Back when i was taking art classes, one of my teachers walked around — this was a pastel life class — and then walked to the middle of the room and said “you all need to learn to go dark.”
Of course,I was already me, so I was sitting there quietly and heard myself say, in this horrible squeaky voice “Come to the dark side. We have cookies.” Yes, the class laughed, after a short pause.
At the time I didn’t see what she meant, but a few months later I could see it. All my paintings of that period are bland and kind of washed out and fuzzy, because there is no shadow or dark.
After a while of doing art, you realize that what you’re actually seeing is shapes defined against the dark. The dark has to be there or it all goes bland.
It’s the same in books. Look, yes, there are some of the more… popcorn books that are amazingly bland. In fact in fanfic they’ll advertise themselves as “no angst.” And when you read them, you….
Look, even in Jane Austen fanfic, I get pretty tired of no angst stories. Darcy doesn’t insult Lizzy at the Assembly. She never falls for Whickam lies. They dance, they go to dinners, they have twee conversations. everyone in society loves Lizzy. Darcy tells her how her very presence made him a better man.
Obviously some people like to write — and presumably read — that. But seriously? I wouldn’t be able to stay awake writing something like that. By about the third ball and 10% in with everyone praising each other I bail.
So, yeah, you need the dark. Your characters need challenges. Do they need utter disaster? I don’t know. I seem to be meanest to the ones I love. But I know it’s not an everyone thing. And I’m not gratuitously mean. I’m just mean enough to show off what they’re made of, because like light shapes are defined against the dark, characters are defined against challenges.
However, I’m going to make an important point: It’s possible to have too much dark. At the point where everything is dark, it’s no longer fun.
I can understand when the main character turns out not to be Simon pure. At this point it’s kind of a cliche, but you can work with it, and if you’re good enough it can be interesting.
But if one by one you realize every character in the book, even the toddler, are utter bastages and the book is the story of the author “punishing” them, also known as a long drawn out revenge fantasy, you’ve painted the entire room black, and you nailed the window shut, and you can’t see anymore.
Those aren’t fun either. As well as seriously worrying you about the mental state and the … well… the soul of the writer, because if this is not a mere whim to look “smart” and “important” and this is really how the writer sees the world, that person needs help.
The world is not sugar coated candy unicorns, but neither is it utter darkness and evil.
You need a little darkness in the light, but even the darkest book, you need relief. A little light. One helps us feel the other more.
So– add a little dark to your book. But don’t take joy in torturing your reader. Don’t kill the ones they love. The writers that go big that way had big promo and a lot of help.
And even with those, the time for them might be a thing of the past.
Come to the dark side. We have cookies. But don’t linger too long or you become blind to the light and the book becomes as much indistinguishable mush as if you never had any dark.
Mad Genius Club 
16 responses to “The Dark Side”
Taking that suggestion for the current WIP – got to put in some artistic darkness to the characters – besides being impulsive and too quick to leap to unfortunate conclusions…
Romance doesn’t need a lot of it.
Oh, it doesn’t have to be a revenge fantasy. It can be a straight story where you’re supposed to root for the main character. Nevertheless, it can lead to the Even Deadlier Five Words: “Why can’t you both lose?”
I remember the first time I painted on a black canvas. I remember showing the canvas off to my family: “Hey, look what I painted today at my lesson! It’s supposed to be a night scene!”
Far too many writers seem determined to take my joke and play it deadly serious. They probably would have entered the black canvas in an art show and fully expected to win the blue ribbon.
Grimdark has a market. I’m not it. Dark, depressing, grim, “they all should lose” is not what I want to read. I’ve lived on the edge of that – N.O.
Yeah, I’ve sometimes worked out pretty dark scenarios as thought experiments, but i can’t actually write them and I often can’t read or watch them either. One of the few pop culture pundits I follow on YouTube just lost about a bazillion points with me for endorsing The Brutalist, for instance.
