Terrible things happen in the stories I tell.

In books–and the games in which I participate–my storytelling veers towards the darkness, sometimes unrelentingly so. This isn’t because I have any gratuitous or salacious fascination with violence. (I personally shy away from the horror genre and I can be quite squeamish when it comes to gore even in the fiction that I enjoy.)

Admittedly, dark is in. As the world seems grittier and more dangerous, people are increasingly turning towards even darker fantasy worlds for entertainment, as if it might make the times we live in a little less scary in comparison. But I don’t write dark because of commercial trends either.

I do it for the same reason that your hand hurts when you put it on a burning stove. The pain forces you to action, focuses your thoughts with immediacy so that you can see exactly what is important. You yank your hand away. You learn from this experience. Pain tells you that something matters.

When I’m writing a dark story in which the innocent die in horrible ways, in which the beautiful are scarred, and in which loss is near depthless, it hurts. It hurts me as an author and forces me to dig deeper. It makes me think about the meaning of the awful things that have happened in our world in the past and still happen now in places in the world that most Americans never think about.

Now I’m not saying that authors can’t learn anything important, or teach anything, or communicate anything, through laughter. Comedy is its own brilliant art form and I respect it. I enjoy it. But that’s not my talent, so to speak. At least not yet!

While my fantasy stories always have moments of redemption and my romances always have happy endings, I try never to bypass the black hour of the soul. In part, maybe it’s because I’ve lived a pretty privileged life. I’ve had every advantage and opportunity. And that, in turn, makes it incumbent upon me to look at the lives of people who haven’t.

And not just that. Not just the big evils of our world, the commonplace horrors of war, and all the stuff that they gloss over on the evening news. I also like to explore what it was like for women to live in a time when they had no power–because that time isn’t so far in our past. I like to challenge conventional wisdom, cloaked as sensitivity, but which serves as just a new expression of old misogynistic mindsets. And lastly–perhaps least pretentiously–I think it’s important to poke at the demons inside me and expose them on the page.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 12th, 2010 at 3:27 pm and is filed under Miscellaneous. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.