This week’s events don’t help with this post, not because I feel any great need to add my opinion to the uncounted other ignorant opinions floating around (they’re mostly ignorant because most of those commenting don’t possess enough of the facts to be anything else, and that would include anything I chose to say). Rather, I’m in the middle of a very dark sequence in the current work in progress, and find myself wondering how far I should go.
I snippeted the opening of this piece a few weeks ago, and it’s grown to some 35k words in the intervening time, so it’s definitely one that insists on being written. The thing is, I have a lasting fascination with evil, particularly the borderline when dark becomes evil and vice versa. The question of when ruthlessness or even cruelty is necessary and when it moves from that to evil is a question I somehow always end up exploring no matter what I write, alongside the ability of evil to act in service of good. Big surprise, a lot of what I write shades very dark indeed, so much so that friends tell me if I think something is “creepy” chances are it’s frigging terrifying.
Because of that I tend to flinch when I write the darkest places. Not because it scares me, but because I don’t want to send my readers running screaming into the night. It’s counterproductive. I want them reading my book and wanting more, not cowering somewhere vowing to flee the moment I should appear.
Okay, I’m exaggerating. A little bit.
Between that and my tendency to get frustrated with the “evil for the sake of being evil, let me kick that puppy to show you how evil I am” cartoon evil that infests so many books (largely I suspect because their writers don’t really understand evil), my villains tend to be… realistic. Sometimes too much so. They have motives that humans can understand and those motives get shown. Sometimes those motives are things that leave normal people wanting to scrub inside and out (that piece hasn’t been published for complicated reasons), but they are right for that character for reasons that are usually fairly complicated.
Fortunately this piece is first person. I don’t have to get inside the POV of the villain. Except that I do, for reasons involving a magical gestalt and my main character being in the kind of horrible situation where dying is unquestionably the better option. My friends know that when I write this kind of thing they’re likely to get angsty messages, not because I’m scaring myself but because I’m worried by not being scared. By how easily I can slide into the mind of a character who has lost his humanity so profoundly he sees nothing wrong with courting someone while he’s torturing them.
So how much is too much? I’ve never been one for loving descriptions of every drop of blood, but the psychological dynamic keeps pulling me back. The emotions that go with the pain are something I dance around in damn near everything I write, one way or another, and I don’t know where the line between enough and “oh god no” is. Or even if it is.
Thoughts? Suggestions? “Keep away from me you crazy psycho woman?”
Mad Genius Club 
13 responses to “How Dark is Too Dark?”
I’ve never really thought about this before, but your post brings up the question of the difference between the physical and the psychological. First, physical descriptions are easier to write because you’re dealing with something tangible. They also seem to be easier to accept, for most people, if we go by the popularity of such descriptions (and images) in books, TV, and movies. The psychology of characters is intangible, but it also comes closer to resonating with readers. I think that both the difficulty of grasping what’s going on in a character’s mind, and the way it touches something in us are what make a deep exploration of psychology very uncomfortable and even unpleasant for a lot of readers.
If you’re trying to reveal the innate truth about a character, you’re going to risk losing some readers. The question is: what are you trying to achieve with the book or story? If it’s just entertainment, then maybe go lightly. I prefer to plunge as deep as possible, both in my writing and my reading.
It’s more that this is what the story demands and I’m worried that what the story demands will freak other people. And yes, the physical is much easier to accept than the psychological. The psychological cuts deeper if it’s done right.
If you are not faithful to your own vision – however dark – you will probably regret it.
The place you pay for being an artist in a tiny niche is that what you write may not have commercial appeal, ‘commercial’ meaning millions of readers. That thought is worth revisiting periodically, to see if there are any accommodations you are willing to make, of your own choice, that might make what you want to write accessible to a larger audience.
But the writing? Go right ahead. It’s only when you have to get your writing past gatekeepers who won’t publish it at all if they don’t like it (ie, publishing as it was), thus denying you ANY readers, that you HAVE TO cowtow to someone else’s taste.
There are plenty of people who don’t think cow dung piles – or worse – are ‘art,’ and hate it when such stuff shows up in an art gallery. That’s a similar situation: the gallery is the gatekeeper. Their stuff may not sell, but the gallery might get usable publicity out of having shown it. A dark novel that didn’t get out would be as useless as if it had never been written.
Now that you can put out almost anything you want by self-publishing it, the search for the right audience is up to you, and you might as well see if there are people who share your vision, but can’t write, and will be delighted you write it (and imagine it) for them.
I don’t think it’s crazy.
Of course, I’m in a similar boat: I don’t know yet if and where the audience for what I write is going to come from. I just KNOW, in my bones, it was never going to get an agent and a publisher the traditional way – which kept me from really trying to finish it. 2012 has been a huge revelation – the year I learned I can BYPASS THE GATEKEEPERS. I am excited – and well on the way to finish.
I wish you well – and that you stop worrying so hard.
