Personal Dilemma: Writing Darkness (Vent)

[Arch9CivilReactor]

I had to rewrite this many times and thought I might as well begin with a disclaimer. I’m not really expecting anything from this post. It is just giving voice to a dilemma I avoid normally. Say what I really feel even if it’s just on a forum.

From what I can tell, my dilemma stems from being unable to write ‘positive arcs’ despite personally liking them. It’s a contradiction from my rational mind influencing imagination. My stories end up as either one or the other.

Either a hopeful world, or a despairing world.

I’m unable to imagine the characters I’ve read in stories I admire going through ‘positive change’ after experiencing setbacks. I can only imagine Suburu’s ‘What if’ side stories when thinking about how I would write the next chapter of it.

My readers usually tell me that I write darkness tastefully, but I know that the only reason I’m writing ‘darkness’ is out of angst. Those stories never last longer than a scene mostly because I can’t imagine positivity in a despairing world.

As an example of this, I’m going to bring up ‘Death is the only end for a villainess’. It starts off as a story about neglect. I cried when reading the FMC’s pain in early chapters of the novel. I also sympathised with why she never changes.

Neglect isn’t exclusive to those who hate you.

You can love a person and show kindness at every occasion, but that doesn’t mean you’d want to see or empathise with their sadness. It is a selfish relationship. Loving for the sake of feeling like a good person, rather than being one.

I can’t imagine the FMC of that story forgiving her neglectful family. Just as I can’t bring myself to forgive people IRL. I want to imagine the FMC becoming happy by forgiving them if they have redeemed themselves, but cannot imagine it.

I can imagine a hopeful world where the FMC can work through her issues, but it’s hard to imagine this hopefulness when the line is crossed. Maybe that’s why I feel so cathartic when Xianxia MCs kill their evil relatives.

Guess I’m just petty like that. Imagining every scene of that story being about the FMC murdering her family. I just get so influenced by the character that I forget about plot. It becomes more about fulfilling my angst than telling a story.

This is where the heart of my dilemma sleeps.

I feel ashamed to write a ‘dark story’ that’s just angst fuel. A story that simply says ‘doing bad things get bad results’, as if that isn’t obvious. It is so dumb that I feel my work is actively lessening the IQ of the person reading it.

Obviously, you can’t kill all you hate and be done with it. The whole “and then I killed everyone I hated” ending is the same as “and then everyone died”. It’s troll logic when you get to that point. I tend to delete everything just to start over.

No ‘story’ should be like that.

I don’t know how to ACTUALLY write a tasteful dark story. Only the kind of embarrassing edge fuel you’d think a teenager wrote. Even worse that Redo of Healer because there is no end goal when I write ‘darkness’. It is just me venting.

I’m not gonna end this with a question like other posts. This is something I just gotta figure out.

I hope I can accept this part of me one day.

 

[Simo]

Writing is different from one person to another, don’t be ashamed of your own writing, instead try to embrace it. There’s nothing wrong with how you feel, nor is there anything wrong with writing angst, you are an emotional person and that’s not a bad thing. Stories come in different types, genres, etc… and there is a reader base for almost everything you can imagine. Continue with what you enjoy, and don’t try to change yourself to fit in with what you “think” is the norm, you will end up hating writing. Good luck my friend, and I hope you can accept that part of yourself as well.

 

[Fox-Trot-9]

The fact that you're acknowledging it and are actively trying to overcome it or just cope with it enough to not let it take over your creativity means that you at least have something to shoot for, both creatively and emotionally. I do that a lot, too, especially when shit hits the fan, and I'm venting through my writing, and it shows. But my question is this: Why are you so hung up on whether it's angsty or not? And why are you so hung up on positive arcs and negative arcs?

It's not like you have to reinvent yourself to write what you wanna write just b/c the stuff you've been writing keeps turning into angst. You don't need to change who you are or how you feel to do that. You just gotta work through it. Improving at writing is a lot like emotional shadow work in that you have to keep doing it to see progress. This also operates on the same principle of getting good at writing. You gotta work through it. You're gonna write a lot of stuff that makes you cringe and feel dissatisfied, but that's okay. The thing about writing stories and working through your emotions is that it takes courage to keep going just as much as it takes courage to start over. But as long as you keep at it, you keep getting better even when it feels like you're not. Then one day, you'll find that what you're writing now is objectively better that what you've written beforehand, but you need the practice and the perspective to see that. So chin up, you're doing fine.

 

[WinterTimeCrime]

Wow, you're like me for real.

When I wrote my first book, Let's Imagine A Female Knight, I just wanted to write tons of gore and horrific scenes traumatizing my main cast as much as possible. I was dealing with some real-life stuffy and high school, so you know how it goes. Probably used the book to vent looking back, anyway...

My friend, also my former AP English instructor, asked why the characters in my short stories were sad or emotionally ill. I told her that those were the only characters I knew how to write in-depth well (and to some extent, this is still true). She replied with something that I've never forgotten and whisper to myself every time I begin writing: "When you write a character, you give a piece of yourself, but that piece is like a prosaic clay. Sometimes it's nice to pound at the mold until it's flat, but remember, it's just as important to shape it up into something better."

Super cheesy, yes. But it turned my first book from a girl who wanted everyone to perish and feel her pain to overcoming depression and suicide, accepting that she's fragile, and allowing others to help put her together again. For me, I just looked at my main character and asked, why was she miserable? After some reflection, I corrected it through narration, then worked on myself. My readers enjoyed the revised version, and my biggest fear was that becoming more vulnerable would make me lose my horror-writing edge, but it actually made my work better.

