by E. D. Rich
Rage is all the rage. Contained rage, unleashed rage, the tiny bubbles of simmering rage rising to the surface becoming a full boil. We love to read it.
The character who unsuccessfully manages inner turmoil who turns to his or her rage engages readers while they go on the journey with the villain, or perhaps anti-hero. We love to watch the honing and weaponization of rage as it transforms into action that cannot be undone.
How do writers get there, though? What’s the hook? In the age of true crime, the journalistic approach has proven to get readers to the endpoint with a set of facts, the ever familiar who, what, when, where, why, and how. Readers get through the story without a lot of the description found in fiction. Character development in true crime leans toward facts and personal accounts.
True crime podcasts have taken center stage in the audio media we consume. There are festivals and tours. Podcasts have gone from being strictly audio content to being video broadcast, too. The popularity of true crime isn’t going away either. We are hooked.
As humans, we constantly strive for meaning, and true crime gives listeners an opportunity to try to unravel what happened, what went wrong, and why. What causes an average person to turn into a killer? Some of the more popular true crime podcasts manage to tell the story, inject humor, and interact with the material, to make their brand of podcast more attractive and palatable to enthusiasts.
When true crime podcasts first proliferated, I’ll admit, I was sucked in. It shocked me to learn how many truly disturbed people may be in my orbit. I’ve learned a lot about personal safety as a result. That said, I don’t live my life in fear, but I’d be lying if I didn’t admit I am more aware of my surroundings since listening to true crime podcasts. And, the best podcasts do have strong entertainment value, based on whatever delivery you like for ingesting stories of true crime.
Pivoting from true crime to fiction, (which can be written with a true crime approach), authors have an opportunity to occupy a character’s headspace. We, as readers, can go back in time to see the cog and spring assemblies behind the character’s personality and story arc. Fiction gives readers the who, what, where, when, why, and how but on a larger scale because authors have the canvas of an entire novel to answer the questions as well as the luxury of building three-dimensional characters.
Authors can build the same backstories for characters who may serve as counterpoints for one another where the characters use the experiences in diametrically opposing ways, showcasing in some tales just how thin the line between good and evil can be.
We don’t have to like the characters, but during the course of reading novels, we’re given an inner glimpse to their psyches—again, we see the cogs and springs were maybe not oiled, cleaned, maintained. On the flip side, maybe the assembly was cleaned too often, and perhaps the springs were wound so tightly, they eventually snapped apart. Whatever the case, we get a front row seat to a slow burn.
What about the hero? Going back to journalistic tradition, the hero is typically a person from a law enforcement arm, and we don’t know much about the person beyond a mention in the article. True crime podcasts may feature the hero in an interview, allowing the listening public to have a vested interest in this individual. In fiction, though, the author can draw someone fleshed out, someone with his/her own troubles and challenges and a complete backstory.
Let’s adopt the following postulate: Heroes who are flawless are uninteresting.
Undertake an exercise. Take five minutes and bullet-point your own hero. Take another five minutes and bullet-point your villain.
Who has an ex-spouse, a drug problem, economic hardship? Do both the hero and villain operate outside the law? Why are they on opposite sides of justice?
Before I landed on my bulleting exercise, I tried out some software that prompted me with a battery of questions about characters, setting, and plot. I felt like I had written entirely too much into my answers, confining myself to something I wanted to evolve on its own on the page. I know there are writers out there who follow a defined outline, and they create amazing work. There’s a different approach for everyone. One of the things I learned from my trial with the software’s mental teasing was getting a more fully formed picture of my villain and hero and getting key details documented to help me stay true to what I was creating. If I didn’t like it, I could scrap the characters and create someone or something different.
Am I a master crime fiction writer? No. Do I read a lot of crime fiction? Yes. Have I listened to a lot of different true crime podcasts? Yes. Have I become a better fiction writer from the experience? I like to think so. What have been the biggest takeaways for me? I can start at the end and work my way to the beginning and then spin the whole tale. I get to fill in the blanks, and I don’t have to stay true to people or events except as I’ve created them (or deep-sixed and re-created), but I do still have a framework to honor and questions which still have to be answered to make the entire work make sense. And you can bet there’s rage.
–Contributed by E. D. Rich
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