NEW PARIS BOOK IN PROGRESS IN 2024: THE DARK SIDE – Blog # 15.
As I write my Paris book I think of plot and character and all things that good novels need. There comes a time to think of the dark side. For me, that time has come.
Almost every novel has a dark side – a dark situation, a dark thought, or a dark character. But dark doesn’t necessarily mean bad. Nor does it mean that the situation, thought, or character is disliked or rejected by the reader. Sometimes it’s “the character we love to hate.” Many readers like the dark side because it makes a novel interesting or it makes them think or it resonates with their own lives.
The dark side can help push the main character – the hero in the story – to grow and develop. That’s called “development.” The dark side can introduce drama – high stakes drama – life or death drama – push comes to shove drama – that keeps readers reading. That’s called “climax.”
The hero needs a dark situation to spur them on to slay that dragon, climb that mountain, ford that stream, follow that rainbow, till the hero finds that dream. Do you recognize those words, dear reader? Yes, it’s “Climb Every Mountain” – the 1965 Rodgers and Hammerstein song from the soundtrack of The Sound of Music film starring Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer. It’s based upon Maria von Trapp’s 1949 book The Story of the Trapp Family Singers. It initially seems like a light and breezy sing-songy musical. Highly popular. But it came from the dark side, a dark situation. It’s the time when the Third Reich annexed Austria. That’s called “suspense.”
The dark thought is inner dialogue, not only about violence and horror and revenge, but also about shame, guilt, anger, secrets, temptation, deceit, insecurity, fear, and the like. People can succumb to their dark side, or they can conquer it. The Universal peacekeeping Jedi, in the Star Wars movies (1977 to the present) famously conquer their dark side through patience and discipline. But there’s a fine line when writing about dark thoughts lest authors either glamorize them or ostracize them. Authors generally think there should be some light at the end of writing about a dark tunnel of thoughts. That’s called “hope.”
The dark character is not just the trickster. It’s the illusionist, the sceptic, the ideologue, the idiot, the bully, the cheat, the stickler, the fool, the bore, the cynic, the psychopath, the liar, the neglecter, the tyrant, the abdicator, the hedonist, the slob, the snob, the poseur, the pedant, the …
The dark character is more than “the character we love to hate.” The dark character can bend or break rules, behave unpredictably or uncharacteristically, have a bitter or trigger personality, act charmingly or turn wickedly, and change constantly or chameleonically, or say one thing and be another.
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