We live in a storytelling moment deeply fascinated by darkness—and for good reason. Stories have always descended into shadow to help us metabolize our fear, trauma, and moral failure. They name the monster, bringing it out of the shadows where it can be faced and perhaps integrated or understood. But stories don’t just explore darkness; they also orient us within it as part of a larger narrative. This is why writers need to continue exploring a sense of wonder in fiction more than ever—not as escape or denial, but as a way of completing the arc. Wonder, hope, and other life-affirming paradigms are what allow stories to move through the descent rather than getting stuck there, which in turn shapes how both individuals and cultures imagine whether the journey is ultimately worth it.
Stories have always been our portals to the unknown that is both inside and beyond ourselves. Sometimes that unknown is a wonderful mystery. Other times, it is a terrifying mystery. Both are true. Writers are the keepers of this strange paradox. When we carry the understanding that, even in facing the terrifying mysteries, it is our capacity to tell those stories with a corresponding sense of wonder that allows our readers’ descent to resolve into meaning rather than cynicism.
I often tell people, “Stories are my language.”
This, I think, is true of humanity as a whole. We are, as Jonathan Gottschall calls us, the storytelling animal.
Stories are our means for making sense of the sometimes impossible complexities of consciousness—of allowing the light of our left-brained egoic selves to shine upon the symbolic and archetypal depths of our right-brained intuitive selves. Through that sense, we gain meaning and purpose.
From an on-the-nose perspective, stories are seemingly little more than factual recountings (or plausible pseudo-recountings) of linear events. But I would argue that even hyper-realistic stories are still representative of deeper symbolism—not least the plot arc at the center of our strongest storytelling.
Too often, we fail to appreciate the psychological power with which we are interacting when we read or watch stories. Because of their profound capacity to bypass the conscious brain and engage directly with the most primal parts of our psyche, stories do not merely reflect worldview, they also actively participate in shaping it. Story’s capacity to influence our contextual perception is self-evident. This is one of its great strengths—and our best storytellers wield it with care and thoughtfulness.
This is why it is important to question what the stories we are writing (or consuming) are pointing us toward. I do not mean that stories that explore darkness—whether realistically or hyperbolically—should be eschewed. Quite the opposite. But as so many storytellers already intuitively understand, darkness must be reckoned with as part of a larger cycle.
Last year, over 700 of you contributed to a survey exploring how and why people interact with stories. At the end of the survey, I offered space for suggestions about what you’d like me to post about this year. One of the most requested themes was some variant of “dark vs. hopeful stories.”
I will be posting on this more specifically later this year, but it felt timely to begin the year with a look at the bigger picture, including why we need both darkness and “wonder” in our stories, but also why they work as part of a continuum that charts not just the psychological arcs of individual characters in individual stories—but the great millennia-long arc of storytelling itself and its impact upon all of us. Seen this way, the persistence of hopeful, meaningful stories throughout history is itself evidence that wonder has never disappeared.
TL;DR
Dark stories play an essential role in helping us face fear, trauma, and moral failure—but darkness is not meant to be the destination. A sense of wonder in fiction allows stories to complete the arc, transforming descent into meaning rather than cynicism. Importantly, many stories—especially books—already do this well, carrying hope, sacrifice, and return with integrity. Wonder is not escapism or denial; it is the imaginative capacity to believe the journey is worth finishing and that a good future remains possible. Through this work, writers can continue to help both individuals and cultures move forward with meaning, courage, and care.
Why We Actually Do Need Dark Stories
Dark fiction has a purpose. It always has. Descent stories, shadow journeys (Ursula Le Guin’s Wizard of Earthsea comes to mind), tragedies, and cautionary tales: these are how cultures deal with fear, trauma, and moral failure. They are how we name the monster, so it stops being invisible. They are how we seek and find catharsis. But I believe it is important, as storytellers, to consider the idea that darkness is not a destination. Rather, it is a single point in the journey.
That distinction matters.
Last year, I shared a post expressing my personal readiness to see a turn in the cycle of storytelling—away from deconstructionist, anti-heroic stories and back toward what I always think of as “wonder.”
