Those questions don't have particularly comfortable answers.
Which is probably why I enjoy exploring them.
In An Unwoven Truth, I wanted to examine the stories people construct around themselves and the lengths they might go to protect those stories.
The secrets they keep.
The versions of themselves they present to the world.
The uncomfortable truths they bury beneath layers of carefully maintained appearances.
Because the truth is, everyone has an internal life that exists beyond what other people can see.
We carry memories, motivations, fears, insecurities, and desires that don't always make themselves known.
And sometimes, even we don't fully understand why we do the things we do.
I find that extraordinary.
Here we are, billions of people wandering around this planet, each experiencing an entirely individual version of reality.
Each carrying a lifetime of experiences that have shaped the way we interpret the world.
Each convinced, at least occasionally, that our perspective is the correct one.
And yet, two people can witness the exact same event and walk away with entirely different understandings of what happened.
One might remember a person's expression.
Another might remember the words they spoke.
Someone else might recall an entirely different detail that neither of the others noticed.
Memory is imperfect.
Perception is subjective.
And human behavior is rarely as straightforward as it appears.
What an extraordinary foundation for a mystery.
Perhaps that's why I find myself constantly imagining stories in the most ordinary places.
Because the world is filled with possibilities.
Every stranger has a history.
Every conversation exists within a larger context.
Every seemingly insignificant moment is connected to countless experiences that came before it.
And sometimes, all it takes is one unusual detail to send my imagination careening into an entirely different reality.
I suppose the life of a murder mystery author is a peculiar one.
It's a strange balancing act between recognizing the darker possibilities of human nature and appreciating the extraordinary beauty of the communities we create together.
I can spend an afternoon contemplating betrayal, violence, deception, and death, then sit beside my children and feel completely overwhelmed by the tenderness of an ordinary moment.
I can imagine the worst things one person might do to another while simultaneously believing that human connection is one of the most remarkable things about being alive.
Those ideas aren't mutually exclusive.
At least, not to me.
I think acknowledging humanity's capacity for darkness makes its capacity for goodness even more meaningful.
We are not singular things.
We are not one decision, one emotion, one experience, or one version of ourselves.
We are constantly changing.
Learning.
Contradicting ourselves.
Becoming people we might not have recognized ten years earlier.
And every experience adds another thread to the complicated fabric of who we are.
Some threads are beautiful.
Some are frayed.
Some are knotted so tightly that we may spend years trying to understand how they became tangled in the first place.
But together, they form something uniquely human.
A story that is never entirely finished.
And perhaps that's what draws me to writing more than anything else.
The opportunity to explore those threads.
To imagine what happens when one is pulled.
To discover what might unravel.
So yes, perhaps there is a little madness involved in spending your free time imagining fictional murders.
Perhaps it is slightly unusual to see a stranger behaving oddly and immediately begin constructing a potential criminal investigation.
And perhaps my internal dialogue could benefit from a moderator, a strict agenda, and the occasional mandatory moment of silence.
But I wouldn't trade my curiosity.
Not even for a quieter mind.
Because somewhere inside that chaotic collection of thoughts, questions, observations, and occasionally disturbing possibilities are the stories I want to tell.
And I have a feeling there are quite a few more waiting to be discovered.
To be human is to be multifaceted. Our experiences are dynamic, our perspectives are imperfect, and our stories are always changing.
Mine just happens to involve an unreasonable amount of fictional murder.
And honestly?
I'm having a pretty fucking good time.
— Chelsea C. Macdonald
Author of An Unwoven Truth
Founder of Shirley Books