Down The Dark Road...

There's a great quote from Harry Potter in which Sirius Black says: "We've all got both light and dark inside us. What matters is the part we choose to act on. That's who we really are." Of course, when he says "act on" he's talking about the division in the magical world - the Death Eaters and the Order but this quote came into my head because the other night I was watching a documentary about William Golding. During it they talked about how Golding wrote Lord of the Flies - a dark, harrowing novel - and they said how he had darkness inside him and the reason he wrote such dark stories was to prevent himself from acting on his own darkness. 

Just as Robert Burton said: "I write of melancholy, by being busy to avoid melancholy." (Same basic principal.) People write about dark things because they are dark people and have dark views and want to avoid the darkness. Sure they relish about it - otherwise why else would they write about it for others to see? - but surely they are a bit weirded out about it. I love the character of Will Graham from Thomas Harris' Red Dragon who is so disgusted at himself fro being able to get into the minds of serial killers and actually understand them - putting himself in their position and working the way they would work. 

But then you get people like Bret Easton Ellis who relishes in his darkness. I once saw an interview with him in and he laughed at how people wanted to ban his book. "It's just a book!" he chuckled. "I love how people react to it!"


I write dark stories - why? - well you'd have to ask my psychiatrist (that was a joke by the way, I don't see a psychiatrist). There was a beautiful moment in my fiction class the other week where we were work-shopping two stories, one by me called Let's Run Away Together - the story of an affair between two guys and inspired by Tom Perrotta's Little Children - and a story by another girl about the beginning of a relationship between a woman and a man who comes into her cafe. 


We read hers first and everybody relished in the way they could relate to the whole "why hasn't he called me back?" thing and...
                                         ...then 
                                               ...we 
                                  ....read  
                                           ...mine 
                        ...and the room was silent when it ended. 
"Tragic" was what their faces said to me. "As is life," I wanted to reply but instead I smirked. When we discussed the story - people mainly going on about the character and how they hated one and loved the other - I said that it had to end the way it did for an affair never really ends well, does it? Especially an affair that is made up of excitement and secrets. What happens - my story asks - when the excitement and the secrets are gone? What do you have left?


...Just darkness.