“You have such a sunny disposition…
why are your stories so dark?” — E.T.
This is a funny thing people ask me all the time.
Yes, on the outside I present as a pretty happy, chatty, light-hearted person. And I am! But as with all of us, I have my own shadow side to contend with.
I’m okay with that. I understand and accept that nobody is 100 percent cheerful, especially not these trying days.
The fact is, we all carry low-frequency energy (myself, Little Mary Sunshine, included). We carry all the frequencies. Some of us carry more of one kind of frequency than another. It’s not better or worse, right or wrong, good or bad… it just is.
I like answering hard questions
My stories are dark because I’m curious and willing to look into the why of the motivations of my characters.
- Why would they behave this way or that way?
- Why do they make the choices (often bad ones) that they make?
- Why do they feel a certain way, and how does that feeling shape the way they see the world?
Psychological and emotional tension are swatches on my writing palette that I eagerly dip my brush into because they bring the potential for conflict, drama, high stakes, and the kind of unsettling atmosphere I strive for.
Remember, my sweet spot in writing is speculative stories: “What if?” scenarios that lean into the tropes of horror, science fiction, fantasy, surrealism, the magically real. Even some of my literary stuff might be deemed neo noir.
My sweet spot: Against odds and expectations
I write about people living with fear, trauma, pain, bad memories. I write about how they work through these things, and that means I write characters who are working on themselves.
Yes, I write “what I know.”
I also strive to write to find out just “what I know.”
Right now, “what I know” comes from working on myself, through old stuff from childhood and emotional triggers that, after all these years, still exist.
Someone has to do the work. I know, as a nonfiction writer talking about living with chronic illness, that my sharing of personal experiences that seem dark or unpleasant to certain people has been cathartic and helpful, even empowering, for others.
Fiction has the power to do this, too.
I’ve always been a truthteller
Magical realism is a storytelling approach that I appreciate, adore, and find myself writing (even by accident) for precisely this reason: it subverts, it says the hard parts out loud (even and especially if in a pretty, nonconfrontational way).
Bigger than my writing life (which, let’s face it, is 99 percent of who I am) is my need to see justice enacted in this world.
Not all wrongs can be righted going through the legal system, though. Social justice is an ongoing effort and always will be; some humans will always want to steal the energy, dreams, freedoms of other humans in a twisted “survival at all costs” campaign.
But creative writing (and other forms of art)—especially through fictional or avenues where creative license prevails (like poetry or experimental writing)—can often do more to expose the truth about what and who has been wronged than all the nonfiction* one can consume.
*not only the news, but interpretive or investigative journalism, academic writing, and how-to writing done in the service of educating
I’m a journo by trade but I feel like my creative writing, with its darker root systems, gets at these bits of life we’re all dealing with (again, social justice, but also the more entrenched value systems we are trying so hard to shed—namely, white Christian patriarchy in the US).
Right now, I have several works in progress and every single one of them has a dark underbelly tied to this very concern.
Yep, my writing is going to take people to dark places, I certainly spend a lot of time there myself.
But with any luck, I’ll also be able to characterize what resistance, empowerment, and hope looks like.
A brief turn: Why I don’t write romance, part 1
In related news…
I was in an accountability group session yesterday which was, at least on this day, made up mostly of romance writers.
They were working out the details of a potential marketing blast for the fall.
I made a joke about recusing myself because I don’t write romance. Because… I don’t write romance.
(Nor do I read it. Nothing against it. I also don’t read biographies or manga or most New York Times bestsellers. Nor do I write those.)
Introducing a love interest, for me, inside the universes where my writing lives, is counterintuitive to my goals as a writer.
A romance might be a happy deflection of the truth. Especially if the main character is a woman. And for some readers and writers, that’s the point.
But I don’t think I’m the outlier here when I say that I want my female protagonists to live life on their own terms and not as second fiddles to love interests (I am speaking entirely of binary cis-het relationships here, as this is also, indeed, all I know from experience).
I don’t mind there being incidental romantic liaisons in works I read, and I have on occasion written characters for which there is a flare of romance between them… even sex scenes!
