Writing Journal: Writing away on The Adjusters #52. Nothing particularly interesting to report. Except perhaps that I had a tidbit of insight for Book VI that has me reconsider one of my subplots.
Throughout May and June, I'm asking for your input about the sort of kinks you might want to see in The Adjusters.
Still somewhat reeling from last week's events in Isla Vista, California. It's nothing new, sadly, but the document that the killer left reads like bad fiction, and is altogether depressing. The one (only?) bright spot to come out of those events is the #YesAllWomen movement that with some luck opened a few people's eyes. Though I had to avoid like the plague most comment threads on the topic, because man! you can really see the filthy crud rising up to the surface.
Every time something like that happens, it forces me to think about my own role in the grand scheme of things. I mean, I spin tales involving misogynistic characters whose contempt for consent and agency is extreme. I know, I know—it's all fantasy, it's all fiction, but fantasy and fiction do not occur in a vacuum, they are embedded in a sociological context, and worse, those stories actually are part of the sociological context and help form it.
It's something I struggle with once in a while. Not the part about having dark fantasies—I've read enough psychology to not be particularly worried about that. But sharing them, in the way that I do, it has an impact. And I just don't know what that impact is.
I don't have answers. Just more questions. So I'll just keep reflecting about this.
In the meantime, let me close with two stories, one for whichever mood you happen to find yourself in on this rainy Friday night.
The first is a happy story where all is essentially rosy and loving and sexy, Beauty and the Geek by Frozenhero1: “The rumors were true; the geek was hung.”
The second is a dark depressing story where everyone is a bastard and the sex is... well... special, A Study in Scarlett, by AMoveableBeast: “A man follows the sway of a stripper's hips into depravity.”
I have worried about the role mc writing might play in real life tragedies. Your writing is great, and even though I am not drawn to the darker sides of the genre, your characters feel familiar and real to me. For myself, mc speaks to my insecurities about relationships, and offers a path (even though it isn't real) to a lifelong relationship. When it comes to your writing, the abusive controllers come off as true bastards, yet you can leave a gray area for weak characters like Jackson. He loved Kyra, but had more opportunity than his morals could withstand. A writer like Mr. Grey did glorify the villains in his work, and that bothered me. So even though I like the nigh-omnipotent character as the protagonist, I have no compulsion to re-read his stories. The only part of your stories that bother me is the hell hole the victims, Daniel included, have fallen down, with such a slim hope of climbing back to the surface, and that speaks to your skill in breathing life into your characters.
ReplyDeleteThink about it that way: You live in a world where most people get to have a car, but not you. Because you don't have the looks, smarts, charm or the money to afford it. Also your body parts gets painfully anxious to drive a car every spring. It gets to you in more ways you can imagine, you develop complex atop of pile of complexes, that effectively slims your chances to get a car even further. Also you get looked down upon by society for not having a car, even though it is a society that mostly keeps you from getting one. You go crazy then, feral even. Few people have sufficient self awareness at that point to realize that there are other ways to live a happy life. I believe we are living on the minefield consisting of such individuals, humans that were not relatively lucky from the start, that just don't match new standards of life quality that modern society imposes on us. Our grandfathers were happy just to have food for a day and a shelter for night, our fathers prided themselves for clean shave and clean clothes, and now we relatively drown in luxury and it is still considered not good enough. So for now I don't see how we can rectify such disparity in the sort term, only more rampages can follow if things don't change. Your writing don't do things worse that is for sure, but it can do things better if there are things that teach readers something important about life.
ReplyDeleteThanks for taking the time to comment on this—always happy to have more fodder for thoughts.
ReplyDeleteI do make a distinction between consuming dark mind-control (say) smut, and producing it. The former is an individual choice, and in some sense and most of the time, really also only affects the individual. I'm really uncomfortable stopping people from enjoying reading whatever the hell it is that they want to read. I know I'd hate it. The latter, producing dark smut, is a bit more fuzzy ethically. Aside from everything else, it is contributing to the rape culture (or "the massive power disparity between maledom and femaledom" culture if the term rape culture raises your hackles) as well as the heat-death of the universe, and that's the bit I'm not too happy about. But granted, my stories are not all bad, and evil is sometimes punished.
That said, I won't stop writing anytime soon. But it's probably good for me to once in a while revisit this and make sure I'm still happy with where I stand in the spectrum from good to evil.