I browse the daily news with one eye open for articles which would help us all write better. That’s the only reason for this website to exist. I came upon this article in The Guardian which I felt fitted the bill beautifully. It was written by someone whose dad was murdered when she was 12 by a teenage gang.

The Guardian article reads like a police-procedural – albeit an up-market, unusually reflective one. But it isn’t a work of fiction – it really happened. Just not in the way the author had imagined.

Any crime novelist would be proud to be able to write like that. Laconic, with well-chosen words and impeccable logic, but with acute awareness of people’s emotions, especially her own as a 12 year old. And of how emotions twist perception, especially of traumatic events. Precisely those events which merit the application of critical thinking. Far more than we are in the habit of giving them.

Years later the original police report came into her hands. It concluded: “As it develops [sic], the circumstances presented themselves in a more criminal and sinister manner than perhaps they deserved.”

A tactful understatement.

Recently she got to meet the boy (now a man) who had been accused of her dad’s murder – and justly acquitted, to her family’s enduring fury. And the story he told her was nothing like what she’d been expecting.