However, darkness—not just in individual stories but in storytelling trends—is culturally necessary as part of this larger cycle. If we consider storytelling as a whole, it is mostly about bad things happening. This is ultimately the root of our sometimes maligned aphorism “no conflict, no story.”
As both social reflection and social catalyst, the storytelling cycle reflects the reality of our lives. It reflects the outer events of our history. And it reflects the inner thrashings of each generation’s struggles to confront, evolve, grow, and ultimately survive. From their very earliest iteration, stories have been mandates for survival. That writers continue to engage this mandate with thoughtfulness, honesty, and courage is worth acknowledging and celebrating.
When in times of personal and cultural crisis, the primal instinct to stare down the monsters in the dark becomes strong in all of us. We see this reflected in the types of stories that become popular at any given turn of the zeitgeist.
However, as any sojourner of the Dark Night of the Soul can tell you, when we courageously dare to venture into the darkness, there is always the very real possibility of getting stuck there. And this is precisely where attentive storytellers matter most.
The Danger of Getting Stuck in the Descent—and Why Stories Must Complete the Arc
Stories don’t just reflect culture; they train it.
They don’t merely express what we feel; they instruct us in what to expect.
Over time, expectation often becomes prophetic. When a culture repeatedly tells itself that power corrupts, love fails, heroism is naïve, and meaning is a lie—eventually, that story stops being cathartic and starts being formative.
At that point, darkness ceases to be a warning and becomes a worldview. It’s true that at the waning end of hopeful cycles (e.g., 1980s and 2000s), there comes a moment when speaking darkness into the light actually becomes a radically life-affirming act. This happens when positivism can no longer support paradigms that have become tyrannical or even just simply outgrown their usefulness (and therefore their truthfulness). This is often a moment when our interaction with certain archetypes (e.g., the Hero) has become too literal—and the deeper meaning is in danger of being lost.
We can argue this is what happened in the late 2000s and 2010s when an assembly-line approach to such myths as the Hero’s Journey flatlined the archetype’s symbolic grittiness. In response, storytelling trends rightly begin pushing back with their own form of critique by exploring other aspects of what Robert McKee calls the thematic square.
Whereas one decade may explore the Positive, another decade may in turn seek balance by exploring the Contrary or Contradictory corners. Eventually, however, this leads us to the Negation of the Negation—and we remain in this hellscape of nihilism at our peril. What keeps us from staying there? The persistent work of storytellers who continue to finish the arc.
Darkness and deconstruction is never meant to be the whole story. The story arc itself teaches movement: descent → transformation → return. When stories linger too long in cynicism, they stop being cathartic and start being formative. Deconstruction is not the problem. The problem is deconstruction without reconstruction.
Why Stories Must Promise a Return to Wonder
As storytellers, we should be willing to go into the shadows, yes—but, even more, to go through them. Let your stories descend, but also let them return. Let your heroes break, but let something inside them remain inviolable. Let the future be uncertain, but not unthinkable.
Stories teach us how to live forward. To do so, stories must promise—or at least hint—at a return to wonder in the end. It is a promise that the darkness is worth it. This needn’t be explicit. Sometimes it is just a tonal inflection.
Think about the endings of such stories as Children of Men or Casablanca, in which—in many ways—all things are lost for the main characters. And yet, it is understood that what they have sacrificed or what they will risk offers at least the hope that it is in service to something greater.
The closing moments of Children of Men remind us that even in a broken world, sacrifice can still point toward a future worth believing in. (Children of Men (2006), Universal Pictures.)
It is a promise that the tribulations of the character arc are worth enduring—that to devote one’s life to the long, arduous, and sometimes unrewarding quest of being heroic is worth it. Like Frodo and Sam, stories walk us through hell, through the darkest parts and deepest fears of this fragile human existence—and then they show us there is something worth it on the other side.
When the journey feels impossible, Sam’s choice to carry Frodo reminds us that finishing the arc often depends on love, endurance, and shared sacrifice. (The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003), New Line Cinema.)
Stories exist because arcs exist. Going into the shadows is not the same as staying there.
The Sense of Wonder in Fiction as Moral Imagination
What do I mean by this idea of “wonder” in a story? By it, I am trying to encapsulate the idea of what allows humanity to believe—sometimes improbably—that life is worth living. It is a feeling I daresay we have all experienced in response to story.
