Grit Vs. Gratuitous

Wednesday August 13, 2014

I am currently working on a short story in the same universe as my full length novel that deals with human / sentient trafficking and child rape. Pretty brutal stuff, and a lot of writers will not touch it with a pole let alone a pen. So a couple of questions naturally follow from this: why are you writing about such dark subject matter, and how are you doing it?

The why is the easy part. I'm writing about these topics to flesh out the underside of my universe and to develop my characters into more three dimensional people. Child abuse, child exploitation, human trafficking, and other crimes against humanity remain a huge problem in our world. Unless your characters live in utopia, those problems and others like them will exist in your universes. Portraying them can set the tone for many things, including who your characters are, the fight they are fighting, and what your world really is.

In my case, my main characters are warriors, not law enforcement. The world they live in, however, has made such progress that crimes against humanity (called crimes against sentient life) are uncommon - so uncommon that the local law enforcement doesn't understand or know how to handle such grievous infractions of the law. My characters do know how to handle those problems - and it's not pretty for anyone. In showing this, however, I paint a much more vivid picture of my characters and of my universe. My characters are put into more extreme emotional situations and we can really see who they are as a direct result of that stress. My world becomes more complete. More human.

The how complicates things, but not by much. I'm not going to recommend you put horrifying things into your writing for the sake of having them there. That's not art. If you want grit in your story, it has to serve the story. Further, such topics can often be inferred rather than directly represented - in dealing with these topics by omission (writing by omission seems like it's becoming a common theme in my blog) you avoid your work becoming gratuitous, which is likely what you don't want - and I don't recommend it.

This is where using your language becomes important. Choosing your vocabulary carefully is paramount. Using my short story again as a case study, I don't directly portray a sexual act being committed against a child - that would not serve the story and would drive away readers (and rightly so!) In the simplest terms, I infer that it happened, and my characters' outrage is the result. That serves the story, however, and one particular character is more fully developed in the end - one of the primary goals for writing the short story in the first place. My world has this really dark underside, and it never has to be mentioned again for the reader to know that things like that happen in my world - just like in the one we live in.

As a disclaimer, it doesn't feel good to come up with a lot of this stuff, but I view it as a challenge to me as a writer to portray it, and portray it without being lost in the details of the horror. It's way outside of my comfort zone to write about those topics, but in doing so I am making a realer world for myself, my characters, and my readers.

So add in grit. Go way beyond your comfort zone as a writer. You don't need, and shouldn't use, gratuitous descriptions to get your point across. Take away every non-critical element of the darkness you are trying to add into your work and tack on the most minimalist elements you can. It can have a visceral effect on your writing and the results will be a more believable world, a more desperate fight for your characters, and a more satisfying read for your readers.