Ziggy!
I’ve probably touched on this subject enough last week since I mentioned darkness and torture. So, this time I’m only going to leave a question here for people to reply to in the comments. Primarily because I won’t be around much this weekend. One of those things where I’ll get a lot of dirty looks if I whip out my phone. Dear god, I pray I’m not the person who forgets to turn his phone off. Maybe I’ll just give it to my wife until I’m free to reclaim it.
Anyway, have you ever written a story where you pushed some limits? I’m talking about having a character cross a line that you’d never cross in real life. If you did, how did you handle it? If you didn’t, would you ever want to? (I do hope to get more than yes and no answers here. Enjoy the weekend.)
Legends of Windemere 
All the time, but not what you’re thinking. My characters have killed people, but so have everyone elses. If you want to get to the gritty part, I still worry about how Jason Fogg is perceived. He spent a large portion of his time using his powers to invade women’s privacy. When he finally does something good with his powers, some still won’t think it’s enough to redeem him. Even Lisa Burton hacked into peoples private accounts, and performed some DNA tests, that weren’t authorized.
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It’s funny how we can shrug off a character killing and stealing. Yet any type of invasion is practically unforgivable. I think it deals with a sense of violation that can’t be undone. Death is final and stolen items can be recovered. That feeling of security isn’t so easily revived.
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That’s why I went there, but some readers were uncomfortable. It’s like something unforgivable. How death evolved beyond that, I’ll never know.
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Do you ever find that people react deeper to fiction than when such events happen in reality? Like they’ll get more upset reading a rape scene than watching a news report on one.
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Not from personal experience, but yes across social media. That’s why I never kill the dog. (Or other animal character.)
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Social media seems to be the realm of outrage. I’ll kill any character if it works for the scene. At least off camera.
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I shut down a whole project over Clarence the Lion. Imagine a paranormal adventure that looks a bit like Ghost in the Darkness. People freaked the hell out that someone shot a lion, so I thought better of the project. I don’t need a literary hit squad running me down.
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That would have been awesome, so I hope you try again. Very few people remember Cecil (obviously) anymore. You rarely see that Harambe gorilla now and it’s usually as a joke. This is the mentality that has me worried about that Bedlam one.
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If you think about colonial – backcountry Africa, you’re going to have to hunt to eat. Dominoes won’t deliver, and refrigeration didn’t exist. I may do it one day. It had a romance element I wanted to explore.
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Cool. People do forget about what was acceptable in the past. We tend to put our modern and real world ideals on fiction even when it doesn’t match.
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I have an assassin character who enjoys his work, even to the point of killing beloved horses. I didn’t write his scenes lightly. Each scene took a toll on me emotionally. That’s why I couldn’t write his scenes every day. I could only write maybe one. Then I would have to take some time away from him to debrief.
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Horses are always a strange factor in stories. Animals in general if you think about. How many times have we read or seen horrible events in fiction, but only the humans get killed? Kind of unrealistic in a way, but people do react more to an animal dying than a person. So I can see how the character killing a horse could be rough. Was there a reason he did it or just for fun? Sounds more psychopath than assassin.
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Well, he has some psychopathic tendencies. He did it to stop the main character from getting away from him. Nothing stands in this dude’s way. The horse’s death was the hardest for me to write about. I knew I had to go there though.
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Honestly, that sounds like a good strategy. Outside of fiction, it wouldn’t really cause an eye blink. I think I’ve accepted the hard kills as part of reality.
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One of my antagonists is a serial killer. There have been a few of her kills that’ve made me step back and ask “The hell is wrong with you, Jesse…? What’s your problem?!”. But of course, Jesse feels no remorse for the whole thing with the sledgehammer, or the acid, or any of book 3. And then there’s Arsyn, my cannibal…She’ll target anyone that might make for a good meal, and is positively elated to find one that could regain lost limbs and come back from the dead: saves time on hunting. I also have my assassin characters, but they have a moral code and don’t make me wonder what my own problem is (in addition to the characters’ own issues).
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Cannibals are always a headache when it comes to going too far. You can’t have them hold back considering one of their main purposes is to eat other characters. The psycho killers are even stranger at times. Some parts of society have become desensitized to the common methods of killing. So you need to make Saw look like Fried Green Tomatoes to get a reaction. Have some good ones coming up for Dawn in October.
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Well I write murderers quite a bit and that’s a line I haven’t crossed in real life… though if one more driver cuts me off while I’m on my bike, that could change… 😂
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Authors do tend to stay on the right side of the line while their characters cross it. I’ve seen some people forget that. With you on the driving thing and I’m usually in a car.
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Haha well I hope I manage to stay mostly on the right side of that line!!
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Me too. 😁
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I can’t say I have ever had a character cross a line I would never cross unless it is the villain. I think though for your question you are wondering about having a character take a step over a moral line. I have to say that John Cannon did seem to lose his way by romancing two different women. He did pay for that but under the circumstances, I don’t think I would have done what he did. When I wrote it I had a little feeling that I was doing something naughty. In a strange way, it felt good.
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The feeling makes sense. We get to try on different moral codes when we write. Be rather boring if every character has the same code. Then again, people seem to think that’s how the world should be, which is what gets me in trouble with my villains and morally iffy heroes.
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So true
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I have in the past with one character. He wasn’t a horrible person but alcohol and events happening around him caused him to cross the line with a girl he liked. It was a dark place and written when I was much younger. However, it taught me that you can go to some depths that you normally wouldn’t and come out wiser.
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Very cool lesson. A lot of people try to avoid that stuff. If anything it can teach an author how to distance themselves from the work.
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It does but I still cringe when faced with some areas. As mentioned above, cannibalism for one.
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Did you go too far? I would toss a question back — is the scene honest? That is, are the characters involved already established as having that darkness in their character? Then write it. Will the story feel fake if the characters don’t go there? Write it.
Does it upset or frighten you to go there? You probably still should challenge yourself and write it.
Is there an alternative way to achieve your plot and character goals, that is still honest, without going there? Then maybe write the alternative. For me, it comes down to the truth of your characters and story.
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Pingback: Writing Links 4/3/17 – Where Genres Collide
I did once. I write for children, so I’m usually careful, but the ending of my book “Yua And The Great Wizard Hunt” tends to shock readers a little. It may have been because I was hurting so when I wrote it, having just lost my dog (who one of the main characters is based on)or it may have been something else. Either way, I let the little girl in the story get her revenge, and though the other characters were shocked, she acted like she’d done nothing worse than spilled something to make a little mess. I thought about changing the ending, but then let it be published as it was, with a content warning in the book’s blurb. The book still gets reasonable ratings though, so I guess readers don’t mind too much that I went a bit too far.
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Interesting. A kid could be seen in that light though. Even if they know right from wrong, they’re at the whims of their emotions and can rationalize like pros.
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True. Perhaps that’s why people don’t seem to mind it too much? Still, I did let her go further than I normally would have.
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