Real Life Versus Fiction

The very first rule of writing fiction rejects the basic truth of life: Characters must be consistent. If the matriarch of a powerful family of soda pop manufacturers has been established through three hundred pages as obsessively well organized, she cannot meet her end by getting her feet tangled on one of her own discarded sweaters and falling out her bedroom window. This kind of thing happens to people every day in the world we inhabit, despite evidence of past behavior, but we have left that world for a better one. If it happens here, we will throw the novel or short story out the window after the old lady, and good riddance to them both. In a pilotless universe, we accept confusion because there is no place to file a complaint. In a story, plotted and executed by an individual or individuals in collaboration, we know whom to blame.

Loren D. Estleman, Writing the Popular Novel, 2004

A Forensic Psychologist On the Insanity Defense

My forensic workup is a good deal more intensive than that of most other forensic psychologists, but anything less would not satisfy my standard for formulating an opinion "with a reasonable degree of psychological certainty," which is what New York's insanity defense statute calls for. What goes on in the mind of a murderer at the moment of his crime will always remain unknowable. But I believe it is my professional mandate to make the most thorough, informed, and educated judgment I can. [Critics of this branch of psychology would call it an educated guess. Forensic psychologists routinely testify against each other in insanity defense cases.]

Dr. Barbara R. Kirwin, The Mad, The Bad, and the Innocent, 1997

Establishing Time of Death

     Throughout the long annals of true crime lore, countless murder convictions and acquittals have come down to this: When did the killer strike? When did the victims breathe their last? In the absence of credible witnesses, the lack of an easy answer has bedeviled our criminal justice system since its inception...

     Murder investigators found themselves desperate for clues as to time of death, and not just for evidence of guilt at trial. Knowing when a victim died could speed the earliest stages of an inquest by ruling out suspects with confirmed alibis and focusing scrutiny on those who did not. The postmortem interval, or time since death, proved even more critical in cases where a corpse turned up decomposed beyond recognition. Even an approximate time of death gave investigators a framework in which to connect the remains to a suspicious disappearance.

     Yet for all its importance, determining the time of death has defied the detective's magnifying glass and the pathologist's scalpel for over 2,000 years. Even today, despite crime labs crammed with high-tech equipment for DNA analysis, toxicology, serology, and the detection of rarefied chemical vapors, we remain nearly as blind as the ancient Greeks with their belief in maggots sprouting fully formed and spontaneous from the flesh of the newly dead. [They did not realize that maggots were fly eggs.]

     Nonetheless, it still startles most people to learn that a prudent medical examiner can rarely, if ever, accurately measure the interval between death and a body's discovery...

     The myth of the medical expert's ability to nail down time of death has endured. No doubt this stems in part from the many pathologists who continue to offer more precision in court than their science can rightfully claim. That they do so is understandable enough, given the relentless pressure [put on them by detectives, prosecutors, and the public].

Jessica Snyder Sachs, Corpse: Nature, Forensics, and the Struggle to Pinpoint Time of Death, 2001 

Dealing With Repeat Offenders

What has too often happened in the past is that people have threatened punishment but have failed to carry it out. It's imperative in any initiative that is undertaken that punishment be real and that there be truth in sentencing, and that the truly dangerous offenders--the recidivists and career criminals--be put away and kept away.

Janet Reno, U.S. Attorney General under President Bill Clinton

Writing as a Calling

There's a difference between a vocation and a profession. A vocation is a calling--something you are called to. A profession is something that you practice. In the states, I think about 10 percent of the novel writers actually make a living out of their novel writing. The others have the vocation, but they can only partly have the profession, because they have to spend the rest of their time making money in order to keep themselves in their habit. They are word junkies. They've got to pay for their fix. I chose university teaching because there is a long summer vacation, and also because you could fake it.

Margaret Atwood, 2002

Novelistic Tones

The tone of a novel may be described in words like comic, wry, reflective, tongue-in-cheek, bittersweet, or in compounds such as incipient fear, sense of lurking evil and sense of unease.

Lesley Grant-Adamson, Writing Crime and Suspense Fiction, 1996 

Using a Pen Name

Pseudonyms are especially attractive to fiction writers, whose work (inventing people and seeing the world through their eyes) requires an impersonation, of sorts. Writing under a pen name is like doing an impersonation of someone doing an impersonation. I've fantasized about using an alias, but my fantasy mostly entails making a lot of money writing a quick horror novel. [Unless you write in that genre, good luck with that.]

Francine Prose, "Bookends," The New York Times Book Review, November 17, 2013

Stray Bullets: The Empire State Building Police Involved Shooting Case

     Jeffrey Johnson, a quiet, 58-year-old loner without a wife or children, lived near Central Park where he bird-watched and photographed hawks. He left his Manhattan apartment at eight in the morning of August 24, 2012 dressed in a suit and tie, and carrying a briefcase. Johnson, a T-shirt designer, had been unemployed for a year after being laid off from his job in the garment district. Behind in his rent, he faced eviction, and on this Friday morning, left his apartment keys behind in an envelope for his landlord. In his briefcase he carried a .45-caliber pistol, and extra ammunition. Mr. Johnson had no intention of returning home that day, or ever.

