Getting inside the reader's head

[John Dean]

As a writer, I have always been interested in triggers, the images, concepts, places, people, utterances that evoke reactions in your reader.

That reaction will often be based on something the reader has actually experienced, or maybe something that they dread ever having to experience. It is why crime, horror and ghost stories work so well.

I am thinking about this because, in writing the latest Harris novel, I found myself stuck at the start of what felt like it should be an important scene that wrote  itself.

Then came the trigger. I thought how I would feel in the situation in which my detective found herself. How would I react to the person she was questioning? Thinking that way led to me being convinced that the interviewee was concealing something. Indeed, I found myself disliking the interviewee.

The result? New impetus for the story, a new plot possibility, and the challenge of depicting in a unsympathetic way someone for whom the reader should feel only empathy, namely someone who had experienced loss.

Yes, it means that you are messing about with the reader’s head, yes, you may be presenting them with conflicts that remind them of events in their own lives, but isn’t that sometimes what writing is about? If every story, every book, was about sugary-sweet people in lovely situations, then writing could never really move the reader as it should. Let’s be honest, everyone has a dark side and it is the crime writer’s job to explore it and use the information to trigger a response in the reader.