Why I Write Clean Fiction

I’ve started a lot of great books that I never finished.

Sometimes it was a graphic sex scene. Sometimes it was violence described in more detail than I wanted to read. Other times, the profanity became so constant that it pulled me completely out of the story.

Eventually, I began wondering: Why can’t a book be dark, suspenseful, frightening, and impossible to put down without all of that?

That question is one of the reasons I started writing.

My first novel began with an admittedly unusual idea: a Latter-day Saint missionary who becomes a vampire. Strange, I know. That book is still a work in progress, but from the beginning I gave myself a challenge. I wanted to tell a story about murder, abuse, corruption, vampires, and some very bad people—without profanity, sex scenes, or graphic violence.

I discovered something along the way:

Clean fiction doesn’t have to mean tame fiction.

A story can make your heart race without making you uncomfortable for the wrong reasons. It can explore murder, evil, loss, fear, secrets, and the darker sides of human nature without describing everything in graphic detail.

That first novel led to another idea, and then another. One of those ideas became Lies I Never Told. What We Should Know came from my desire to write something unusual—a psychological thriller built around a question I had never seen explored quite that way before: What if two people fell in love, married, and then discovered they might be twins who were separated as children?

Those are the kinds of stories I want to tell.

Stories with mysteries to solve, secrets to uncover, characters worth caring about, and chapters that make you want to read just one more before turning out the light.

My goal is simple: to write clean mysteries and thrillers without taking away the mystery or the thrill.

No sex scenes.
No profanity.
No graphic violence.

Just suspense, danger, secrets, twists, and a story I hope you won’t want to put down.

And perhaps my most important standard is this:

I never want to write a book I’d be embarrassed to have someone I know read.

If that is the kind of fiction you’ve been looking for, you’ve come to the right place.

DJ Rawlings
Dark stories. Clean pages.