Violence

As I've begun skimming all these writers' blogs, I'm fascinated by how so many writers spend their days doing ‘writery' things. Pacing in front of a typewriter, glass of whiskey in one hand, giving a seminar at some conference, some woodsy retreat.

     At a quarter to seven this morning I was standing barefoot in my yard holding a twelve gauge shotgun as a sick, possibly rabid, raccoon stumbled toward me. Maggie had taken our dog in the house and closed the door.

     I grew up in the rural South, where husbandry is often linked to violence by necessity. I grew up around guns, and a gun culture. At my high school almost every truck had a gun rack, every car a pistol on the seat. But we never shot anyone. ‘Beat the hell out of each other, maybe, but I don't think I ever had a discussion with my friends back then about killing, except in war.

     So I killed the raccoon. Put it in a box and called animal control, some forty miles away. I sit here now, still waiting for them to arrive, over three hours later. Not unusual, here in the deep woods.

     But I didn't just kill a raccoon. I committed an act of violence. I felt it, viscerally, from the bile in my throat to the ache in my shoulder, a vibration through me by this act of violence that is still here. Violence is visceral. It is physical. It leaves a stench that other animals recognize.

     I spent almost an hour bleaching the kill spot first, then hosing the area down over and over again, in case the results will come back positive for rabies. After I let my dog out, maybe ten minutes ago, she went straight to that spot and put her nose to the earth. We leave a trail behind us, all living things do. It's why people are compelled to travel a thousand miles to touch a piece of highway where a loved one was killed. To leave a little cross in the grass, a handful of flowers.

     I write mystery fiction, political thrillers mostly, from a private detective's point of view. There's always a body count. But unless your protagonist is one of those rare, true sociopaths, he or she will not wade through rivers of blood with a smirk saying things like "hasta la vista, baby," or "I'll be back."

     Violence takes a toll, even if it's necessary. Occam's Razor (also known by the curious term The Law of Parsimony) applies to animal husbandry as well, as it did this morning. My options were to leave it alone, close the door and hope it would wander off to maybe infect another animal or human, or to kill it.

     I killed it.

     And here's where this becomes writery. I served during the Vietnam war, though I never had to kill anyone. In the course of my long life, growing up rural, I've had to kill beloved pets because they were in terrible pain with no chance of recovery. I've held them in my arms and kissed them goodbye as I ended their lives, and as I get older it gets harder.

     I could say I ‘put them down,' but that wouldn't tell the real story.

     Never treat violence in your writing as though it had no consequence. It does. From a slap in the face to a murder, it's an unnatural act. In the land and the time of my raising, boys fought all the time. We didn't even have to be mad at each other, we just liked the sting of pain, the rush of adrenaline. The odd relaxation that followed.

     To those who didn't grow up this way, the act of striking someone with your fist isn't natural. It causes such a rush of adrenaline that a person, sometimes, finds it hard to stop. Or, the thought of it makes it impossible to raise that fist against another. Shooting at a target isn't the same as shooting at a living thing. I know...I've done both.

     One of my dear friends, who fought through WW Two under Halsey's command in the Pacific on the deck of a ship, told me how he once stood on deck in underwear and a flack jacket, shooting a fifty caliber gun into the air at diving Japanese planes, shouting over and over the whole time, "God, please don't let me kill anyone!"

     He's gone now, and I miss him. Violence should never be used lightly in a novel. Never.

                                                Mike