     Just before nine o'clock, Johnson took up a position between two parked cars near the offices of his former employer, the Hazan Import Company located just down the street from the Empire State Building. Johnson was lying in wait for Steve Eroclino, the company's vice president in charge of sales. It was no secret that Johnson believed that because Ercolino had not aggressively marketed his latest T-shirt line, he had lost his job at Hazan. Following. the termination, the 41-year-old sales executive accused Johnson of  harassment. There was clearly bad blood between these two men. While hard feelings are common in business and people get fired, Mr. Johnson wasn't your ordinary disgruntled ex-employee. That Friday morning in the heart of New York City, Jeffrey Johnson was on a mission to kill Mr. Eroclino and then force the police kill him. He probably didn't realize that several innocent bystanders would go down in the crossfire. Or maybe he did know and just didn't care.

     As Steve Eroclino approached the building housing the Hazan Import Company, Johnson came out from behind the parked cars, walked up to his target, and shot him in the head. Mr. Eroclino dropped to the pavement. Standing over the man he had just shot, Johnson pumped four more bullets into his body. After making certain that Mr. Eroclino was dead, Johnson calmly walked down the sidewalk toward the Empire State Building at 34th and Fifth Avenue.

     Two New York City patrol officers who had been standing a few yards from the shooting site approached Johnson with their guns drawn as he moved along the sidewalk among panicked pedestrians. Johnson, aware he was being stalked by the officers, abruptly turned to them and raised his pistol. The police officers, just feet from the gunman, opened fire, sixteen shots in all. Three of their bullets found Johnson, nine of the slugs ricocheted into, or directly hit, nine pedestrians desperately trying to get out of the way.  Bleeding bystanders were scattered about the sidewalk and lying in the street. According to initial news reports, the gunman had killed one man, then had opened fire on innocent tourists. But Johnson and the nine pedestrians had been shot by the two officers. Of the ten people shot by the police that morning in the shadow of the Empire State Building, Jeffrey Johnson was the only one killed.

     One of the police officers had fired nine times, his partner had fired the other seven bullets. All of the bullets were hollow-points. Compared to full-jacketed projectiles, hollow-points, upon impact, expand. This makes this type of bullet especially damaging to human tissue and bone. The police prefer hollow-points because they are more lethal than regular slugs, and they do not pierce vehicles, walls, and other barriers. For that reason, hollow-points are considered appropriate for use in urban settings. But they do ricochet, and when they miss their targets and hit bystanders, they produce angry wounds.

     In the Empire State Building case, the fact these officers, while firing sixteen shots at an armed gunman at close range, fired thirteen stray bullets reveals an important reality about police-involved shootings. Formal firearms training, and hours and hours of police range target practice, does not prepare officers for real-life gunplay. The conditions in military combat situations do not lend themselves to handgun accuracy. Moreover, the use of semi-automatic pistols in an urban landscape where bullets ricochet amid a dense population puts bystanders at risk. Notwithstanding the best firearms training in the world, collateral damage is always a risk in police involved-shootings. Fortunately cases like the Empire State Building shootings are rare. 

The Benefits of Writing Nonfiction

I find the possibility of life as a fiction writer horribly depressing. Nonfiction, meaning journalism, essays, scholarly work, etc. is far more important to me because I am attempting to have an actual impact on the culture, on politics, and on ideas in people's heads. Nonfiction provides a more direct line to all of those things than fiction, which is too often used as an escape or to console people about their lives. Oh, and nonfiction pays much better.

Nick Mamatas, smallsspiralnotebook.com, 2005 

The Politics of Fiction

     The line between fiction and nonfiction is more blurry than many people like to admit. Sometimes, political writing that claims to be nonfiction is actually fiction. The political power of such fiction-as-nonfiction is undeniable…

     The power of fictions that admit to being fiction, such as novels, may seem to pale in comparison. There are exceptions, of course: In popular lure, Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin is said to have led to slavery's abolition.

    Novels aren't directly credited with starting wars, yet fiction still instigates change. Fiction can say publicly what might otherwise appear unsayable, combating the coerced silence that is a favored weapon of those who have power…

     Does fiction affect politics? Yes, inevitably. So is all fiction political? To my mind, yes again. Fiction writers who claim their writing is not political are simply writers who seek to dissociate themselves from the politics furthered by their writing. Making up stories is an inherently political act. Like voting is. And like choosing not to vote is, too.

Mohsin Hamid, The New York Times Book Review, February 17, 2015