I'm still an avid horror writer, and I love working with traumatic MCs, though I don't push them into massacres and world-ending scenarios unless it builds them up. My advice would be to ask your character(s) why they're miserable; what's stopping them from saving others rather than destroying them? If you don't have an answer yet, keep writing. Maybe it just needs a bit more narration.

 

[Arch9CivilReactor]

Wow, you're like me for real.

When I wrote my first book, Let's Imagine A Female Knight, I just wanted to write tons of gore and horrific scenes traumatizing my main cast as much as possible. I was dealing with some real-life stuffy and high school, so you know how it goes. Probably used the book to vent looking back, anyway...

My friend, also my former AP English instructor, asked why the characters in my short stories were sad or emotionally ill. I told her that those were the only characters I knew how to write in-depth well (and to some extent, this is still true). She replied with something that I've never forgotten and whisper to myself every time I begin writing: "When you write a character, you give a piece of yourself, but that piece is like a prosaic clay. Sometimes it's nice to pound at the mold until it's flat, but remember, it's just as important to shape it up into something better."

Super cheesy, yes. But it turned my first book from a girl who wanted everyone to perish and feel her pain to overcoming depression and suicide, accepting that she's fragile, and allowing others to help put her together again. For me, I just looked at my main character and asked, why was she miserable? After some reflection, I corrected it through narration, then worked on myself. My readers enjoyed the revised version, and my biggest fear was that becoming more vulnerable would make me lose my horror-writing edge, but it actually made my work better.

I'm still an avid horror writer, and I love working with traumatic MCs, though I don't push them into massacres and world-ending scenarios unless it builds them up. My advice would be to ask your character(s) why they're miserable; what's stopping them from saving others rather than destroying them? If you don't have an answer yet, keep writing. Maybe it just needs a bit more narration.

It’s the first time I’ve ever felt a comment touch my heart. I was never good in English and only got into the hobby to please someone who I’d felt close to me. Gradually, I started to like the whole process of storytelling and its subtleties.

I’ve never heard such clear advice before. It’s feels like that instructor really knew what they were talking about. Maybe it’s just me who is thankful to have heard such a thing. To make my mould into something better… I feel something stagnant within me starting to move for the first time. I’m feeling more confident in myself, oddly.

Good luck your endeavours. I’m happy to have met someone I just click with so suddenly.

Thank you for your thoughtfulness.

 

[Nolff]

Wow, you're like me for real.

When I wrote my first book, Let's Imagine A Female Knight, I just wanted to write tons of gore and horrific scenes traumatizing my main cast as much as possible. I was dealing with some real-life stuffy and high school, so you know how it goes. Probably used the book to vent looking back, anyway...

My friend, also my former AP English instructor, asked why the characters in my short stories were sad or emotionally ill. I told her that those were the only characters I knew how to write in-depth well (and to some extent, this is still true). She replied with something that I've never forgotten and whisper to myself every time I begin writing: "When you write a character, you give a piece of yourself, but that piece is like a prosaic clay. Sometimes it's nice to pound at the mold until it's flat, but remember, it's just as important to shape it up into something better."

Super cheesy, yes. But it turned my first book from a girl who wanted everyone to perish and feel her pain to overcoming depression and suicide, accepting that she's fragile, and allowing others to help put her together again. For me, I just looked at my main character and asked, why was she miserable? After some reflection, I corrected it through narration, then worked on myself. My readers enjoyed the revised version, and my biggest fear was that becoming more vulnerable would make me lose my horror-writing edge, but it actually made my work better.

I'm still an avid horror writer, and I love working with traumatic MCs, though I don't push them into massacres and world-ending scenarios unless it builds them up. My advice would be to ask your character(s) why they're miserable; what's stopping them from saving others rather than destroying them? If you don't have an answer yet, keep writing. Maybe it just needs a bit more narration.

It’s the first time I’ve ever felt a comment touch my heart. I was never good in English and only got into the hobby to please someone who I’d felt close to me. Gradually, I started to like the whole process of storytelling and its subtleties.

I’ve never heard such clear advice before. It’s feels like that instructor really knew what they were talking about. Maybe it’s just me who is thankful to have heard such a thing. To make my mould into something better… I feel something stagnant within me starting to move for the first time. I’m feeling more confident in myself, oddly.

Good luck your endeavours. I’m happy to have met someone I just click with so suddenly.

Thank you for your thoughtfulness.

So... Without saying, you guys said that our OCs are part of us?

Alr, then how are you gon' to explain those who created those OCs with the pose of 'asserting dominance'?

Like this one, for example.

 

[CharlesEBrown]

Have you ever finished a story? Dark or otherwise?
Sometimes a dark story can be cathartic and open up a block you have with others - but if you obsess over it you might not even come close to the block, let alone removing it.
I personally like a bit of darkness but tend towards more positive stories over all (had one story that got so dark I had to step away from it, twice, and then lost the file after a computer crash so never got back to it). You might just be wired the opposite.
My younger brother tends to write very dark stuff; it took him several years (and two therapists, IIRC) to realize this was his way of coping with depression. Not saying you need therapy but there may be a reason you feel a need to embrace the darkness as well as a reason why this kind of embarrasses you.

Talking about it like this can be kind of therapeutic, but few, if any, of us really KNOW you, so any advice we offer may be 100% wrong in your case but I would really consider one (or both) of two things:
1) Embrace the darkness and take to writing horror and tragedy (not the best fits for this site AFAICT, but there are other writing communities that embrace these) or
2) Talk to a professional.