Thank you.
This particular sequence is very dark and no gatekeeper would know what to do with it. Thank goodness for indy!
Of course, the story not letting me know how things well end doesn’t help, either. I’m getting this in dribbles.
I’ve got a similar problem with two scenes involving my MC and another character. In one scene she provokes him into lashing out at her (trying to prevent a blind berserker outburst that would involve innocents) and darn near gets killed by his reaction, and the second is similar. Do I scrap the stories or the scenes because people will scream about domestic violence? The MCs do not see it in that light. The characters say leave the stories alone, but I wonder . . .
Hm… I’d say leave the stories as is, but make sure you show the reasoning behind it so that readers can see that it’s not garden variety domestic violence. (Says she who has the torturer courting his victim. I”m a great one to talk about healthy relationships in fiction.)
Try it. See if it sells. Get worried if you start getting fan mail from convicted serial killers. Or self-proclaimed wannabe serial killers. Something like that might be a good reason to tone it down.
I have a slightly similar problem with one story I been have toying with, although there it’s a more a question of breaking a certain taboo rather than what I would consider evil. Group of humans and two individuals belonging to a human descended artificially created species, very human-like in most respects but still definitely a separate species. Planet that is alien enough they can’t eat anything there (neither humans nor the near-humans), dwindling food supplies, and the two with higher caloric needs than the humans. Humans have died, the temperature is cold enough that the bodies have frozen. Should I tell that the two near-humans have been eating the corpses? It would be logical for them, considering how I see the characters, technically not cannibalism because they aren’t humans, and they don’t kill in order to feed, just use people who have died – no sense to waste, especially since by keeping in good shape they will be able to protect the surviving humans better. But they are supposed to be the good guys, and lots of people have funny reactions about something like that. So, write that they do, hint at it but never really say it, leave it completely out? Well, lots of people also seem to like Hannibal Lecter so maybe I could write that they do, just keep it as tell, not show, and not dwell on it.
That may be the really scary part. Lots of people really do seem to like the monstrous characters, even the truly evil ones, and welcome them to side of the heroes if the writer goes for a heel face turn, or maybe writes a story which shows that the monster has actually have been sort of a good guy the whole time, and no questions raised about what evil deeds he may have been committing in the previous stories (unless they get retconned into not really having been his deeds, or having had some higher purpose, or that they actually were some sort of smoke and mirrors act and no real evil was, after all, done, or at least nothing really that bad, or the victims weren’t quite as innocent as they seemed at the time, or whatever).
Maybe the real measure really would be to see what kind of fans the story seems to be gaining?
I tend to get afflicted with gay characters. Not every time, but about 1/3 the time (all out of proportion to statistics.) This is not a problem PERSONALLY — I have a lot of gay friends. It doesn’t bother me. But I know it limits my audience because it bothers a lot of people — particularly as main characters (and even though I NEVER follow anyone into the bedroom.)
My compromise? Change it where I can. Sometimes I can’t. Either the book will fall apart, or the book refuses to let me write it any other way. The rest of the time? I write the story. If I lose readers, I lose readers. c’est la vie.
Thanks for the input. That detail about eating the dead isn’t particularly relevant to the story as a whole, at least right now it doesn’t seem to be, so leaving it out might not really change anything (I seem to be a pantser, mostly, so that might, however, change at some point, I do start with something of a plot but it seems to have a tendency to start changing after I get to the actual writing part). But it does say something about the characters. So I don’t know.
Well, I do have some time to ponder this, first of all I can’t really write much at this time of the year anyway, and it will be several weeks before that will get better, and when it does I really need to finish that almost finished fantasy novel first before starting anything new.
Yeah, the story has its rules. This particular one is turning out to be far more twisted than I’d thought it would be. I still don’t know if the villain will succeed in his redemption play or not – but from HIS perspective the story is a tragedy.
I can’t do anything the easy way.
I like the Showtime series Dexter. A lot of people do.
They skate pretty close to the edge sometimes, on purpose – and keep moving the edge – because the character is sympathetic.
The Godfather in Mario Puzo’s book was sympathetic – in a similar way: he was better than the corrupt cops, which somehow made it okay – and he didn’t deal in drugs, and respected women and children. IIRC, also didn’t get into prostitution.
These are not absolutely good characters – they are relatively good characters, or relatively well-motivated characters.
Trust your readers – if you think it’s okay for your characters to eat dead humans for your good reason, readers should get it. Just make sure they understand the motivation, which trumps gut reactions.
Ah, yes. That’s where I skate a lot of the time: evil in the service of good, or evil with standards, or the “necessary evil” that has to clean up the mess because the supposedly good are incompetent or corrupt or… You get the idea.
I suspect the fans would be a good indicator, yes. If I start getting fan mail from convicted mass murderers and serial killers then yes, I will be worried.
And yeah, people do seem to like the dark in a nice, safe environment like a book or a comic or what=have-you.