Exciting, violent, full of swearing - dystopian storytelling

One of the judges of a prestigious literary award was recently quoted as saying that one of the reasons the awards committee had chosen the winner was because it was "exciting, violent, and full of swearing."

It's at times like this that I despair of our society.  That is dystopian storytelling at its worst, bringing out the worst that humans can be.  We may not always think about it, but what we write about, and the way that we write it, involves making moral choices.  We choose whether to tell a light or dark story, we choose the amount of violence we put into it.  We can choose to write about murder, blood and gore, about wholesale slaughter with spectacular special effects.  Or we can choose to write on a less bloodstained slate, and focus on the devastation those deaths produce in the lives of those around them.  

I suspect that how we choose to write depends on how we see our writing.  If we see it as purely entertainment, we might feel the need to compete with Hollywood's blood and gore, to have the same level of sensationalism in the text.  But if instead we want to focus on the fallout from those deaths, we need to be more subtle.  To focus on the grief and loss, to examine what changes as a result of the death.  And that takes us to somewhere other than the world of shallow entertainment.

We might still have a whole planet full of people dying, but their deaths aren't gratuitous.  They're there to illustrate the evil in the story.   Having less violence and swearing in the narrative can be far more effective in getting a message across.  But that presumes that the text has a message.  Sometimes I worry that all there is in these bloodthirsty books is blood.

I need to believe that humans can be a civilised species, that we can make moral choices in extreme  situations.  Anne McCaffrey's Sassinak is a military officer.  She's forced to sit back and watch a whole colony of people die in order to follow the slavers instead.  She has to allow the smaller evil in order to stop the much larger one.  It's a choice that haunts the character ever after, but it was necessary.

Literature like this teaches us something in its stories.  It shows us that being military doesn't automatically mean being violent.  And it shows us that violence has a price.  We should remember that next time we praise a book for its violence and swearing.

Making my characters suffer

This week I've been continuing with my rewrite of Genehunter.  I've been leading up to the Supreme Ordeal, where Aris is kidnapped and asked to do something she can't.  In my original version she didn't really come to any harm, and the danger was muted.  She wasn't subject to any violence, and she was rescued too easily.  It was a cop-out, and it was totally devoid of dramatic tension. What was happening to her wasn't even being seen through her eyes.  

This time, I've put the scene into her viewpoint and she is subject to violence, but only a small amount.  They don't hurt her badly, and that's another decision I've made about the scene.  For me, toughening up the story and letting my characters suffer is a balancing act.  I don't do dark and violent.  I'm responsible for the energy I put out into the world, and I don't fill the universe with such things.  The trick is deciding how little violence I can get away with while writing such scenes.

I've read several young adult books recently which have described violence in great detail, violence meted out to the main character on the page.  I've been surprised, and sometimes shocked, by the level of darkness in these books.  I've also read a YA book recently which described the teenage heroine being forced to kill for the first time.  The author has included a lengthy section of the character's reactions to her action, but this still makes the book uncomfortably dark.

The trick is to provide enough danger and challenge to the main character to make what happens to them matter while not alienating the reader.  The stakes need to be high, yes, but I don't need a detailed description of the gruesome death that will await my character if she gets caught by the villain.

I freely admit that I err on the side of being too soft with my characters.  Often I let the violence happen off the page.  My challenge is toughening up enough to make the scene feel realistic versus becoming so dark that it loses my readers.  And I think that getting this balance right is crucial. There is one bestselling YA series I refused to read beyond book one because of the excessive violence at the end of that book.  The right degree of toughness matters.

Wendy Metcalfe is the author of Panthera : Death Spiral and Panthera : Death Song and the short story collection Otherlives.  Find out more at www.wendymetcalfe.com

A lighter shade of darkness

I recently did a sort-out of some of my bookshelves, and found myself giving away a few young adult  series.  The common factor in every case was that I'd only half-read the book, or had managed to struggle through to the end of it but knew I would never read it again.

