On the Dark Side (Yeah, Yeah) On the Dark Side…
For this week’s roundtable, we’re all going to take a walk on the dark side. (It’s okay if you sang the Eddie and the Cruisers song just then.)
Do you have limits to how dark you will allow your fiction to become? How do you determine those limits?
Sara Freites Scott: Yes I do have limits. I go by how it makes me feel when writing. I push it a little but if I start to feel too uncomfortable reading it back or even writing it I’ll scrap it.
John L. Taylor: Since my writing is mostly of a darker tone, I’ll answer here. As to how dark I let it get, two things determine my limits:
1. The community standards of the publisher/platform, and
2. the needs of the narrative and characters.
Sometimes going needlessly dark works against you, but as a rule the less likable or “good” my protagonist is, the darker the antagonists need to be by contrast to still accept the point of view of the main characters. Stories like Blood Meridian and The Hellbound Heart wouldn’t work with lighter treatments. But darkness isn’t always just horrible deeds being done to someone for shock value. It’s as much the way they process their experiences, beliefs, and traumas that’s dark. There I wish community standards on platforms like YouTube were more context-flexible. I have a half-complete yet unpublished novel. The protagonist is someone who engages in self-harm behaviors and a big part of the plot is her overcoming her trauma and evolving beyond it. In no way does the work glorify this behavior or encourage it. Indeed, it takes a stand against self-harm. Still, any such descriptions are against Facebook and Amazon’s standards, so the project remains unfinished because content platforms deem any depictions of such behaviors unacceptable without regard to context. That said, I do have hard limits on some content as both my wife and mother are survivors of abuse situations which I refuse to portray in a positive light or for rote shock value. Simply put, I’ll write like Clive Barker or Dean Koontz, not Bentley Little or Aaron Beauregard.
Lucy Blue: I write in two very clearly defined, very much opposite modes–light stuff like the Stella Hart books (which are downright frothy) and dark like The Devil Makes Three, which is very dark indeed. But yeah, there are limits. I’m good with disturbing or frightening my readers–I love it. I even enjoy the idea that my story might haunt them later. But I don’t want to make them vomit. As a reader, I’m a total wuss, but as a writer, I blow right past my reader limits like I don’t even know they’re there.
Read the full article:
https://seanhtaylor.blogspot.com/2024/02/on-dark-side-yeah-yeah-on-dark-side.html
