What if your novel inspires a murder?

A great reason to procrastinate on writing your novel, or perhaps never finish: it might inspire a murder.

You might think that only Stephen King or Jeff Lindsay (author of the Dexter novels) really has to worry about that. But murderers can be inspired by anything.

There were two teen girls in New Zealand who were inspired by the music of Mario Lanza. They went on to make up their own fantasy world, and when the grown-ups objected, the two girls murdered the mother of one of them. With a brick. (One of the girls grew up to be the mystery author Anne Perry).

If Mario Lanza music can inspire murder, ANY old novel you might write could inspire a murder. You might not get called on it if you write books about saintly elderly nuns tending a garden rather than about serial killers chopping up prostitutes. But there is no predicting ahead of time what some deranged killer might claim as inspiration.

What is our moral responsibility as writers, then? We cannot control how other people will react to our work. But what we can do is ensure that our fiction has a moral compass.

'Fiction with a moral compass'. It's not fiction in which no character, not even Lord Voldemort, ever does anything morally questionable. Our characters may sin away. They may not even be aware that what they are doing is wrong. But if our fiction has a moral compass, we, as authors, must know, and we must find ways to share that knowledge with our readers. You don't need to preach a sermon. Just a word or two, perhaps out of the mouth of a minor character, to show that killings, theft, adulteries and the like are not the right or wise thing to do.

To be good at this, you must have an accurate moral compass yourself. If you have been trained by your church in catechism classes and know the Christian moral teachings well (or Jewish teachings, or Muslim teachings...), you have a head start.

If you are the sort of person who rejects moral absolutes and traditional Christian values--- the way I used to be--- this can cause a problem as it's difficult to get across the message that murder is absolutely wrong if you also have a message that NOTHING is absolutely wrong. But it can be done--- there are secularist, non-Christian and anti-Christian authors who write as if they had a good moral compass at least when it comes to murder, rape, child sexual abuse, major thefts and the other traditional moral teachings of Western culture that they don't reject.

Still it seems to me it's safest not to publish at all, just to be safe. ;)