Darken Your Story

Some fiction writing tips to help you

Today I am going to talk about darkening your story. And by that I don’t mean that having the story take place at night or in a darkened room or building. What you want is to have some foreboding suspense.

One way to do this is with the character going from a happy go lucky person to despondent either immediately due to a traumatic event. Or through the course of the story or series of stories the character changes — which is supposed to happen anyway — but they fight against it trying to keep themself the same against everything going on around them.

Other dark emotions include despair and rage. But be careful not to show them that way all the time. Think about what causes the dark emotion in the person. Something from their past might cause them to react to something. This could be a person they had conflict with in the near or distant history. A song or smell can also trigger something in them.

Write down a list of things that can cause the character to change go from a light to dark mood. I usually like to try to come up with ten things and pick the best one(s).

For a setting to be darkened, this is done in the world building stage. A lot of dystopian novels like The Hunger Games have a dark theme and setting to them. As do post-apocalyptic by their very nature have a dark theme.

To do this, decide how the tension in the setting and theme are to be increased. You can begin by asking these questions:

1. Is it due to the type of government in the story?

2. Was there some sort of calamity that happened in the near or distant past?

3. What are the relations between nations or planets in your world? If the relations are bad, this can be a source of tension if there is a possibility of war.

4. If you’re doing a fantasy story, what are the creatures? They don’t necessarily have to be dragons.

Those are some of the things you can ask yourself as you are building your story world. Remember to also have some lighter moments so it’s not all doom and gloom. And you can have evil characters do some good things as well, like for a family member. To quote from 3:10 To Yuma the Russell Crowe character Ben Wade said, “Even bad men love their mommas.”

Hopefully this all helped.