Censorship is not my jam, but personal responsibility is. My first book, Chasing Sisyphus, is a futuristic cops-and-bounty-hunters romantic suspense that includes fighting, shooting and people dying.

So, naturally, I went down a bit of a rabbit hole trying to learn some of the mechanics of real-world violence. It helped that I had access to self-defence subject matter experts, the internet and useful books. (For anyone interested in this topic, Rory Miller’s Meditations on Violence was educational in ways I didn’t expect.)

At some point, I came across a talk on knives that included a note on how you really kill someone with a knife versus how Hollywood kills someone with a knife. It’s no understatement to say this terrified the crap out of me and, despite my excitement at learning a new fact, I was absolutely not in a rush to share it in my writing.

Quite often, it seems like real-world accuracy affords you respect in fiction writing, particularly around historical accuracy and scientific accuracy. I fully concede my perspective on this may be skewed. I could just be living in a filter bubble of media consumers who love to hate on fictional elements that don’t reflect real life.

Anyway, Chasing Sisyphus was my first book and I was still getting my head around where my boundaries were with all this. Sharing true-to-life mechanics on knife violence just for dramatic effect — risking people using this information to nefarious ends — struck me as a hard no.

Is this the dreaded, awful thing we call censorship? It doesn’t quite feel that way, does it? That information is still out there, accessible to audiences. I just don’t want to be the bearer of it. This doesn’t feel like self-censorship either, because that would presume I actually wanted to write about that kind of thing in the first place.

Maybe it’s conceited to presume my book would even reach someone who’d weaponise this knowledge against another human being, but the (paranoid) part of my brain that imagines possible futures instinctively recoiled from this one. Graphic, gritty and gory is fine, but I’ll stick with the unrealistic, laughable Hollywood flavour of it. Even if it means my writing idols will never respect me.