I got started in horror, so yeah. I’ve written some pretty dark stuff. But more recently, the WIP started out with no villains at all. At least, not that the reader could discern through the PoV character. That story arc is more adventure/survival/post apoc than strictly hard sci fi (even though the readers tend to see it that way, strangely enough).
Later on though, the villains start getting sprinkled in like death confetti. Corruptocrats are a running background theme and Doc Z has a special hate on for them. There are also (BIG spoiler territory) entire cultures, corporations, militaries, and ex-Terran nation states of evil bastages out there, waiting in the wings. Backstabbing, thievery, murder, framing, lies and the whole gamut.
The lack of villain confrontation is a weak point in the early story arc, in my opinion. Even though there’s enough dark sh!t about what with the entire population of the planet either cannibalized by post-homo sapien sapiens (homo zombicus) or the chimera of biological and technological infection result, the villains provide a powerful lever for the plot to move it forward.
There’s a lot of reaction rather then proactive movement due to the setting itself. Not especially bad, but there needs to be choice, decisions made that drive the plot as well. Pivot points, if you will. The darkness of human depravity is rather overdone in zombie fic, and I’m trying to avoid that and make it a better story than having the survivors resorting to cannibalism and backstabbing themselves while hiding in the sewers (metaphorically or not) and bemoaning man’s inhumanity to man.
The MC has his issues. He’s arrogant as all heck, even moreso than he is intelligent, antisocial, has issues with authority, doesn’t like people or socialization much, and has some serious baggage issues that he’s been ignoring. Character growth is a large opportunity for him that is only slowly being tapped. He backslides occasionally and suffers relapses to his previous bad behavior at times, which present their own challenges.
Having that darkness is like setting borders. Or outlines. It draws attention to the contrast, which is reader crack from what I can tell, and really draws them in. In horror, the contrast was stark and in your face. Normal human life vs chaos, sudden violence, tension, and, well, lots and lots of gore and organic fiddly bits with a bunch of flies buzzing around the few recognizable parts that once were human.
i started in poetry, but yeah, first shorts were horror.
I wrote poetry too, early on. Man, those early attempts were… let’s not say bad because that’s giving too much credit. I dunno how they were even published.
Mine were in Portuguese. Some ALSO got published.
Um…. should I burn the poetry notebook before I die? My kids would be awfully embarrassed.
While I don’t normally advocate for burning ANY books (things with words in them), that might just be an idea.
…Wonder if I can track down any remaining copies of that publication. This being before the internet was much of a thing at all, there’ll be physical copies. Discretely burning them would probably be a net good thing for the entire world, right? Totally justified. Anybody else would do the same.
All my teenage prose went into a fire. It was all angst, dead trees, victim fantasies, and so on. At the time, it kept me sane and was good practice. After college 1.0, I destroyed it all. The poetry I still have.
My teenage prose was, if I recollect, more adventure fantasy that was a mix of JRR Tolkein and the spirit of moralistic local Just-So tales common in Southern Appalachia. Puerile, but kinda fun back then.
It was the early twenties what with the poetry and whatnot needs to be forgotten. I’d rewrite those quick little fantasy stories someday, if I could ever *find* the things.
My characters complain if I start adding darkness, because it’s more for them to clean up. Cuts into their romance time, and many of them feel they’ve brought more than enough darkness along with them.
That’s why every book ends with a party of some description. It’s my reward to them.
Because you do not want cranky characters cluttering up your cerebral cortex, kicking stuff over and making a ruckus. So distracting. ~:D
One does note that the idyll is a genre. On the other hand, idylls tends to be short.
When I was doing the fanfic thing, it felt like, if she did not have to deal with at least one strong negative emotion, the story wasn’t pushing her hard enough.
I was initially thinking she usually has a point when she excused herself to go have a cry, but looking back, it was only a handful of stories. It’s just they were very big impacts for the character, so it felt like there were more.