1.3 Gordon Brown

Authors often take part in writing panels (or author panels). These typically take place in book shops, or at conferences or literary festivals. Normally they involve several different authors with a moderator who facilitates the audience, who are able to ask questions of the authors. In this interview Gordon Brown talks about a question he is often asked at such events by his readers.

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GORDON BROWN

In terms of the impact the character has on a reader, one of the favourite questions or a couple of the favourite questions that get asked at writing panels when you’re doing crime writing panels is, you know, what you write is bad. Aren’t you scared someone’s going to copy it? Or, why do you write about that stuff? Why are you writing about the bad stuff? I often point out, actually real life is far worse.

There’s things out there in real life that I would never put in a book. There’s stuff I will not write about, and I won’t put it in. And the stuff that my editor would turn around and say to me, do you know what? That just doesn’t work. What I hope can be taken from mine-- from my writing, is that the reader gets to connect in some way to a world that they don’t inhabit, and maybe makes them think on that and think on what’s happening inside that world, even outside of the book.

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The crime writers therefore all have a clear awareness that their work is very much viewed as fictional by their readers, and give a sense, if you like, that different rules apply in the fictional world. There isn’t a sense that writers are worried that readers will copy what they do, and there is an awareness from the authors that one of the benefits of reading might be to connect readers (safely) to worlds they don’t inhabit.

One of the potential benefits of fictionally inhabiting worlds we might not want to access in real life is that this experience, obtained through reading, leads to the potential for growth, which is what you will learn more about in the next section.