4 Ethical Rules for Writing True Crime
True crime is a story of the once-living, meaning a usual requirement for the genre is that our main characters have been murdered, often in unfathomable ways. Beneath the true-crime explosion is a collective suffering about this, an audience driven by heartache toward podcasts, books, and cinema offering companionship in the otherwise lonely act of processing violence.
(5 Rules of Ethical Journalism.)
Everyday writers now dig through cold case files or flock to fresh homicide scenes hoping to land a book deal. The aluminum pens held behind their ears are reminiscent of pick axes catching daylight over the shoulders of prospectors searching for gold.
While true-crime writers rush toward the next story, it’s important that we don’t forget the most import tool in our rucksack: our duty to the dead, and to those they’ve left behind. To that end, here are 4 ethical rules for writing true crime that no writer should approach a homicide story without.
1. Remember Who You Are
Many writers in the genre came to true crime through their own trauma. Some survived abuse, others abductions, many emigrated from law enforcement, others from war. Despite differences, most of us writing stories of death do our work in a train car riding what I call “the ghost rail,” that haunted artery between our past traumas and the present day, where we struggle to assimilate.
In a way, our daily existence runs parallel to the procession of the dead, who reach at us from broken bodies as we roll by. That’s why we tell their stories to begin with, because almost nobody would otherwise believe what we see—nor, especially, what we feel.
The dead are sometimes closer to our hearts than the living, as only they know what we’ve been through. When we accept that about ourselves, we are no longer writing exploitatively “about” the dead but alongside them, with authenticity, which is the only ethical starting point.
2. Remember Who You Are Not
The ghost rail should not be treated as running the gravy train, no matter the surge in true-crime interest. While all writers must promote our stories, promoting true crime requires grace.
One might understand this intuitively, but will only truly learn this through mistakes: The temptation is to hawk one’s true-crime tale like the latest automobile in a new car lot, but ethical true-crime promotion stems entirely from pushing the story, not the sale—and there will be sleepless nights if we do so without honor. I know from experience that the dead will sometimes bang their fists on the door to a writer’s home, saying they’ve paid enough already.
And we must not only honor the dead in our approach to promotion but also honor those they’ve left behind. We are rooted in the true-crime pursuit as writers, not salespeople, and neither the dead nor their loved ones should be treated as accessories to our ambition.
3. Love Everyone
As I alluded to in While Idaho Slept, we must love all victims as if they had remained the children they entered this world as. Only then can the dead be mourned-for properly in our pages. Yet I don’t mean we must simply paint them lovingly—we must truly love them, unconditionally, so that the pain of their absence vibrates through our sentences. If nothing else, it is our job to claw at the hearts of a readership with that love, no differently than the dead might claw upward to be heard again.
Likewise, we must love the survivors, those parents and siblings and friends of the dead who cry into their shaky hands at night, not knowing how to move on. They didn’t ask us to tell their stories, but they often find themselves as central characters, their broken hearts brimming like a flooded well we often return to for material. To offer them anything less than love in return is a sacrilege.
Learn more about J. Reuben Appelman’s While Idaho Slept here:
(WD uses affiliate links)
And, perhaps controversially, we must find our way toward love for even those monsters who haunt our pages, for they, too, began as children, and did not ask for the disease of violence in their minds. We must not necessarily forgive them, only first love them if we are to understand them enough to tell their stories with delicacy. That is our duty, since we have co-opted even their tragedies for our pages. Their punishments are the responsibility of their own gods, not of the authors who have chronicled their lives.
4. Tell the Truth
In my True-Crime 101 course, one of the lesson plans is called “Get your story right.” How true-crime writers should do that is pretty simple: Tell the truth, and your story will always be the right one, even if it wasn’t the story you expected. Did you go out to the crime scene but nobody would talk to you? In that instance, it’s natural to think you didn’t learn anything.
But what you learned was that the neighbors won’t talk to you! That’s a big part of the story when we wrap our minds around only telling the truth.
And it would be easy to embellish about the dead, whose retorts go unheard by all but a writer’s conscience. Having studied the practice of embellishment like sleight of hand in social media funnels, most of us now intuit how to massage a story for wider readership, but few people have greater responsibility to the truth than writers, especially in the true-crime genre where the real story is the only story.
The dead and living alike depend on our accuracy, even if unflattering. Was the victim physically attractive? Say so, but don’t call him beautiful if he wasn’t, especially if his soul was unclean. To love him is your duty, but you must love him also for his flaws, sometimes even for his participation in the circumstances leading to his death. It is human to err, and that is sometimes a true-crime story, as well.
A writer mustn’t stray from where the truth takes us. Otherwise, we risk fictionalizing more than minor details—we may accidentally lay claim to disproportionate real estate in the emotional funeral ground where true-crime literature keeps its bodies. Equally important about telling the truth is the sparkle in a sentence that seeks it. Honesty in the genre is not only ethical, but leads to art.
(ChatGPT: A Writer’s Best Friend…for Now.)
Some believe there are simpler ways to write our stories about the dead, perhaps even through Artificial Intelligence gathering the facts and smashing them into paragraphs. Even today, some writers close their eyes as they type, not just to the glow of their computer monitors but to old concepts like truth and honor, and sometimes even to the value of life itself. Life, however, is what the dead miss most.
The payoff for a readership should be the beautiful embrace of what’s right in front of us. What we see, touch, and feel in our hearts is a gift, and we should honor those without these luxuries by practicing a code of ethics as we stampede with our notebooks toward their deep, unfathomable plots in the ground.