The Writer in Black

The Writer in Black

Sunday, March 9, 2014

Come to the Dark Side. We have STORIES.

Musing a bit here but back when I got started, late 80's to early 90's, the music I listened to was all of a piece (bear with me.  I'm going somewhere here).  Love songs and ballads, lightweight pop music, that sort of stuff.  The fiction I read was mostly, almost entirely, pretty upbeat as well.  As one example, I got so bothered, so freaked by the "danger" to the protagonist in the late Harry Harrison's "The Stainless Steel Rat's Revenge" that I nearly dropped the book.  I got through it and ended up reading it and the rest of the series, but it was a close thing.  I couldn't really deal with the darker elements of life, not even in fiction and music.

This showed in my own writing.  I never really put my characters in jeopardy (EMT was probably the most "risk" I put my characters through at that time).  And when I tried, I tended to shy away from expressing it vividly.

The result was rather weak writing.  I was able to sell some stuff if I had a clever enough gimmick but that was about it.

More recently, I've gained an appreciation for the dark.  John Ringo's books have introduced me to power and gothic/symphonic metal.  And that was really a catalyst.  The fear, the outright terror for the fate of the characters one is reading, is what makes for powerful fiction.  Back when I was in sunshine land I could not have written "Plague Station" (still looking for a few beta readers if anyone's interested).  I had the idea for "Oruk Means Hard Work" years ago but I couldn't have written it because I couldn't have written the ending, the way it had to end.

There's a great line from a movie that was otherwise, IMO, pretty lame:  if you want to paint pictures like that, you've got to use some dark colors.

Thus ends this musing.


And so let me end with this musical interlude:

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