I am back on a Round Robin post today, and we have been set the following topic:

How do you handle/use violence, or any type of danger, in your stories?

This is a fascinating topic for me because my most recent novel, which is currently going out on submissions via my agent, is about a serial killer. Not only that, it is definitely NOT a crime story!

But thereby lies the dilemma – I have written a literary fiction book that focuses on the internal world of someone who kills, and the friendship he forms with a woman who was born profoundly deaf. They share a very internalized sense of the world and a common love of the Lincolnshire fenland landscape where the book is set. The writing is descriptive, but the subject matter is harder hitting than is normal in ‘literary’ work.

This is a book that I am proud of. I believe I have written something with integrity and I want it to find an audience. Its origins stem from the well-loved Quaker phrase: ‘that of God in everyone’. It got me thinking: as we can find ‘that of God’ in all people, what is it in some people that allows them to kill or to commit awful crimes?

This is the question that the book tries to answer in some way.

So: I did my research. I read about ‘types’ of sexual offenders and serial killers and the different ways and means that aggression is expressed. In rape, for instance, patterns of behaviour may be based on anger (sexuality becomes a hostile act), power (an expression of conquest) and sadism (where anger and power become eroticized). I probably ducked the difficult options in choosing that Michael, my character, would be an anger killer – it’s easier to see the humanity in someone who loses control without pre-planning anything, and where there are trigger events to explain it. It also meant introducing backstory to show how he came to be the person he was – and I based this on research and reading interviews with real rapists and killers.

The other thing I decided with this novel was to let the reader know from page one that Michael had killed in the past. This brought in a sense of jeopardy for the other characters that he met and it meant that his own journey was about trying to control his anger and not to kill again. His crimes involve sexual violence, and I did write the scenes fairly factually – the reader sees what happened and it’s hard to tell how an individual reader feels in reading these scenes. Each crime shows the lead up and what triggered Michael’s loss of control – and the randomness of who becomes the victim. Because the land and cycles of nature are central to the book, I also show how the bodies of Michael’s victims decay and become a rich source of nourishment to the landscape – a sense of the earth reclaiming its own.

All this is brilliant, except…. I appear to have shot myself in the foot by crossing traditional genre divides. This is literary fiction but it features a serial killer. Crimes are committed but the focus is on the reaction of the community and the characters involved, not police involvement or solving of the crimes. Feedback from publishers has been extremely positive but the book does not ‘fit’ their normal categories and it is hard to find it a home. One editor put it this way: ‘having a serial killer as a main character [in a novel that is clearly literary in nature] will put it into a certain category that will alienate some readers and potentially appeal to the ‘wrong’ readers in other cases, who will expect something more narrative’.

Another dilemma posed by writing storylines that involve violence from both a perpetrator’s and a person-centred perspective is that people are not always comfortable with being asked to treat a serial killer as a human being. One editor expressed discomfort at the feeling that they were being asked to sympathise with a serial killer – not my intention, but perhaps it shows that I did manage to get across my character’s humanity despite his capacity to kill.

I have dealt with violence in other novels – self-harm and domestic abuse, an overheated argument leading to death by dangerous driving – but Out of Silence retains a very special place in my heart, and will continue to do so whether it finds a publishing deal or not.

See how other writers deal with danger and violence in their work:

Dr. Bob Rich https://wp.me/p3Xihq-1i2
Victoria Chatham http://www.victoriachatham.com
Connie Vines http://mizging.blogspot.com/
Anne Stenhouse http://annestenhousenovelist.wordpress.com/
A.J. Maguire http://ajmaguire.wordpress.com/
Marci Baun http://www.marcibaun.com/blog/
Skye Taylor http://www.skye-writer.com/blogging_by_the_sea
Fiona McGier http://www.fionamcgier.com/
Anne de Gruchy https://annedegruchy.co.uk/category/blog/
Rhobin L Courtright http://www.rhobinleecourtright.com
Judith Copek, //http://lynx-sis.blogspot.com

© Anne de Gruchy