Bestselling novelist Don Winslow explores the tricky ethics around depicting violence in fiction
There are some hard ethical questions in the writing of crime fiction.And if so, how do you do it with some sense of morality?
And maybe I’m wrong about not sanitizing the violence. There is, after all, a place for the cleverly plotted, suspenseful whodunit with its witty dialogue, exotic locales, and intriguing characters. It’s fine, as long as we know it’s a game and we play by its rules and know its conventions. So if Colonel Someone kills Lord Someone Else in the study with a monkey wrench, we don’t expect to see the blood and brains and we don’t feel much from the grieving family except anticipation of the will.
Not necessarily. Many readers of crime fiction go to books for an escape from reality, and there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s a legitimate choice on both the writers and reader’s part. I’ve made that choice myself, in pieces that were never meant to depict real events. that were so horrific as to be surreal. I didn’t think the reader would even believe them. But, in all candor, the larger reason I didn’t was that just couldn’t bring myself to write them. I just couldn’t do it to the reader—or to myself.
There were still times when the story required that I write the actual violence, but I started more to write the funeral, the wake, the feelings of the survivors., the effects over the course of years. Maybe I’ve just softened over time myself, I don’t know.
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