But I really prefer there to be something more compelling than he loves me//he loves me not. Such relationships are subplots, if they exist at all, and only if they help deliver the main plot.
So my preference as a writer and as a reader is for characters who problem solve their way out of tough situations by themselves. That usually means women facing obstacles laid out for them by the patriarchy. That is likely always going to be the lens through which I write, and I do so without apology. Even in this sweetest little flash fiction there is a hint of this. It can’t be helped.
Also, I write what I want to read. And what I want to read are stories where people overcome insurmountable odds and have hope for a better world at the end of it all.
I want to see how those characters stick their landings (might as well use some language tied to the Olympics, which open today in Paris!), so that I might better stick my own.
But in order to stick the landings successfully, they have to have a lot of false starts, they need to trip on their own feet, they will have fallen on more than one occasion.
O! for the art of being imperfectly human!
Why I don’t write romance, part 2
To be clear, I don’t equate romance writing with sunny-side-up topics, by the way. I just don’t want to feed the narrative that women must reach for romantic partners to fix their problems.
I’m not a big fan of Disney princesses for this reason (though Mulan gets all my mad respect). Self-reliance is also a virtue I raised my daughters to value as well.
Choosing to go a different route than what’s expected… well, that’s me, all day long. If you know me at all, you know that I’m quite comfortable with solitude, being contrary, and subversion.
Yet there’s this presumption, around almost every corner where I find writers, that every female main character surely must be searching for a mate. (It’s almost never true for male main characters.)
This plagues me even in writing groups where everyone is leaning into sci-fi and fantasy. Nobody asks the men about the love interests in their stories, but everyone seems to think my single female protagonist is looking for a boyfriend.
Even among my session mates yesterday, there was a push when I joked that I write about apocalypses.
“Kinda off brand for a romance novel package,” I quipped.
“Yeah, but don’t you have a romance in your apocalypse?”
Um, no. When people are literally trying to survive disaster, the last thing they’re looking for is romance (at least that’s the last thing I’d be looking for). The best they might hope for is some ill-gotten trauma bonding that they might still need to slough off later by way of therapy… if they do indeed make it through the apocalypse.
Anyway, romances have their own vibes when it comes to conflict, drama, and tension. For me, writing a romance into an already toothsome topic is rather like writing two books at once. I already pick complicated topics, I don’t need to make it even harder on myself!
All to say that yes, still waters run deep
On my surface, you may find me to be someone who is quick to smile or crack a joke. That’s me, for sure. But underneath it all is a complex person who actively works at emotional intelligence, and to do that, ya gotta mine the darkest recesses.
It’s okay. I know there are readers who absolutely need to read the bleak, nihilistic, bloody stories that comprise the genres under the umbrella of contemporary dark fiction.
I’m one of them. I like reading things that scare me, that haunt me, that introduce me to the shadow side of the human condition.
What’s to enjoy, you might ask? My reply: The way the characters in these narratives—
- overcome their anxieties
- solve the mysteries that have held them back
- conquer the malevolence of abuse or violence they were previously trapped by
Survival stories, indeed. Told within the relative safety of the printed page. I want to discover how they do it.
Movies, too. I loved the film Castaway nearly as much as I loved the movies Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, A Quiet Place, I Am Legend, and even Inception. All of these storylines are, to some degree, about survival.
And I love true stories about survival, whether they come through true crime podcasts, memoirs (especially medical memoir and triumph over mental health tragedy), documentaries about the journeys of victims to justice, and even TV shows that explore how people made it through harrowing encounters of all kinds.
I’m still a pretty happy gal, nonetheless.
I love my hikes, my flowers, my kitchen garden, my forays out in a kayak, visits with friends and peers, listening to fun music, coffee, watching comedy on TV (and game shows, which are the epitome of happy-happy!).
But my writing takes me into corridors unknown (just like my dreamlife). It’s not always a happy place, but I’m not really afraid of this, I see it as “challenge accepted!”
I hope I can write in a way that shines a light on solving the riddles, completing the puzzles, tackling the mysteries, and overcoming the monsters we all face in our lives, whatever they might look like.
You can’t have shadows without sunlight, my friends.