To me, that feeling of wonder is the whole rhyme and reason of story.
It is why I write, why I read, watch, listen. It is a feeling that rises up from somewhere deep within that enlivens and ennervates every particle of body and soul. It shows us that just as the story may reflect our deepest parts back to ourselves, it also reflects upon something deeper and greater than ourselves and our small egoic understandings of what this existence is all about.
Wonder is the promise of a good future.
As a society and as individuals, it is imperative we believe that. Our stories tell us, at any given moment, whether or not we do believe it. The best of our stories have always been those that tell us—whether through critique or through affirmation—how to seek it.
This sense of wonder in fiction is emphatically not escapism and not saccharine optimism. Wonder is not denial; wonder is expectation. Indeed, wonder is structural to story itself. The symbolic underpinnings of the story arc—for both plot and character—are founded upon it.
Wonder is the capacity to believe something better is possible without denying what is broken. It is the refusal to let cynicism have the final word.
Wonder says:
- Yes, the world is dangerous—and still worth saving.
- Yes, people fail—and are still capable of transformation.
- Yes, the shadows are real—but still not the deepest truth.
Stories that understand wonder are not shallow. They are structural. They are stories that remember the shape of meaning and understand how the journey cycles over and over again throughout history.
Like all literary cycles, the anti-hero era reveals something important—in this case that unexamined ideals can become hollow, performative, or even oppressive. But the answer to corrupted ideals is not their demolition. Rather, it is their redemption. Although we stand in a moment that often feels stripped of innocence, this does not mean our heroes should be stripped of purpose. Otherwise, we haven’t yet told a truer story than those of our ancestors—just a smaller one.
We get what we focus on. Writers, especially, live inside our material. If our imaginative diet is exclusively murder, disillusionment, manipulation, nihilism, and power games (no matter how artful), the cost is not neutral. The psyche absorbs patterns before it critiques them.
This doesn’t mean every story needs a happy ending, but it does mean every story needs the capacity to at least point forward along the trajectory of the greater arc toward that moment of redemption. Even classic tragedies traditionally offered wonder, in meaning if not in outcome. There was loss because first there had been the potential for value. That, too, is hope.
Stories That Build, Not Just Dismantle—And Why Writers Need Them
Writers are cultural architects. This is because stories do more than just reflect reality. They create it.
Society begins with us. We are the dreamers—whether we are dreaming of love or justice or enlightenment or peace or a child’s laughter or the good death. That writers continue to dream boldly, even in uncertain times, is no small thing.
We dream our stories and, together, our stories dream our culture, our society, and our world. Even now, we are dreaming into existence the next generations and their paradigms.
Humans cannot live indefinitely without hope. If our stories can’t imagine goodness, then goodness becomes unimaginable. Stories teach us what kind of future is possible and whether it’s worth striving for. Without this, what happens to imagination? What happens to agency? That writers keep choosing to imagine such futures—again and again—is an act of courage.
I have sometimes felt uncertain of my deep belief in this need for wonder at the heart of all storytelling. A voice in my head tells me, “That’s just naïvety or idealism talking.” But I don’t think so. Balance is important in all things, and bypassing the terrors of shadow work to play endlessly in fields of sunshine is neither healthy nor helpful. But there is a time when it becomes an act of radical courage to raise our hands and say, I dare to be happy, I defiantly choose hope, I will build toward wonder.
Wonder is not denial. Wonder is expectation.
Wonder is the radical act of believing that the story—our story—is going somewhere good even if the road is hard.
Dark stories matter. Shadow work matters. Descent matters. But wonder is what allows those experiences to resolve into meaning rather than despair. Stories that finish the arc do not deny suffering; they contextualize it. In doing so, they help both individuals and cultures imagine a future worth moving toward.
I don’t think that’s naïvety. I think that’s responsibility.
Want More?
Writing Your Story’s Theme (Amazon affiliate link)
If this exploration of darkness, wonder, and meaning resonated with you, it’s because—at its heart—it’s really about theme. It’s about what our stories are proving beneath the surface of plot and character, and how those underlying beliefs shape not just our stories, but ourselves.
