Influence in Writing

Dolor for Misdeeds is the culmination of several influences in my life and writing. As my first novel, DFM was really the one project to date that I have been able to dedicate enough time and interest in to see it to completion. If you read the book, I think you might see where some of the following things fit into the story.

One of the influences of the "misdeeds" aspect was certainly Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky. While I do not dare compare my own writing to that of Dostoevsky, the genius of his description of Raskolnikov certainly motivated me to imagine a character who was suffering such psychological distortion for his actions. Most of us have a few things which come to mind in our past lives that we wish we had never done, albeit short of murder.

Another influence that shows up in Dolor for Misdeeds was my own personal experience on a jury for a murder trial. Sequestered with the jury for the better part of a week, I was intrigued by the process of "a jury of one's peers" and the dynamics that make up a such a group. I had just read Grisham's The Runaway Jury a few weeks before the event, and in some sense I felt that I was living the experience for those few days.

Finally, Jeremiah 17:9 states that "The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?" The corruption of the human heart by sin is something we can only begin to understand in this lifetime, and the effects of sinful actions are often greater than we could ever imagine. We justify our own secrets by whatever means, while there is really no such thing as pure objectivity when it comes to ourselves.