The Moral of the Story

In the wake of the mass shooting in Las Vegas, the deadliest in US history, I was listening to a segment on the radio about research into gun owners in Australia. Rather than reinforcing the idea that weapons were more likely in rural areas where they are necessarily used for farming and predator control purposes, it found that a small number of urban gun enthusiasts and sports shooters were amassing huge arsenals. One owner had 283 guns. All legal, of course, otherwise the researchers would never have known about them.

There are plenty of illegal guns in Australia as well, estimated at about 10,000, but the strict gun control laws in this country mean that gun ownership is seen as unusual, abnormal even. We don’t have the gun culture that the US has, I suspect partly because of the different ways in which the countries established their independence from their shared colonial master.

The reason this segment on the radio resonated with me is because the main character in my debut novel is a small weapons engineer, a gun designer with a large arsenal of her own, although primarily comprised of historically significant pieces worth a lot of money. In the as-yet incomplete sequel, the novel begins with the opening night of an exhibition of her collection at the Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond, Virginia.

I began writing the character and her story in 2004. There’d been plenty of mass shootings by that time (Port Arthur, Dunblane, Beslan and Columbine just to name a few within my lifetime) and yet I didn’t give any thought to making her someone with a passion and a skill for such deadly machinery. I just thought it made her unique, intelligent and determined. She must have been to have made it in such a male-dominated industry. In fact, part of the storyline was that her employer kept rolling her out to be the public face of the business to demonstrate how progressive they were.

So why now, more than a decade after I created her and five years after I published the novel, was I suddenly having a crisis of conscience? The Las Vegas shooting was still very raw, so there was that. My longest non-familial relationship had also just ended in a not unexpected but still devastating death. Grief was at the forefront of everything. And since I’d gone back to a non-writing job four months ago that left little spare time and meant I’d written nothing new in just as long, I was doing a lot of reflecting on things I’d already written.

It was Oscar Wilde who said, “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.” But, despite the many terrible things he experienced as a man who was well ahead of his time, he could never have imagined the world in which we live today, in which something we tweet or post on Facebook can go around the globe multiple times in mere seconds. He could also never have imagined the terrible weapons we have at our immediate disposal, particularly in a place like the US where guns in their many and deadly forms are seen as a right and not a privilege.

I’m not arrogant enough to assume that anything I write has influenced or will influence anyone to do anything more than buy my books (or not buy my books, as the case may be) or buy someone else’s books (in the case of my book reviews). But I suspect that any writer who doesn’t understand the inclination to go on a shooting spree and kill dozens of people will at one point or another in their writing career question their decision to write about the things they write about, especially if the things they write about encompass the horror of things like murder, rape, paedophilia and war.

But the reality is that fiction is more often influenced by people who choose to do terrible things than people who choose to do terrible things are influenced by fiction. And the fact that we writers wonder about the morality of the things we choose to write tends to suggest we fall into the camp of the traditional “good guys” because the “bad guys” perpetrating terrible crimes spend very little time on morality beforehand or remorse afterwards.

And yet none of this makes us feel much better when terrible things happen. Another sign of being a “good guy”. So what can we as writers do?

The answer, to this question and to so many others we ask ourselves in the writing caper, is simply to write. Write what you must. Write what you can. Write whatever it is in your heart to write. If it is faith that inspires you, then write it. If it is the good deeds of others that inspires you, then write it. If it is an exploration of the darker side of human nature that really gets your creative juices flowing, then you must follow where it leads. Pretending it doesn’t exist won’t get any of us anywhere closer to a better world. But there have been plenty of books that focus on difficult subjects that have changed the world. If you’re brave enough, yours could end up being one of them. And if your writing is honest, then morality will take care of itself.