As I grow older I find myself being a little more careful, if that's the right word, with what I put in my stories. I pull back when, back in my college days, I would normally go full force. It could be that as I grow older I have become more aware of what, exactly, I am putting out for people to read. I start to question whether people will see the content of my stories as a reflection of me. When I was younger, especially in my late teens and early twenties, I didn't care what people thought. I was still finding myself, and everyone else be damned.
Now, though, as I continue writing Daughter of Darkness, I find myself pushing on those boundaries that I have placed for myself. Sure, my stories have been violent and dark in the past, but I'm now trying to push the more horrific aspects a little further. There are scenes later in the story that shocked me as I wrote them, and yet I wasn't tempted to delete them. It felt right. I realized that if I am going to make Grath and his followers the truly twisted individuals that I envision them as, that means that I cannot play it safe while describing the horrors that they inflict on the heroes. I did use some restraint, but I let myself dabble with the sick and twisted mind of my villain, and what I found was something that, in a weird way, I was comfortable with. It's not to say that I found the images that my brain concocted enjoyable. Actually, it's the exact opposite. I found them horrifying, which is the whole point of writing a horror/fantasy series. I created scenes that cemented how vile and perverse Grath really is. I do feel like I had started to get the point across during the end of Experiments in Darkness, but in the one scene that I could have gone all out with, I pulled back at the last minute. When Grath attacks a powerless Bobby, I started to push forward, to let the character be truly abused and broken, but in the last second I pulled back. It wasn't so much that the abuse didn't happen, but that I shifted it to the background, uncomfortable with the weight of what that scene meant for the future of my character, and for the characters connected to him. More importantly, I was too scared of what the audience would think. While some would say that, in that instance, pulling back was a good thing, a part of me wonders if I ended up softening the preverbal blow, and removed the strength that could have really driven the characters to a different place, and given the story some more emotional weight.
The same goes for the sexual aspects. While I have no real interest in writing pornographic sex scenes, I am finding myself wanting to explore how my characters view sex, and part of that is including parts of their sex lives in the stories themselves. I actually wrote my first love scene (which will be showing up in a later part of the story), and I really enjoyed it. I didn't focus on the biological, or the mechanics of sex, but instead on the emotions that drew those two characters together in that moment. I actually found the scene to be oddly powerful (and a little cheesy, but that comes with the territory). I have hinted at sex several times before, but I always found myself stopping short of actually delving into a true sex scene, or even a love scene. Now, after dipping my toe into that pool, I feel like maybe I can start to explore that aspect of my characters in a more full, and yet not explicit, way.
One area where I find myself pulling back is cursing. While my characters will curse (and even drop a few f-bombs), I don't feel the need to load my story up with a constant stream of vulgarity. One of the issues I had with my first game, and one that I really didn't develop until after it had been released, was just how vulgar some of the dialogue is. It didn't bother me just because it was vulgar, but because it was vulgar for no reason. Sumthak was the biggest victim of this, with her dialogue falling so flat because of the near constant stream of curse words that seemed to fall from her mouth. Cursing has a purpose, and can actually be a pretty powerful tool, but in that instant, I abused it, and I feel like it hurt the game a little.
Do I think you, the reader, will react the same way as I did while writing the story? I hope so. I hope that whatever talent I do have is able to convey to you the emotional intent behind the scenes. I am not a great writer, and probably not even a very good one, but I am learning every day, with every new part of the story that I write. One aspect of writing these stories is allowing myself to learn, and grow, and challenge myself. Hopefully that growth is reflected in the quality of my writing.
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