This has been a great thread to read over. Some very good thoughts, everyone. I would certainly agree that it's okay to write dark scenes sometimes...but honestly I think it's different for each one of us. I think for some people (and I'm not saying any of you HWers are this way, necessarily
) writing a dark scene might drag them down, might be appealing to their baser nature...but others might be able to handle it just fine and use these scenes well (as other posters discussed further - how dark scenes can add a lot of emotional depth to a book and make it more real. I discussed this briefly myself in
my very rambly pseudo-review of The Penultimate Peril). Similarly, some readers will be disturbed by such scenes, and other readers will be able to appreciate them. Dark and violent scenes aren't evil in themselves. We just need to be careful and aware of ourselves when we write them and read them. It's the old food-sacrificed-to-idols thing: some people can handle it, some can't, and there's no shame in that.
I don't personally struggle with writing dark scenes, but I know I'm this way with negative book reviews, actually. I like to read book reviews online, and I often enjoy reading reviews of books that aren't very good just to see people picking them apart and showing why they're bad. But I need to watch myself and make sure that I'm reading those negative reviews to learn more about writing and about books...not just to see something criticized and torn down and made fun of. And then I also need to watch myself when I write negative reviews, or imagine them in my head, as the case may be.
Lightwalker wrote:
With the characters I write about, I want to expand on some of those darker emotions that I've felt and show as realistically I can, what happens in people's lives that don't have God. Without Him, it's cold, hard, and downright depressing while in Him, we have joy, peace, and fulfillment. For the characters that don't except God, I try to explore those feelings of rage, despair, and loneliness that I've felt when I was younger.
Yes, this is why I often enjoy reading dark non-Christian literature - I like to see how empty the world is without God!
Airianna Valenshia wrote:
Also, it is interesting that when you hear stories told by the suffering brothers and sisters in Christ, they tell you how worth it their torture was. I think in America we tend to downplay suffering and even torture. We have two issues. We minimize it, or we try to distance ourselves from it. We think it has to be one or the other. Neither really is healthy, I feel.
Yes! So true! I think too much of American culture these days is built on comfort, and your "right" to comfort. And then sometimes because people aren't used to the idea of suffering being a normal and healthy part of Christian life, they overglorify it and treat people who have suffered or died for their faith as amazing, perfect heroes. Yes, such people are worthy of admiration. But maybe not as much blind admiration as they sometimes get. Maybe
God needs to get a bit more glory for these people!
My father tells stories of Christians from the country where we live who fled to Europe or the US, hoping for more comfortable lives, and then
made up stories of torture and mistreatment. That way they could get into a Western country, and they would get treated as heroes, too. In some cases they
were actually threatened or mistreated...but they often exaggerated the truth. It's really sad to me to see Christians lying so other Christians will admire them.
How can I not die over that?