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I started thinking about what to write for this prompt for quite a while. Since I got it actually, and I ran through several ideas before ending up with one I wrote. Originally, my first thought was to do something where the candle was symbolic; there was going to be a young man whose mother died, and she told him to keep this special candle burning no matter what happened. The candle was going go symbolize hope, and the ending scene of the story was going to be the man sitting and watching the flame go out.
Unfortunately, that would have taken a long time to write, and I would have had to have known the character pretty well, I think (and while the ending scene looks utterly cool in my head, the rest of it sounds kind of lame). I went through several more ideas and rejected them until I finally made this frustrated entry (since it’s F-Locked, you won’t be able to read it unless we’re friends). Basically, I talked about how my friend and I read vastly different kinds of books, and I had no idea what the hell I was going to write. Ironically, writing that journal gave me an idea because in that journal I wrote that I maybe should try writing something similar to a story I’d read in one of Augusten Burrough’s books. After I wrote and posted that, my mind drifted to the book of his I had been reading at the time called Magical Thinking, and there’s a story in there about how he brutally kills a mouse that climbed into his bathtub through the faucet and about how shitty he felt afterward.
Suddenly I had this image of someone brutally killing a rat; only they didn’t feel bad about it. Hell, they didn’t care at all. Then I started writing, and it was as I was writing that I came up with the idea that rat belonged to this man’s niece and that he loved his niece dearly. It wasn’t an entirely conscious decision to show his affection towards his niece at the same time he’d willingly murder her beloved pet, but once I had it, I attempted to use it to make what he did even more horrifying because a bad person doing bad things isn’t going to leave much of an impact. But a person who obliviously has affection for someone and still kills their pet is far more intriguing, and their actions more horrifying.
I was originally going to make the candle more prominent by having Mark kill the rat by using the candle to burn its face off. But then I figured that, logically, the rat would thrash so much it would more likely knock the candle over than die, so I had Mark toss it into a fireplace instead. I had also originally figured that I’d leave the story with the line “maybe he’d buy her a puppy,” but I thought that it’d be a bit more disturbing to see him go get another candle so he could do something as simple and normal as reading right after doing something so horrible as tossing a living creature into a fire.
So not that long, but I hope somebody found it interesting. Wrote it mainly so that my RL friends and such could get a bit of a better look at what goes into writing a story and stuff...but I hope some of you guys found it interesting too. And, you know, that I didn't sound completely retarded while writing this.
