Responsibility through ridiculous inaccuracy

Censorship is not my jam, but personal responsibility is. My first book, Chasing Sisyphus, is a futuristic cops-and-bounty-hunters romantic suspense that includes fighting, shooting and people dying.

So, naturally, I went down a bit of a rabbit hole trying to learn some of the mechanics of real-world violence. It helped that I had access to self-defence subject matter experts, the internet and useful books. (For anyone interested in this topic, Rory Miller���s Meditations on Violence was educational in ways I didn���t expect.)

At some point, I came across a talk on knives that included a note on how you really kill someone with a knife versus how Hollywood kills someone with a knife. It���s no understatement to say this terrified the crap out of me and, despite my excitement at learning a new fact, I was absolutely not in a rush to share it in my writing.

Quite often, it seems like real-world accuracy affords you respect in fiction writing, particularly around historical accuracy and scientific accuracy. I fully concede my perspective on this may be skewed. I could just be living in a filter bubble of media consumers who love to hate on fictional elements that don���t reflect real life.

Anyway, Chasing Sisyphus was my first book and I was still getting my head around where my boundaries were with all this. Sharing true-to-life mechanics on knife violence just for dramatic effect ��� risking people using this information to nefarious ends ��� struck me as a hard no.

Is this the dreaded, awful thing we call censorship? It doesn���t quite feel that way, does it? That information is still out there, accessible to audiences. I just don���t want to be the bearer of it. This doesn���t feel like self-censorship either, because that would presume I actually wanted to write about that kind of thing in the first place.

Maybe it���s conceited to presume my book would even reach someone who���d weaponise this knowledge against another human being, but the (paranoid) part of my brain that imagines possible futures instinctively recoiled from this one. Graphic, gritty and gory is fine, but I���ll stick with the unrealistic, laughable Hollywood flavour of it. Even if it means my writing idols will never respect me.