On Crime Writing

 I'm still not entirely sure about this business of longform writing. For someone who's been writing since at least the 1970s, I'm remarkably tentative about it. 

I have a back-catalogue of non-fiction articles, short stories, and some verse, most of it dating from after the Great Purge of the mid 1990s. Prose at around 2,000-6,000 words? Sure! Verse? Sure! But longform writing? -er- ...

And here I am, writing a crime novel. Crime? Really, Nisaba? After all the genres you are interested in? Of all the genres you could have picked for your belated first novel, crime? And here's the thing - it was never meant to be a crime novel. It was meant to be psychodrama. Black humour at times, perhaps. An existential and metaphysical romp through the mind of the protagonist. 

I thought a lovely lens through which to look at the minds of my characters, might be the lens of crime and punishment. That creates unique stresses which are going to expose any cracks, and it's the cracks that make people interesting.

From the very first paragraph it was evident that crime was involved. It was also clear that it was not a whodunnit: who dunn it is known at the outset. So, not a thriller, but a novel with crime as the book's windmill. 

The original plan was to have two major characters bouncing off each other. At the beginning of the book one of them is free and apparently stable, the other is serving a custodial sentence and apparently dangerous. As the book went on, the one on the outside would go through a gradual process of personal disintegration, while the one inside develops into a structured and upright personality.

I liked the idea of two different personalities, one on a downward trajectory and the other on an upward trajectory. And that is still the larger plan, although now that I've spent some months with my characters and have got to know both of them quite well, there are interesting little fiddly bits in the book that don't take away from the basic planned structure, but add some interest and decoration.

If you are looking for a fast-paced adventure, this is not it. If you are looking to solve the mystery and work out who the murderer is, this is also not for you. But if you enjoy looking at the lives and minds of bizarre and damaged human beings in an environment that is drenched in blood (blood that is always shed offstage), then perhaps you will like it.

The more I write, the less I like my characters. But the more I write, the more interested I am by my characters. There is a dark fascination that makes me think about them all the time. I wake up thinking about them. I go to sleep thinking about them. And in this process, the next chapter gestates in me, until when I next sit at the keyboard, it flows out of me as fast as I can type.

I've been talking about it. A publisher I spoke to, compared it with a particular NZ crime writer, which was both deeply complimentary and also a bit odd, as I don't feel like a crime writer. This same person mentioned as a possible genre, rural-noir.

... which got me thinking along another line. Just why are there so many dark novels set in the bush?  I've lived in big cities. I've lived in tiny country towns. Currently I'm living between the two, in a regional centre that is small enough to feel rural and large enough to provide everything I need. And let me tell you: I feel a hell of a lot safer here or in tiny bush towns or even camping by the side of the open road, than I ever do in cities.

In large cities, you have a much larger population around you, so you are more likely to have criminally freaky people in your sphere. In smaller communities, if they don't all know you, they know people you know, and are much more likely to have a kind of tribal acceptance of people living in the region. Goodwill is rife in the bush. And a larger percentage of people seem to be educated and have a bit of creativity about them somewhere.

You're safer in the bush. You can walk around at night. You can't do that in a large city. I just worry that, by setting a bizarre novel about bizarre people in the bush, I am perpetuating the irrational urban fear of darkness, of unlit streets and low populations. But I can't rewrite this book to place it in an urban setting - it just wouldn't work. At least, I'm not skilful enough, personally, to make it work as an urban book. 

I just can't imagine either of my two main characters in Adelaide, or Sydney, or Melbourne: not in the inner suburbs, not in the suburban sprawl. Yet both of them have pasts before the start of the book where they lived in urban environments. The  destruction of their lives may have happened in rural Australia, but it could well have started in the soulless cities. 

I'm absolutely not writing that in. You have to allow the reader to do at least some of the work. I'm not spoon-feeding anybody - do your own thinking.