Hypertext Magazine asked Jason Fisk, author of The Craigslist Incident, “What inspired you to write this book?”
By Jason Fisk
A few years ago, I was flipping through the news app on my phone, and I came across this crazy article about a young woman who took an advertisement out in the Women Seeking Men section of Craigslist; she was looking for someone to assassinate her. I couldn’t believe what I was reading. As I continued to read the article, I was shocked to discover that a young man actually answered the advertisement, and, together, they went through with the killing.
They drove out to the woods; they both got down on their knees and prayed together. He stood up and executed the young woman. That story bounced around the interior of my head for days and then for weeks and then for months. The article spawned so many questions. Why would someone do such a thing? Why did she phrase her advertisement like that? Why didn’t she just take an advertisement out asking for someone to assist her with suicide? Why did she need someone to assassinate her? What kind of person would answer an advertisement like that, anyway? It all seemed so tragic and bizarre to me, and I knew I just had to write about it.
The above questions haunted me and were the impetus for The Craigslist Incident. I took my computer to the library and started writing. I wrote what I imagined to be these characters’ backstory, and they took on a life of their own, drastically diverging from the original news story. I wrote and wrote and wrote, and, two years later, the first draft of the novel was completed. After numerous revisions, the initial Craigslist advertisement and the assassination scenario are about the only parts of the original news story that remain. I ended up falling in love with the characters and could not figure out how to wrap it up, so I wrote two endings. You, the reader, get to choose how The Craigslist Incident ends.
Related Feature: Excerpt: Jason Fisk’s THE CRAIGSLIST INCIDENT
Jason Fisk lives and writes in the suburbs of Chicago. He has worked in a psychiatric unit, labored in a cabinet factory, and mixed cement for a bricklayer. He currently teaches language arts to eighth graders. He was born in Ohio, raised in Minnesota, and has spent the last three decades in the Chicago area.
