I didn’t realize this about myself until my husband asked, “Are you obsessed with death?”
Don’t get me wrong, I like to think that I’m quite self-aware, but I truly didn’t realize how dark my books can get. Not in a way most dark romance or dark fantasies do, though. Not spicy or alluring. But… heavy.
And to answer my husband, no, I’m not obsessed with death. (Okay, maybe a little.) But darkness has always appealed to me. (I’d like to think it’s the Scorpion in me.) I’m going to be honest, though. It’s not always me who dives deep into these darker themes.
My Characters Have a Mind of Their Own
My characters, mostly, just bleed on paper on their own. They spill their traumas and their coping mechanisms onto the page before I can stop them and force them to see the light or make it all fun. It just happens–and sometimes, I don’t have any power over it.
What Xavier’s Trauma Made Him Do
For example, let’s take Xavier from Let It Fall. I wanted to make him flawed and villainous. And he was. But he was mostly rough around the edges, unable to process the things he’d been through, the trauma he carried, the walls he built around himself. He was a very complex character to write. It’s messy, the way our brains work, the way we decide to do things, the way we react to our triggers. It’s not pretty. And I didn’t want to sugarcoat it.
He self-harmed because he was human and needed the pain he felt inside to leave marks on his skin. He was obsessive because Giselle was the only thing left in his world to protect–the only light he had. He was abusive because abuse was all he’d ever known. He was someone in the process of losing his mind entirely… and he did.
It was beautiful–rough, messy, bloody, uncomfortable, and entirely human. He made me cry, and he did it all himself. He wrote his own story. He knew what he was doing, and he couldn’t stop. And that’s peak human experience.
An Excerpt From My WIP
Similarly, my WIP is a dark fantasy. Let me share a small detail from this world. After dying an untimely death (I see you rolling your eyes, Husband.), Emery ends up in Visterrenum as a second chance to complete her life. Here, her trauma is physically realized. She burns on touch.
Here is a little excerpt of her conversation about this:
Grandma remains silent for a moment. “You’re not the only one who suffers, my love.”
I grit my teeth. “I know I’m a disappointment—”
“I didn’t mean that. You’re my pride, Emery. All I’m saying—” She licks her lips. “—is that everyone who ends up here carries trauma. It’s why they’re here. It’s why this is a second chance. It’s why we burn.” She pauses, then says softly, “It’s physical here because we tend to put more effort into healing wounds that we can see and ignore the wounds of our hearts.”
Why Do My Stories Have Darker Themes?
My stories tend to discuss darker themes because darkness is honest. It doesn’t fabricate the truth or how raw some feelings can be. Darkness is beautiful because we all have it inside us. Sanitized stories don’t serve readers who are living through hard things. And I want to talk about it all. I want my readers to feel the raw emotions of my flawed characters. I want my readers to feel heard and understood.
I will never apologize for having darker themes in my writing, because if I don’t write it, it’d consume me whole, and because I’m writing for the reader who needs the dark and wants to be seen, not the one who wants to avoid it.
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