Maggie over at Maggie Madly Writing wrote a blog post called “Thoughts about Hate.”

At first I thought, “Oh, I don’t write about hate” (with the inevitable following thought, “I should write more about hate…”).

But then (I admit, kind of a “Duh!” moment), I thought, “Well, you write about people murdering other people — hate might figure in there, at least a little.”

So, I thought about the murders in what I’ve written. Thinking analytically, they seem to fall into three categories.

1) Personal and specific. You find out that your lover is cheating. You find out that your friend killed your lover. You can no longer tolerate your lover beating you. Hate is clearly involved here, even if sometimes mixed with love.

2) Impersonal and specific. Someone is standing between you and something you want. Hate may not be involved here, and in fact you may never have met the person face to face. It could be anybody who is blocking you from a goal. As the Mafia say (at least in the movies), it’s just business. Nothing personal. So, hate doesn’t really enter in here.

3) Impersonal and general. Someone belongs to a group that you hate. Obviously this is hate, and hate mixed with fear as opposed to #1 where it may be mixed with love.

Now, there are some mixtures here (one might murder a lover who threatened to expose the affair, which would be somewhere between #1 and #2, for example).

Interesting. I wonder if there are other configurations that I’m missing…