Done any crimes?

[Cammy May Hunnicutt]

You, know, serious crimes.

 

It's funny, they always say "write what you know".   (And what most of "them" know is campus politics)   So should crime writers have some experience?   

 

I'm not much of a criminal type.  Well, violence.  But that's not like planning out how to kill somebody or how to take all their money.  Then living with it.  I know some people who do serious crimes.  I don't really chase "bad boys".  More the other way around.  But I seem to have a knack for getting tight with guys who theive and brutalize a bit.  I've been present when crimes were committed, which can be the same thing when you get to court, it turns out.  Sometimes I feel sorry for the guy being worked over or ripped off.  But sometimes not.

 

But do you think you can really get into the head of somebody who can point a gun at somebody and say they'll kill them if they don't do something, then if they don't do it, they go ahead and kill them?   Or somebody who just got crippled so somebody could take their bank card and the $60 they just got from the ATM?   Much less more serious stuff?

 

We think we know what we'd do if somebody killed our mother or raped our daughter or smashed up our brand new BMW, but do we?  Is that really what we'd do?

 

Are most people law abiding just because they lack the guts to just take what they want?

 

 

[Dana King]

Stephen King answers this quiestion well in his book ON WRITING. He mentions science fiction and murder mysteries, and asks does it mean you have to have ridden in a starship or committed a murder to write well about one.

 

"Write what you know" doesn't mean to write ONLY what you know. It means to put what you know into every story, regardless of the plot. Was your father a butcher? Then make a character a butcher, or a relative/friend of a butcher. The verisimilitude will be better for it. Ever been arrested for anything, no matter how insignificant? Use that to build the thoughts of a suspect currently in custody. The trick is to find something, no matter what it is, that is part of you to be used in some part of the story.

 

I had a bad temper and a short fuse when I was younger. (Nominally better now.) I can describe what it feels like to go from zero to asshole in less than five seconds pretty well. That's not what a story will be about, but it's there if I need it.

[John McFetridge]

Yes, I think "write what you know," means write about emotions you know and offer up some insights.

I would say that most people are law-abiding not because they lack the guts to simply take what they want but because they have moral codes that they live by in which taking what's not yours is wrong. It isn't a matter of guts, it's a matter of morality.

At the same time I've read a lot of fiction that doesn't understand the lack of morality required to simply take what you want affects every aspect of that person's life. I've known (and am related to) a few lifelong criminals who have the guts to take what they want. What they lack is an understanding of what that means to the people around them. The same 'quality' that allows them to take what they want also means that they always think of themselves first. So those crime fiction characters that are only sometimes thieves, or only steal from certain kinds of people, or the serial killer who only kills 'bad guys' never rings true for me because it comes at it from the wrong end - for the people who 'simply take what they want' it's all about what they want and the only thing that stops them is lack of opportunity.

 

[Cammy May Hunnicutt]

But do we really know the emotions associated with killing and stealing?   

Can virgins write realistically about sexual passion?

 

I was just wondering if we had and actual delinquents in our midst, and if it helped them in their writing about crime.

[John McFetridge]

Well, there are plenty of criminals and ex-criminals who've written books (or had them ghost-written but still signed their names), fiction and non-fiction and no, it hasn't helped very much. Just like cops and ex-cops. Joseph Wambaugh has written some great books but other cops have written not-so-good books.

Experiencing the emotions and the ability to communicate that experience are two different things.

But I'm sure there are some delinquents in our midst ;)

 

 

[Mary McFarland]

Hmmm, good question, Cammy.  About the sexually realistic virgin writer, I'm not sure, but I can say definitively that I can write about any crime imaginable because I put myself inside the head of the perp. when I write, and I don't hold back.

 

Do I imagine a crime the way it would actually go down?  Again, more food for thought.  Regardless, I do my research and then put my crazy writer's brain to work on creating an emotional scaffold for a crime that would make Ted Bundy shudder.   

[Brian Hoffman]

Can the experienced write about virgins?  Yes. 

And yes, I've killed someone.  In war.

[Mary McFarland]

Just a brief sentence, yet so powerful.  What are you writing, Brian?

[Brian Hoffman]

I am completing my first publishable  thriller.   It is titled "The Eighteenth Scroll". I'm also finishing (this week I hope) a collection of five short stories titled "...And the Night Moves."  I am working on another collection of five stories called  "The Detweiler Stories" about a werewolf of all things, and my next novel is called "4 Kinds of Homicide" and it is in outline stage and I have seven chapters in draft form.

I have another novel called "Luna Park" on hold until I clear some of the other projects.  I have a novel outlined called "Living and Dying in Vietnam".  This weekend I got inspired and made notes on a supernatural thriller called "Third and Rose"

Other than that, I lay around and watch television.

Thanks for asking.

My advice is not, write what you know,because you can learn anything.  I think you should write what you feel.

[John McFetridge]

This article is a little wordy, but talks about the whole, "write what you know." i liked the stuff about Tim O'Brien, but that may be just because I really like, "The Things They Carried."


http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/08/don-rsquo-t-wri...

[Cammy May Hunnicutt]

I never bought that "write what you know" stuff, actually.  It's odd this had turned into that just from dropping that one phrase into my inquiry about criminal experience.

I saw a post the other day that said it should be "Know what you write".   

I think it's more like "Write what you can pull off".

[Dana King]

I like your last line there. A lot of successful authors subscribe to that, whether they'd phrase it that way or not. Someone (Otto Penzler) once asked Elmore Leonard how he was able to capture the speech of criminals so well. Leonard asked if Penzler had ever spoken to a lot of criminals. Penzler admitted he hadn't, so Leonard asked how he knew Leonard was good at it.

Seems to me he pulled it off, and has been doing so for over fifty years.

[Cammy May Hunnicutt]

Love the Leonard quote.   There's a sort of "perceived reality" about things that doesn't really have any basis in actual experience.

I used to go with a guy (if that's what you'd want to call it)  who did prison time and got mad whenever anybody talked about the "Oz" show being so realistic.  He thought it was a stupid fantasy and kept saying, "What makes you think it's realistic?"   I think journalists and reviewers do a lot of that because it makes them seem cool.  Actually they have no way of knowing what the "gritty reality" is inside an Al Queda cell or whatever.

 

I was thinking after another post I did here,  the guy I'm talking about--and a lot of his buddies--have no idea how it feels to kill somebody or rip somebody off.  They just don't have normal feelings.  So they aren't much advantage in creating a story.

 

One thing he said is interesting here, though,  "You might think you know when and why you'd kill somebody.  But you're never sure until you're holding a gun on him and find out if you can pull the trigger or not."

 

That's kind of what I'm getting at here, I guess.