Write True Crime That Is Gripping and Fair

Most true crime books braid two timelines. One is the crime: the lives before it, the act, the aftermath. The other is the investigation and, often, the trial: what was known when, what was missed, what was argued. The tension comes from moving between them, and the reader's trust comes from never confusing them. Some books add a third strand: the author's own inquiry, told in the first person.

The genre carries ethical weight that fiction does not. Victims and their families are real; families are often still alive and may read the book. The best-regarded books in the genre give victims a life beyond the crime and avoid treating violence as spectacle. People who were suspected but never charged, or who were acquitted, cannot be written about as if they were guilty. Private individuals have privacy interests, and minors in particular are protected.

Sourcing is the discipline. Court records, police reports, trial transcripts, contemporary news coverage and interviews each carry a different weight, and the book has to be clear about which is which. Reconstructed dialogue should be marked or drawn from a record. Before publication, a publisher will usually have the manuscript read for defamation and privacy risk. All of this is easier when every fact in the draft points back to where it came from.

1. Create the book as Non-fiction and choose the main genre closest to your book; History often fits. There is no true crime genre option yet, so the genre is a starting point, not a label readers see.
2. Add every person to Characters: victims, family, witnesses, suspects, investigators, lawyers. In each entry, note what is documented and where, and whether the person was ever charged or convicted.
3. Build the Timeline in two lanes: "What happened" and "What was known". Put each event in its lane on the grid and link it to the chapter that covers it.
4. File each source in Chapter Notes as you use it: the transcript page, the article, the interview date.
5. Draft. In the editor chat on Premium or Pro, Robin can search the web for coverage of a date or a hearing and list the sources it found. Read the sources; treat them as leads.
6. Before the legal read, ask Robin every chapter where a given person is named or described. Robin answers from the whole manuscript.
7. On Premium, run the Proofing Pass with the Canon filter, which flags a name spelled differently from its Story Hub entry. Misspelling a real person's name is an error readers and families notice.
8. Share the draft with a small, trusted group through an expiring link. A link opens the whole manuscript, not a single chapter, so choose readers you would trust with all of it and tell them which chapters to focus on. Export a Word document for your editor and the publisher's lawyer.

• There is no fact-checking feature; checking is your job. It gives no legal advice either: defamation and privacy review is a lawyer's job.
• No footnotes or source-notes system. Keep sources in Chapter Notes or a Notes chapter and set them in editing.
• No document storage for case files, and no images in the manuscript.
• The Timeline's "When" is a label you type, not a date the app sorts. You set the order.
• Reader Pulse (Premium) scores tension and hooks. It says nothing about whether a scene is fair to the people in it.