Do you think an author is ever to be held responsible for the things people do as a result of reading their work, even though fiction is fiction?When I was a young writer, a man killed his boyfriend, and then tried to make it look like a SANDMAN-inspired suicide. I spent a weekend trying to understand how Sandman 19, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, could have made someone kill himself. On the Monday I discovered it hadn’t. But I had thought about things a lot over that weekend. I came to the conclusion that fiction is indeed fiction, but that as authors we have an obligation to create stories we can stand behind.
But I also came to the conclusion that authors of fictions cannot be responsible for the things people do as a result of reading them, any more than we can blame the Beatles and their song Helter Skelter for the Charles Manson murders. Hurting people will take their inspiration where they can, in a book, a song, in the bible or a movie. I owe them good stories. I cannot be responsible for everyone to whom the story is told.
This happened at my college in the very beginning of my freshman year. For at least a few days the local news stations were calling it “The Sandman Murder". It was the first time I’d ever heard of Neil Gaiman, though I’ve gone on to read a bunch of his work since.
That week and the ones that followed was such a chilling time on campus, as we tried to separate rumor from fact (it was a fellow student that was killed), and people swarmed the local comic shops to get a copy of the comic while other local retailers tried to get it banned before young, impressionable minds got hold of it. For a while we thought there was a killer stalking the campus until news of the other boy’s suicide hit the news.
The incident also led to the formation of a gay/lesbian support group on campus.
As a fiction writer myself, I agree with Gaiman’s assessment. The writer is not responsible for who reads their stories. Mostly I’m reblogging this because of the memories it brought back of a time where I was so naive to so many things. Never stop reading. Never stop learning.
The murderer left a copy of Sandman 19 and a “suicide note” about Sandman on the body.
I heard later that neither of the men read Sandman at all, although the murderer was a big X-Men fan. I did not ever think to blame Chris Claremont for the crime.
It was so long ago, and for a couple of days the media was gearing up to destroy Sandman, and my editor was scared, and I was scared. And then I learned it was a murder, not a suicide, and the media dropped the story completely, and I felt like someone had tried to frame me for murder, and in some ways they had.
Never stop reading. Never stop thinking for yourself.
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