Visiting the dark places

[John Dean]

Good writing is about evoking reactions in your readers and that can sometimes take them on a journey into the darkest corners of human experience. For the crime writer, the dark corners come with the territory. They are the territory.

It is an important thought for crime writers – indeed, all writers - because good storytelling is about providing readers with triggers - words, phrases, images, places, sensations, ideas - that reach deep into their minds.

I am thinking like this because the novel I have just started for those fine people at The Book Folks deals with difficult subjects which are bound to engage the readers’ emotions and bring about intense reactions for some of them.

That reaction may be based on something the reader has actually experienced or maybe something that they dread ever having to experience – the face at the window, the phone call in the middle of the night, the visit by a police officer bearing bad news.

As writers it can sometimes be all too easy to forget that. We get so wrapped up with our craft – is the character properly described, have we given enough detail about a place, are the sentences grammatical, is the pace of the story right, is our spelling up to scratch? – that we forget that, at its heart, our writing is about the impact on the reader.

An example. I wrote a passage in a novel depicting the victimisation of a young person. I worked hard on the craft and was pleased that the piece worked from a technical point of view. When I read it to my wife, she was appalled, not by the quality of the writing, I hasten to add (!) but by the deep-seated effect it had on her when she empathised with the victim. I’d forgotten that our writing has an impact on our readers.

As writers, we have to be aware that we are messing about with the reader’s head, possibly even forcing them to confront difficult truths. However, isn’t that sometimes what crime writing is about? Taking the readers into dark worlds of our own creation? If every story, every book, was about sugary-sweet people in lovely situations, then our writing could never really move the reader as it should.

So, yes, writing can, on occasion, make the reader feel uneasy, uncomfortable, scared even, but let’s be honest, isn’t that sometimes the way we feel in our daily lives anyway? It’s simply art reflecting reality.