Eddie Whitlock's Blog: Reader and Writer - Posts Tagged "dark"
Dark Stories
On a good day, I'm a pessimist. I'm not sure what the difference is between "pessimist" and "cynic," but cynic is what I am on the days I'm not a pessimist.
A personal crisis recently brought home the benefit of this stance. An event that was terrible was not fatal, so I was relieved. While others consoled me on the event, I was happy about it: "Not as bad as it could have been!"
This is most certainly a coping mechanism for me. Put away the Psych 101 textbook. If there's more to it than "coping mechanism," I don't care.
The point here is that the pessimism really taints most of what I write. Even when the story is funny (my George W. Bush vs. the zombies story, for example,) I still manage to work in quite a few negative outcomes.
"No matter how cynical I get, it's hard to keep up," Lily Tomlin said a couple of decades ago. She could have been referring to the cynical attitude of others, but I'd like to think that she was thinking about competing with reality.
I'm working on a couple of stories right now that really need to be different from Evil is Always Human. I am finding it hard to write something that is both upbeat and plausible. To help me with this, my lovely wife Beth has done some research. She's come up with one real-life story on which I can model a plot twist so that it is indeed plausible.
Last night I dreamed that I was working as a psychologist, under the mentorship of a more seasoned psychologist. I was conducting a session for a lesbian couple who were having a tough time. I was trying to help them when one of them physically attacked the other and the other psychologist and I had to separate them.
Afterwards, the psychologist told me, "You shouldn't talk so much. Let them talk. Our job is to love them until they sort out the answers for themselves."
I thought that was a pretty cool thing as a philosophy for faux psychologists, but I doubt that it would be well-recieved by real psychologists.
I find myself applying the idea to my characters, though. I see them as choosing their own actions, actions that often - like in real life - don't turn out very well.
Dark? Yeah, you could say that. But I'm shooting for realistic. For me, that's just the way life is.
A personal crisis recently brought home the benefit of this stance. An event that was terrible was not fatal, so I was relieved. While others consoled me on the event, I was happy about it: "Not as bad as it could have been!"
This is most certainly a coping mechanism for me. Put away the Psych 101 textbook. If there's more to it than "coping mechanism," I don't care.
The point here is that the pessimism really taints most of what I write. Even when the story is funny (my George W. Bush vs. the zombies story, for example,) I still manage to work in quite a few negative outcomes.
"No matter how cynical I get, it's hard to keep up," Lily Tomlin said a couple of decades ago. She could have been referring to the cynical attitude of others, but I'd like to think that she was thinking about competing with reality.
I'm working on a couple of stories right now that really need to be different from Evil is Always Human. I am finding it hard to write something that is both upbeat and plausible. To help me with this, my lovely wife Beth has done some research. She's come up with one real-life story on which I can model a plot twist so that it is indeed plausible.
Last night I dreamed that I was working as a psychologist, under the mentorship of a more seasoned psychologist. I was conducting a session for a lesbian couple who were having a tough time. I was trying to help them when one of them physically attacked the other and the other psychologist and I had to separate them.
Afterwards, the psychologist told me, "You shouldn't talk so much. Let them talk. Our job is to love them until they sort out the answers for themselves."
I thought that was a pretty cool thing as a philosophy for faux psychologists, but I doubt that it would be well-recieved by real psychologists.
I find myself applying the idea to my characters, though. I see them as choosing their own actions, actions that often - like in real life - don't turn out very well.
Dark? Yeah, you could say that. But I'm shooting for realistic. For me, that's just the way life is.
Reader and Writer
I began to write because it seemed to be a realm in which one could exercise omnipotence. It's not.
My characters demand to make their own decisions and often the outcomes are wildly different from wha ...more
My characters demand to make their own decisions and often the outcomes are wildly different from wha ...more
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