The Pain of Writing Violent Fiction

It is hard for me to live in a world of violence, cruelty, and grief, even if that world is only imaginary. And yet fiction is about struggle and conflict. Often the conflict escalates to violence.

Yes, a few genres, like cozy mysteries (with the murder safely off-stage) and sweet romances (with the conflict about what’s keeping the lovers apart) don’t have that level of conflict or risk or resulting pain. But the ones I read and the ones I write do.

Amazon has, over the 4+ years I have been self-publishing there, made it harder to sell books if you write two a year. You have to write five or six a year to stay visible in the charts, and that’s extremely difficult to do. Readers can read a book in a day or two and think it feels “too short,” but the 75,000 words I wrote took to provide that experience took me considerably longer than a day or two to write. After closing a book of mine, you get to hug your kid and dog and cook up a nice stir-fry. Day after day, I'm mired in my creation.

During the writing, and the editing, often without vacation time between, I’m thinking about pain and terror and loss. With post-apocalyptic fiction, I’m glancing off: “oh right, and six billion other people are dead too” but I notice it. It wears on me, which is why I don’t write only post-apocalyptic with its endless fight to just survive, which I have to feel too in order to make you the reader feel it.

Right now, I’m writing about Nazis in France in 1944 and the brave spies of the Resistance and SOE who worked against them. The research alone is horrifying. I was not even looking for horrors one day a couple weeks back (sometimes I must, but not that day) and found a list of known SS officers on Wikipedia. If they knew what atrocities each had committed, they listed it in a simple sentence.

Glancing through them (I was only hunting for a rank!) was like being smacked in the gut with a baseball bat. One Nazi concentration camp doctor who had literally hundreds of recently dead Jews (disease, overwork, shot trying to escape) available for study had 86 relatively healthy ones gassed so he could study their skeletons. And briefly, there was a museum of them. (I didn’t follow up, but I know the Nazis pretty well by now and am guessing it was to “prove” they were an “inferior race” through some nonsense about bone measurements, and the museum was provided so other Nazis could walk through the horrific display and nod about how "right" they were about that. Spoiler alert: they were wrong, dead wrong. No group of humans is inferior to some other group. Period.)

mass grave #3 at Bergen-Belsen

This research actually hurts. It hurts worse because I worry about the state of the world today. It hurts because I must think about very real dangers and terrors and possible outcomes for my characters, who I come to almost believe are real, must become them with their terror, must witness what they witness--and then describe it all. And then edit those words. And then proofread those words. Day after day after day.

I’m glad I’m writing this book, and I think it will be a page-turner and moving to read. But I’ll also be glad to see the end of it.

Sorry to complain. I know I’m not digging ditches during the hot summer for a living, that I sit in air conditioned comfort and type, but there are other strains than back strains. I’m feeling more than a bit strained right now.

Thank you for listening.