One series of books was hailed by commentators as a brilliant portrayal of the fear and darkness of ancient times, an accurate representation of how humans lived then.  This was a book aimed at twelve year olds, and that claim of accurate darkness worried me.  Yes, it may well have been like that in those times, but we are writing for people in 2015.  Most of us don't live in fear of supernatural monsters, and most of us don't live short, nasty, brutish lives.  And part of what civilised us is stories.

You might well argue, as many gamers do, that this is pretend violence, and that people can tell the difference between make-believe killing and the real thing.  I'm not convinced by that argument.  I do think that constant exposure to make-believe violence shapes  our life scripts as much as exposure to real violence,

I believe I have a moral responsibility inherent in everything I write, a responsibility to show a better way of being in the universe.  My stories aim to teach respect for the natural world and its creatures, and I don't intend to do that with a thrill-ride side-order of violence.  My writer friend Carol Westron once described me as the most moral writer she'd ever met.  She said she always felt confident that my stories wouldn't be filled with unnecessary evil.

For me that lighter shade or darkness means that I don't give my characters the biggest guns they can find, and let them blast everything around them in glorious technicolor.  Our current TV news channels do that every day, and I don't watch that violence.  My lighter shade of darkness means I put the violence off the page.  People do get killed in my books, but not on-stage.  My story is about the consequences of those deaths, showing the loss and devastation that others feel when a person or wild animal dies an untimely death.

I see it as my responsibility not to add to the evil in the world, so If you're looking for a tale that revels in gratuitous violence, move along there.  I'm not for you.

Bringing in the big guns

"I write shoot-em-up space operas" a female author said recently on an SF panel of writers. She seemed to take delight in blowing things up, the bigger the explosion the better.

I baulk at this idea. I'm aware that, at base, everything in the universe is energy.  The energy of the universe is affected by everything that I think, say, and do. And the words that I write are also energy that I'm sending out into the universe.

In recent years dystopian stories, and ever more violent crime books, have filled up the booksellers' shelves.  I've read quite a lot of  young adult dystopian stories, and a few adult SF ones too.  But I refuse to buy, read, or endorse, books that have graphic violence front and centre in their plots and stories.  Yes, there is violence in the books I read, but it's never centre stage.  For the most part, the deaths are off the page.

An exception to this was a young adult book I read a couple of weeks ago.  I'd followed the spiky, not-quite-romance of the two central characters throughout the book.  It was the classic clash of opposites, the rich, privileged girl falling In love with the boy from the wrong side of the tracks.  So what did the author do?  She had the boy shot, on the page, in the last chapter of the book.  And he was shot in the back, unable to defend himself.  She then added an epilogue which said, in effect, that the relationship was never going to work.  The rich girl had a duty to marry the prince she didn't love, and she did.

At this point I wanted to throw the book across the room.  A more clumsy use of violence to twist a plot I've never seen, or a more unfair ending,  I felt cheated.  It was an unjust ending to the book to kill the boy.  And it was a convenient cop-out.  I could have looked forward to a sequel which addressed the challenges of this on-off relationship as the characters went on new adventures.  Instead I've marked the author down as one won't read again.

In YA books it's amazing how many sets of parents are killed while being watched by their children.  But it's just a story, isn't it?  But in two cases these books have been turned into films.  The big guns on the page have been turned into big guns on the silver screen.  People have been trying to convince us for years that violence in "make-believe" worlds doesn't affect people in real life.  I've never believed that.  Everything is energy, remember, and I think the violence in books and movies does affect us long-term.  The energy is being absorbed by us, incorporated somewhere into our consciousness.

That's a scary thought, and it's one reason why I don't have big guns in the centre of my writing,  it's a moral decision not to put that violent energy into the world.  Violence doesn't settle anything permanently,  it's only when the big guns fall silent that the talking starts.