To write convincingly from the perspective of a serial killer, you have to spend time inside a mindset most people instinctively avoid.
That discomfort reveals things about how people justify their actions.
When I began writing Memoirs of a Serial Killer, shock value wasn’t the goal. I wasn’t interested in making the story as graphic as possible. What interested me was something quieter — and in some ways more disturbing. I wanted to understand how someone could rationalize cruelty while still believing he was the hero of his own story.
One of the first things you discover when writing from that perspective is that villains rarely see themselves as villains.
They explain what they’re doing.
They justify it.
Soon enough they’ve built a system that makes everything feel inevitable.
The voice in my novel doesn’t wake up thinking, I’m evil today. He thinks in terms of systems and control. In his mind the world runs on rules most people are too blind to notice. Some people understand the game. Others don’t. Those who don’t become pieces on the board.
What makes that mindset disturbing isn’t chaos.
It’s order.
Many violent offenders describe their actions in similar terms — not as random outbursts, but as experiments, corrections or demonstrations of superiority. Writing from that point of view forced me to confront a question that stayed with me throughout the book:
What story would someone have to tell himself for these actions to feel reasonable?
Once that question settles in, the character begins to take shape. The focus shifts away from brutality and toward belief.
He sees himself as smarter than everyone else.
He assumes the world misunderstands him.
And he believes ordinary rules simply do not apply.
That kind of thinking produces a voice that is calm, analytical and deeply confident — which can be far more unsettling than rage.
While researching the psychology behind violent behavior, I read a fair amount of true crime. One book that stayed with me was American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearstby Jeffrey Toobin. Hearst’s story shows how quickly a rational, educated person can begin absorbing the logic of a dangerous situation. Under constant fear and pressure, the mind starts reshaping reality simply to survive.
That idea became unexpectedly useful while writing fiction. People rarely feel as if they’re losing themselves. More often they feel as if they’re adapting.
Seen from that angle, writing a serial killer narrative becomes an exploration of human self-deception. Most people do this in small ways every day. We justify decisions. We reinterpret mistakes. We quietly reshape our memories so we can remain the protagonist of our own lives.
A serial killer story simply pushes that instinct much further.
Another challenge is restraint. Popular culture often portrays killers as theatrical monsters, but the more unsettling version is the one who feels ordinary — someone who moves through everyday life unnoticed, explaining everything he does with calm, quiet logic.
That’s where the tension comes from. Readers begin to notice the gap between the killer’s explanations and reality. The distance between what he believes and what he actually is becomes the real horror.
In the end, writing about a serial killer isn’t really about violence.
It’s about perspective — about the stories people build to justify their behavior and the ease with which the human mind bends reality to protect itself.
And perhaps the most unsettling realization is this: if you listen long enough to the killer’s reasoning, parts of it begin to sound convincing.
Not because the logic is right.
But because the instinct behind it is unmistakably human.
