structural:expansion, structural:reformatting, linguistic:paraphrasing, quality:correction
Beginning of literary career

Burroughs described Vollmer's death as a pivotal event in his life, and one that provoked his writing by exposing him to the risk of possession by a malevolent entity he called "the Ugly Spirit":

I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would never have become a writer but for Joan's death, and to a realization of the extent to which this event has motivated and formulated my writing. I live with the constant threat of possession, and a constant need to escape from possession, from Control. So the death of Joan brought me in contact with the invader, the Ugly Spirit, and maneuvered me into a life long struggle, in which I have had no choice except to write my way out.

As Burroughs makes clear, he meant this reference to "possession" to be taken absolutely literally, stating: "My concept of possession is closer to the medieval model than to modern psychological explanations... I mean a definite possessing entity." Burroughs' writing was intended as a form of "sorcery", in his own words – to disrupt language via methods such as the cut-up technique, and thus protect himself from possession. Later in life, Burroughs described the Ugly Spirit as "Monopolistic, acquisitive evil. Ugly evil. The ugly American", and took part in a shamanic ceremony with the explicit aim of exorcising the Ugly Spirit.

Oliver Harris has questioned Burroughs's claim that Vollmer's death catalysed his writing, highlighting the importance for Queer of Burroughs's traumatic relationship with the boyfriend fictionalized in the story as Eugene Allerton, rather than Burroughs's shooting of Vollmer. In any case, he had begun to write in 1945. Burroughs and Kerouac collaborated on And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, a mystery novel loosely based on the Carr–Kammerer situation and that at the time remained unpublished. Years later, in the documentary What Happened to Kerouac?, Burroughs described it as "not a very distinguished work". An excerpt of this work, in which Burroughs and Kerouac wrote alternating chapters, was finally published in Word Virus, a compendium of William Burroughs's writing that was published by his biographer after his death in 1997. The complete novel was finally published by Grove Press in 2008.

Before killing Vollmer, Burroughs had largely completed his first novel, Junkie, which he wrote at the urging of Allen Ginsberg, who was instrumental in getting the work published as a cheap mass-market paperback. Ace Books published the novel in 1953 as part of an Ace Double under the pen name William Lee, retitling it Junkie: Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict (it was later republished as Junkie, then in 1977 as Junky, and finally in 2003 as Junky: the definitive text of 'Junk', edited by Oliver Harris).