Permission to Harm Low Hanging Fruit in Fiction

Writing fictional murder is dangerous not for the act, but for the shortcuts it can invite. “Low-hanging fruit” victims are a no-go zone. For many, it’s too much to bear.

People often ask why writing about murder in fiction is dangerous. Not because of violence itself, but because of who the violence lands on. If the victim is weak or helpless, a minority, the reader can switch off.

Low-hanging fruit is usually defined by appearance: the quiet one, the needy, the short, the obese, the socially awkward, the marginalised, the person who seems sicker, poorer, less equipped to fight back. Readers recognise them instantly. They’ve been trained to. We all have. And when a writer leans too heavily on them, the murder stops being a narrative act and becomes something that’s downright offensive.

But what unsettles me — and what interests me — is how often that fruit is in disguise.

Some of the most dangerous people I’ve written about don’t look dangerous at all. They present as fragile, kind, overlooked, and maligned. The reader’s sympathy moves toward them almost automatically. And that’s where the risk lies — not in killing the vulnerable, but in misidentifying vulnerability.

In this instance, their facade is a weapon. Softness is a strategy. Victimhood is rehearsed. When the mask fractures, what’s revealed behind it shocks. That moment — when the reader realises they’ve sided with the wrong person — is the real violence. And it doesn’t require just one drop of blood to right the wrong.

Writing about murder becomes ethically dangerous when it reassures the reader that they should know the deal, but the weak person suffers at the hands of the so-called villain. Ironically, it becomes awkward (yet ethically right) when the victim turns out to be a fake, and their comeuppance arrives at the hands of that same person.

In my novel SEETHINGS, I return to this type of tension again and again — not to excuse harm, but to question the shortcuts we take when deciding who is safe to condemn versus who needs condemnation. Low-hanging fruit isn’t always ripe. Sometimes it’s bait. And sometimes the hand reaching for it is the thing that needs examining most.

SEETHINGS is available at smashwords.com.

–Michael (Dark fiction. Author of SEETHINGS (the first book), free for a limited time)