Making your angst hurt:the power of lighthearted scenes.
I’m incredibly disappointed with the trend in stories (especially ‘edgy’ YA novels) to bombard the reader with traumatic situations, angry characters, and relationship drama without ever first giving them a reason to root for a better future. As a reader…
I might care that the main siblings are fighting if they had first been shown to have at least one happy, healthy conversation.
I might cry and rage with the protagonist if I knew they actually had the capacity to laugh and smile and be happy.
I might be hit by heavy and dark situations if there was some notion that it was possible for this world to have light and hope and joy to begin with.
Writers seem to forget that their reader’s eyes adjust to the dark. If you want to give your reader a truly bleak situation in a continually dim setting, you have to put them in pitch blackness. But if you just shine a light first, the sudden change makes the contrast appear substantial.
Show your readers what light means to your character before taking it away. Let the reader bond with the characters in their happy moments before (and in between) tearing them apart. Give readers a future to root for by putting sparks of that future into the past and the present. Make your character’s tears and anger mean something.
Not only will this give your dark and emotional scenes more impact, but it says something that we as humans desperately, desperately need to hear.
Books with light amidst the darkness tell us that while things are hard and hurt, that we’re still allowed to breathe and hope and live and even laugh within the darkness.
We as humans need to hear this more often, because acting it out is the only way we stop from suffocating long enough to make a difference.
So write angst, and darkness, and gritty, painful stories, full of treacherous morally grey characters if you want to. But don’t forget to turn the light on occasionally.
When you lose interest in a story that you’re writing but YOU HAVEN’T LOST INTEREST IN THE STORY, YOU’VE JUST LOST INTEREST IN THAT PARTICULAR PART THAT YOU’RE WRITING AND YOU WANT TO GET TO THE GOOD STUFF THAT YOU’RE ACTUALLY INTERESTED IN BUT YOU CAN’T DO THAT WITHOUT FINISHING THE BORING PARTS
Honestly, ever since becoming a fanfic writer myself I’ve become like 500% more understanding and patient about other authors’ update schedules. An author takes 6+ months to post their next chapter? Yeah, totally get that real life can get in the way. An author abandons a fic? Disappointing, but it it happens- sometimes inspiration for a story just dies. An author apologizes about taking so long to post a 10k word chapter? Dude, that’s like 18-20 pages on Word single-spaced. It takes me at least a week to write an essay for school a quarter the length of that, and that’s with a deadline.
It’s probably the most important thing writing fanfic has taught me, tbh. How to fully appreciate the hard work someone else has put into their story. How important the role of the audience is to an author. And that no matter what, you are never entitled to demand more of a story that you are getting for free.
One of my favorite phrases my Creative Writing professor had for when you’re writing fantasy is ‘giving your story a Flux Capacitor’.
Because it’s not real, it doesn’t exist. But the way it’s thrown into Back to the Future, at no point does it throw the audience off or suspend any more disbelief than time travel would. You believe Doc when he says he created the Flux Capacitor – the thing that makes time travel possible, because the universe never questions him.
So it essentially means like, there are going to be elements to your universe that are just not gonna make any sense, even if you set up a whole system based on it. And the only way to make it work is completely own it. You cannot second-guess your system or else the reader will too. You can give it the strangest explanation, but write it like you own it.
Either you’ve got to follow the rules of reality and physics and shit TO THE LETTER, or you have to say “naaaaaah” and fuck off with your magic/sci-fi/whatever to have a marvelous garden party where reality isn’t invited.
This is also known as a “Star Trek approach”, in which the science and technology in a fictional universe aren’t explained but their existence seems plausible given the context of the universe.
This also articulates excellently why I think Welcome to Night Vale works so well. It’s weird, but even where things are inconsistent, that in itself is a consistent factor in the show’s worldbuilding, so just about everything fits.
