In Chapter 6 of my novel, Blinking Red, you’ll find out everything you need to know about the intriguing nuclear mafia.

Let’s start with this.

What would you do if you had to get rid of a human body, after a murder, in the novel you were writing?

I love the TV series The Sopranos, but Tony’s Sopranos’ version of the mafia doesn’t come up with a lot of creative ways to murder people. And they murder at least one person on every episode!

I also watch a lot of true-crime TV shows.  And I have to admit, sometimes, the murderers in true-crime shows come up with a well-thought-out plan.

Yes, many of the murders are spur of the moment, emotional reactions that were never thought out ahead of time.

But sometimes, the murders are planned out. And the plan itself— ranging all the way from the ridiculous to the sophisticated— can tell you an awful lot about the intelligence of the murderer.

Have you experienced this feeling while you were watching these shows?

And it turns out that there are only about ten million examples of fictional and true-crime murders showing on TV.

Right now.

I particularly like Dateline and 20/20.

So, back to Blinking Red.

If the people who read your novel also see a lot of these shows, it would probably take a literal miracle of creativity to come up with an original scene (and maybe even location) that hadn’t been used before, right?

Well, I think I did it in my novel, Blinking Red.

Tell me what YOU think in the comments below.

Here’s how it might work. A corrupt corporation, with lots of money, buys a truck company. The truck company has a contract to transport spent nuclear waste to an official, yet confidential disposal site.

Let’s see how that particular truck company took nuclear waste to the dump and solved their problem. It’s near the end of Chapter 6 In Blinking Red:

“Each employee in the EDU was licensed to oversee and transport spent fuel from a nearby nuclear plant to certain undisclosed deep geological disposal facilities at the far-end of the state. Clay, and layers of concrete, surrounded the many canisters of radioactive fuel that found these underground repositories their final resting place.

Canisters that were never heard from again.

Beyond reference numbers on a government spreadsheet.

Canisters too life-threatening to ever be sought out again.

Content that would never be unsealed.

To reveal spent nuclear fuel.

Much less, the body of Tarton Davis.”

To find a solution like that–that I secretly believe no one has ever used before– you have to make a long list of possibilities.

In this case, a really long list. 

After you have the first ten or fifteen possibilities (which almost always turn out to be either cliques, or have been used before a million times before, or could never actually happen in real life), you come up with a few  that you think might be original.  And that’s always where the good possibilities are hiding. At the end of a long list of cliques.

But there’s a catch.

The best possibility always requires you to do a lot of research after that, just to make sure it’s the right one.

Why?

Because if it’s that far down your list of possibilities, it’s probably not something you currently know a whole lot about. But hopefully, as a writer you enjoy learning new things. Maybe even doing the research. Rather than being boring, all that research is for something you really need. And, in doing the hard work, you’ll be sure that what you write about it is factual, not imaginary.

And, when it’s all done, you know a lot more about the world you live in.

A great benefit, in itself!

Plus, as a reader or watcher of a movie or television, don’t you want to see something original and interesting?

Isn’t that a more entertaining way of using your free time?

So, for Blinking Red, I had to do some serious research into nuclear waste removal. But I did the work. And the result is right there at the end of Chapter 6, for all the world to see.

And by the way, this process doesn’t just work for novel writing.

This process might just be the secret tool creative people use when they have to come up with something astonishingly original.

Have you ever tried this technique on something you were working on? Artistic or not.

Tell us about it in the comments area below.

Go Even Deeper at FaulknerFiction

• Go to Amazon and read a sample chapter. Tell me what you think of Blinking Red.
• In the books and movies you’ve seen, what were some creative ways people committed murder, or disposed of a dead body?
• What were some of the ways, where you said– Oh, jeez; I’ve seen that like a million times before.