The corpse on the page

Last week, I said:

“As you write, and as you edit, you are faced with 1,000,000 choices: again and again and again. Are you happy with this sentence? What about this one? Does the attacker strike your heroine? Strike her with what? Does he hurt her? Does she hurt him back? Does she escape? How does she escape?”

And –

Well, just casually, almost by way of an aside, I’ve assumed it’s just fine to write about violence against women. But is it? Pretty obviously, violence is bad, and male violence against women is especially unlovely … and making an entertainment out of all this? Isn’t that a bit Ugh?

One approach is to say that violence of this sort should never be used for entertainment.

A British screenwriter, Bridget Lawless, in fact set up a prize – the Staunch Book Prize – which rewarded novels that did not feature violence against women. The prize sputtered on for a few years before closing.

The prize was never without controversy, though. Women thriller writers, Sarah Hilary and Julia Crouch, both noted that women do in fact suffer violence by men. Crouch said, what the “prize immediately knocks out is the lived experience of millions of women in this country.”

That’s true of course … women do suffer violence, so we should talk about that rather than conceal it. And that feels like it might be a let-out, except if I’m being super-duper honest, my last book involved a contemporary detective running around searching for artefacts linked to King Arthur. The one before that involved an extended caving scene and some (literally) mediaeval monastic practices. My books aren’t really attempting to take the ‘lived experience of millions of women’ and make art out of them. They’re attempts to provide bloody good entertainment using stories which aren’t, quite frankly, all that plausible in the real world.

I don’t think that I’m especially keen on having dead women, rather than men – I think I’m an equal-opportunities killer. But, yes, my books do involve violence against women. Fiona suffers ill-treatment in every single book and in many cases, other women are also victims, often dead ones.

So do I use murder for entertainment? Yes.

Does that include murder of women by men? Yes.

Are my books intended to represent a carefully considered view of the actual ‘lived experience’ of women? No, definitely not.

So, bluntly put, am I exploiting stories involving violence against women for pure entertainment purposes? Yes, I am.

But do my readers, including my female readers, mind about any of this? No, they don’t. Or at least if they do, they care in such small numbers that the issue would seem not to matter all that much. And, I should say, I’d guess that at least 60-70% of my readers are women, maybe even more.

Now, assuming that you (A) like writing books and (B) think that men whacking women is generally a Bad Thing, we need to figure out what’s going on here.

The first thing to say is that books do generally need a splash of darkness. They don’t absolutely have to have an episode of violence at their heart, but an awful lot of books do. And it’s not surprising. We don’t want to read books about the everyday. We want our books to operate like really high-class gossip: “Gosh, no! Really …?” That reaction almost always derives from transgression of some kind and the blackest sort of transgression (especially in a sexually permissive age) is violence.

The second thing to say is that there are ways of writing violence that are just … ick.

Any time where the camera lens is pressed up against violence with a kind of glee is, for me, unreadable. (Indeed, I won’t even read on; I know I’m not going to like that book or that author.) Where the violence involves sadism or anything with a sexual edge, then any hint of glee or pleasure in the moment is, for me and, I think for a lot of readers, just a hard no.

And for me, that’s what is always comes down to in the end.

Does the way you write end up commoditising violence – making a kind of porno reel out of it?

Or does your writing try to deepen our humanity? Does it try to enter those dark moments and speak truthfully of the fear, the grief, the compassion?

I think if you do that, you’re OK – no matter what your genre, or story, or purpose in writing. There’s a moment in my upcoming book where Fiona comes across a corpse. The man has been hit hard with a frying pan, then shoved into a freezer, where he froze to death. That’s an ugly (albeit off-screen) dying, but it wasn’t played for laughs. It wasn’t played for sadistic thrills. The murder delivered a moment of quietness – reflection. And Fiona then went to see the dead man’s father and brother. And felt their shock and grief.

None of this is filtered through some ‘holier than thou’ lens. The difference between my books and a sermon in church? Quite detectable, I’d say.

So, for my money at least, entertainment is fine. Violence as part of that entertainment is fine. But – stay human, not icky.

A good life rule, that.

…

FEEDBACK FRIDAY: Be Bloody, Bold and Resolute

Last week, I asked for 250 words of happiness. Today – violence.

The crack of a silver candlestick – Colonel Mustard falling – blood on the library floor. A country house aghast.

Take any episode of darkness from your manuscript and let’s have a peep at it. Remember: we don’t mind a bit of blood and gore. But stay human, not creepy, please.

Post yours here.

Til soon.

Harry