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Every picture tells a story, but not every story creates a pictures within the mind in real time. The reverberations of Hamlet, Gone With the Wind or TO Kill A Mocking Bird resonate throughout a person's lifetime. I walk out of Pixar products happy and satisfied with the entertainment values. But these are a minor titillation that lasts for minutes, maybe a few hours; of nothing earth-shaking compared to say the novel aspects of Blade Runner or the profundity of books by the masters (Cervantes, Dante, Goethe, Shakespeare, other etc).

However, the rules of writing are like me teaching a guitar student ten, twenty rules to capture an audience from the start, but knowing all the time that controlling elements of performance fly right out the window when the first note is struck. The gut (or internal mind) takes over and the song works or it doesn't.

TO me, a novel works if it flows from the start and I can't stop writing it. Something in me takes over the process (and I leave the rest to AutoCrit, lol).

Fiction writing is a fine art, it flows from within and flows best after all rules and regulations are internalized and then muted/smursched from conscious thinking. But of course, basic rules must function in the background, perhaps at the sub-conscious level are rules that are best learned from reactions/reviews to work put out to be read, i.e. reviews from this site, publisher's comments and most important are the bruises and burns on the nose after they've been put to the grindstone. Ha-ha, one sharpens their writing nose through hard-learned grinding (breaking rules and playing with rules) to then sniff out the way towards the final word and THE END.

I'd run it as a parody of Chinatown, but set in the 1970s, with the wife hiring a Jake-like P.I.  who then moves the plot and enhances your single theme encounter. THe main theme would be the ascendency of the mega-profit pharmaceutical industry, the death/disability of thousands by experimental or supposedly proven drugs foisted on a naive populace. The antagonist would be the pharmaceutical companies super secret agents or agent, who are part of a broader conspiracy to get full strength cyanide (Called by its medical name: Sighasnide, and marketed as a tick or leech remover) for death of an unfaithful spouse, or for other marital problems, into the market place, etc.

Tongue-in-cheek writing might allow story arc to ascend, but the conspiracy would have to be foiled in the end by the Jake like character. I'd think the wife deserves a negative fate at the end of story to discourage actual readers from poisoning their husbands.

I can see the product, Sighasnide, packaged especially for women, as women use poison for murder more often. But of course a men's version would also need to be made available... BitchOff! This would be a cyanide product created to keep in-heat female dogs away from male dogs... and would be sold over the counter without a prescription. And those in-the-know (and how to use it) would use it as a murder poison.

Here's my contribution from my novel, APHRODITE'S RAINBOW, wherein I created a variation on the F/F theme I referred to as F/AF for: female / android female:

"Harley Davidson! Oh goodie! Harley Davidson! Oh goodie! Goodie!“ Prunella said in animated excitement. Her processors overloaded at the prospect of seeing her man again. Her long repressed memory circuits double looped over and over, her love pulses created a divide by zero error causing her to sing like a yodeling fool at an idiot’s convention, complete with super-reverb and Alpine echoes.

“Oh my blithering, beautiful idiot android, you're so tantalizing. But until tomorrow comes we love, we will love all night long, ” Isellit whispered, forgetting all about Prunella's death-radiating, rainbow emitting vulva, while lowering her beautiful face and hungry tongue down between Prunella’s naked thighs to experience Aphrodite’s Rainbow, the last and best rainbow-hued light show of her life."

Toffler

Alvin Toffler died. He got it right about 80% of the time.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/07/techn … u_20160707

Where does Chris Christie fit into this cast of renowns? Warren Buffet, the Koch Bros. Stephen Hawking, etc. It would be a wonderful to be able to equate famous figures of antiquity to contemporary persons with a simple click of the mouse. History's lessons of evil and dastardly might be repeated less and less it this were possible. Perhaps I need to shine up my coding skills and write the WHO WAS THIS PERSON LIKE IN HISTORY app... or perhaps this already exists outside of the study of humanities.

the point with the theme i presented was to gear up horror writers to the mass-market fiction realm. empathy, well, we all need empathy to share our understanding of the world, whether it be good or evil, as that is what writing is all about: sharing emotions, digging deep into the dark realm were most people will not venture. we are sharing our thoughts to educate others to good or evil. and that is the freedom we have to present to others, to let them read, learn, enjoy in perhaps ghoulish ways... and pay money to delve into the darker places.

empathy is not the end of freedom, but the beginning of a freedom, since to belong to a group of like-minded individuals allows one the freedom to move beyond the selfish blinders and myopic distortion of a self-contained, limited worldview to then see your place as a successful writer within the world and of the world. poe was a dunk and a nut-case, but his command of the english language and his ability to share (for money, he hoped) his dark thoughts was in many ways his way to express emphatic empathy. he knew the feelings, emotions, dark emotions of others and self, and like many artists he worked and played with this knowledge of drastic and painful emotions to create refined works of art that endured.

murder/suicide of people one loves creates a searing brand within the brain's neural nets that is elusive, scaring, tormenting and for me, vile. murder/suicide/extreme fear & violence are types of experience that will never dissipate, but may only increase and complicate one's life and loves; thereby making the individual an outcast in the realm of polite society. to be cast into impolite society, into the realm of the angry artist, is a hard road to travel. turning a horrific, terrible, monstrous event in one's life around, placing in an artistic format can exercise or excise the psyche to strengthen one's will power to overcome and perhaps understand the horrific. then again it may turn one to escape routes: drugs, drink, other addictions- wine, women and song, lol.

i conjure up the memories of body pain, the smell of gunpowder, the compression of time when i was shot with a shotgun in the abdomen to enhance my writing when a scene needs a drastic lift in emotions or pace. i'm still dealing with the look of death on my wife's face when i discovered her hanging. a year has passed and i realize my writing ambition will not let this horrible event go; at some point i will allow that horrible day rise up and push my writing... one writes what they know; few people are survivors of a suicide and I am going channel this horrible event into my art, my writing, my music composition. but i'm not  ready for that yet.

death is an abstraction that can never be understood in its entirety and that is one of the clays, the raw materials that we can use to shape and mold around the abstraction (death and dying) to create 'edge-of-the-chair' suspense. empathy, imo, should be an element suffused into stories with measured amounts, to be played with, but in the end (literally) an emotion that can move and should move a reader to consider a writer masterful in the writing craft.

I have so much to see in Washington State. So far I've seen about 1%, the drive from Seattle to Gig Harbor, once to Port Orchard... big state! Lots of places to dump a body. But I have a maniac serial killer in me who want me to write him up and tell his tale (fiction of course!). It's been a rough year for me. This maniac is the type to collect and store bodies under the house, in the shed, in the freezer... I'm using the Green River killer as my template. BTW- I met Hitchcock back in the 1970s. Odd little man.

THinking about this I think it is all about the direction of the grain... hey, I'm no woodsman, but I'm learning.

I Googled and came up with the Latin phrase, but in doing so discovered Petronius's Satyricon. Have you read this? Interesting in so many ways.