The First Day of the Rest of My So Called Blog
Tuesday. The week begins not with a bang but with a whimper. Well not even a whimper really. More of thought on taboos.
See, today is September the 11th. It's a day we're told to never forget, and with good reason.
But it's also a day that as a thriller writer, fresh on the back of Silver selling into hardcover, I worked up an outline and sample document for a new book which felt like the thriller 'holy grail' - I had it in my head to do a terrorist novel about an elite taskforce of terror cell hunters formed in the wake of 9/11, and with the 10th anniversary of that haunting and heartbreaking personal tragedy that touched so many lives-including those of friends of the family. The idea was that if I were a terrorist, with the escalation of fear caused by the assault on the Twin Towers a credible threat would always surface on 11th of September 2011, to mark the tenth anniversary.
I plotted it out fairly tightly with an American co-writer who all of a sudden disappeared and the book was left to languish, the timely nature of it meaning that once a certain date past it was dead. It wasn't until about 6 months later my co-author on the project emailed to apologise and in his mail cited the fact he felt 'uncomfortable trading on tragedy'.
That really struck me as a strange reaction given the subject of just about every war novel and contemporary thriller in some way trades on the tragedy of real life events and asks 'what if?' It's not about forgetting or remembering for me. Yes real lives were lost, but does that mean as an author you can't write about World War II or the assassination of JFK or well, looking at the book charts quite a few 'root causes' that revolve around personal tragedies and shocking events. Could you never write a child kidnap story for fear of upsetting people over Madeleine McCann? Or a secret service story where an agent's family get gunned down in the French Alps? Or a novel set in a high school massacre?
Where as writers do we draw the line and say okay enough time's elapsed for that to being grist to the creative mill?
Will it ever be 'fair game'?
Should it?
Needless to say I was quite disappointed that task force novel was ditched, because I thought it had the potential to be a powerful and emotive read. But today I wonder, am I glad I didn't write it in the end?
See, today is September the 11th. It's a day we're told to never forget, and with good reason.
But it's also a day that as a thriller writer, fresh on the back of Silver selling into hardcover, I worked up an outline and sample document for a new book which felt like the thriller 'holy grail' - I had it in my head to do a terrorist novel about an elite taskforce of terror cell hunters formed in the wake of 9/11, and with the 10th anniversary of that haunting and heartbreaking personal tragedy that touched so many lives-including those of friends of the family. The idea was that if I were a terrorist, with the escalation of fear caused by the assault on the Twin Towers a credible threat would always surface on 11th of September 2011, to mark the tenth anniversary.
I plotted it out fairly tightly with an American co-writer who all of a sudden disappeared and the book was left to languish, the timely nature of it meaning that once a certain date past it was dead. It wasn't until about 6 months later my co-author on the project emailed to apologise and in his mail cited the fact he felt 'uncomfortable trading on tragedy'.
That really struck me as a strange reaction given the subject of just about every war novel and contemporary thriller in some way trades on the tragedy of real life events and asks 'what if?' It's not about forgetting or remembering for me. Yes real lives were lost, but does that mean as an author you can't write about World War II or the assassination of JFK or well, looking at the book charts quite a few 'root causes' that revolve around personal tragedies and shocking events. Could you never write a child kidnap story for fear of upsetting people over Madeleine McCann? Or a secret service story where an agent's family get gunned down in the French Alps? Or a novel set in a high school massacre?
Where as writers do we draw the line and say okay enough time's elapsed for that to being grist to the creative mill?
Will it ever be 'fair game'?
Should it?
Needless to say I was quite disappointed that task force novel was ditched, because I thought it had the potential to be a powerful and emotive read. But today I wonder, am I glad I didn't write it in the end?
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Don't blame your friend, though. Honestly, touching the subject with anything less than kid gloves was verboten in the US for a couple of years there. I mean, they were airbrushing the WTC out of movies, ffs.