Juliet Binoche, Wuthering Heights
Do you take it dark with a twist of weird on the side?
I do!
Why is that? Why do many of us find Heathcliff (Wuthering Heights) so compelling? Why are we caught up in his angst?
Remember the horrific scene when he opens Cathy’s coffin? We condemn it, it’s too awful to contemplate but we understand his awful dilemma: he cannot bear the world without her!
I’m a big believer in using my characters’ motivation to write my fiction. My fiction is character-driven and my character’s reasons for doing things give me the story.
I don’t write with an outline. My characters show me the way.
With regard to Heathcliff, Wuthering Heights is what it is because we understand the characters’ motivation.
However Emily Bronte wrote her classic novel, she was well aware of motivation affecting the plot.
Angst, heart ache, desperation are the ingredients in great romantic novels, and we know with regard to horror, horror and romance go together.
Further on this point let us contemplate whether horror and romance is more exciting the more twisted it is.
But hang on! Doesn’t horror have to have something twisted in it or it isn’t horror?
I think so.
Someone remarked that the classic gothic romantic book covers of times past were always so intriguing but they never delivered on the darkness aspect, the implied dark of the cover.
They seemed to promise more but somehow it was less than many readers hoped for.
I want those sorts of readers never to feel that way with my fiction!
From the feedback I’m getting, I’m being assured that my aim in redefining gothic romantic fiction is right.
It’s time to push the boundaries. Time to put a dark twist on the sorts of gothic romance that went before, that our mothers and grandmothers read.
Our world is dark and dangerous. Children get massacred at a French school, terrorists lurk in the backs of our mind, ever-threatening, there are wars, atrocities, and horror in day to day life.
Certainly our horror fiction must reflect the times we live in.
Steven King said: “(We) make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones.
That is so perfect!
Many of the great classics of gothic romance were penned before World War 2. How can our horror fiction not be dark after the Holocaust?
And in more modern times there have been other genocides. There probably always will be.
Dangerous relationships, dark deeds—intriguing plots with twists and turns, the removal even of comfort zones: that’s what we want! That’s what I want, and I am endeavoring to do it with my fiction.
Actually, I’d like to have people elaborate and tell me in a comment WHY it’s better (if they think it is) as in how dark can it be?!
There you go, people!
Love to love the horror!
Good post, Carole! I personally tend to take some known tragety and twist it to something I can render into an answer as to "why"... or never answer, but just throw it out there.
ReplyDeleteI do agree with King, when writers like us put something down it might be our way of dealing with something down right horrifying that happens in everyday life. And readers will read it for the same reason they will stop and look at a car wreck, a shooting, etc.
Lorelei, that wins the best comment of the week award!
ReplyDeleteBrilliant, we do deal with the every day horrors. so true.
your comment about people not be fascinated by a train wreck or shooting is excellent.
For those people who 'can't begin to understand why people read and write horror,' we say to them: hey! did you watch the news last night?
do you turn it away when body bags are shown?
do you slow down past a car accident or if not, do you LOOK?
i actually don't and never did.
thank you so much, Lo.
No proble, dawwwling (^;
ReplyDeleteI think we understand much in each other's writing.
we do! tuned in totally!
ReplyDeletethanks, my dear!
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