That’s why I wrote Writing Your Story’s Theme. I wanted to help writers move beyond accidental or unconscious themes and instead engage intentionally with the deeper moral and symbolic questions their stories are already asking. Theme is where descent finds its meaning, where wonder becomes structural rather than sentimental, and where stories learn how to finish the arc instead of abandoning it halfway through.
If you’ve ever sensed that your story wants to say something true but have struggled to articulate what that is or how to build the plot and character arcs around it, this book is designed to walk you through that process with clarity, depth, and respect for your creative intuition.
Available in paperback, e-book, and audio.
Wordplayers, tell me your opinions! How do you see the sense of wonder in fiction functioning in stories you love—or stories you’re writing right now? Do you feel darkness and hope working together, or pulling against each other? Tell me in the comments!
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About K.M. Weiland | @KMWeiland
Like G.K. Chesterton said, “Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed,”
And when people call storytelling in dark times “naive,” they often say the tale says our real-world dragons don’t exist, and stories don’t do that at all. They simply complete the picture — when too often, the cynics think it’s winning at all that’s naive.
Indeed, this quote always makes me think of what Hayao Miyazaki said in response to critics of Princess Mononoke‘s appropriateness for children:
“I’m not going to make movies that tell children, ‘You should despair and run away.’ But children most certainly have violence within them. Unless we touch upon that, I don’t think the film can be convincing to children.”
I do so love Chesterton! My fave is the “mathematicians tell us that one plus one equals two and they are quite wrong. The difference between being alone and having one friend is not twice one, it is a thousand times one.” Need that one to give me a guidepost to hope: find one true friend and you can keep going forever.
I’ve followed your blog and podcast for YEARS and love and appreciate your work immensely. So it feels very impactful to say this might be my favorite article you’ve written yet. Thank you for your perspective. I’m feeling so inspired to keep writing!
That means a lot! Very happy it resonated. 🙂
In my story “The Orphan”, the protagonist falls into a deep depression after the loss of his wife. With revolver in hand, he is saved at the last moment by a call from a friend.
This is the critical moment in his life, defining the the before and the after.
I like stories that show a clear before and after. That sense of transformation is always interesting.
I have written several “dark” stories. They don’t have happy endings because in life, there are often no such things. One short was about a mother who left her baby in her car, “You Forgot Something.” The ending says just that. Another is about an abused child who, in the end, returns to the arms of the abuser. Perhaps I wrote them as a warning. Is that so wrong?
Not at all. The point I’m making here is not that “dark” stories are wrong. They exist within the overall continuum of storytelling as a whole. Rather, I’m pointing to what I see as the need to understand where the darkness falls in the arc as a way of understanding, on a personal level first of all, that the darkness is not the entire context.
So powerful. And so relevant to today, MLK’s birthday. I didn’t understand, in words, what I was doing with my stories but I can see that, yes, hope always wins, ultimately. Louise Bogen said that in a time of anguish and despair no one should be ashamed if their work gives readers back a portion of their lost heart [paraphrasing cuz I don’t have the quote to hand]. That’s what we storytellers do. Descending into despair just paralyzes a reader. Making it too easy lets the need for action be dismissed as true childishness. Showing the descent, hitting rock bottom and then letting the distant light inspire one more effort, and then another. Even if the first battle ends in defeat, there is a spark that will grow and allow the final triumph of hope.
Gandhi reminded us that the tyrants of the past are all dead, their empires in ruins. May take a long time to bring them down, but …
“In a time of anguish and despair no one should be ashamed if their work gives readers back a portion of their lost heart.”
I love this.
Also this: “Descending into despair just paralyzes a reader. Making it too easy lets the need for action be dismissed as true childishness. Showing the descent, hitting rock bottom and then letting the distant light inspire one more effort, and then another.”
“Stories don’t just reflect culture; they train it.”
Absolutely. This post put things into perspective for me. I’ve written some dark short stories, and have felt conflicted about it. I don’t want to add darkness to the world, but I had to give in to my curiosity (wonder?), explore something within. I see now the value when it’s contextualised. Wonderful post. Thank you!
I think a lot of writers struggle/question this–from one direction or the other. Context and balance are, I think, key–as is staying firmly grounded in and conscious of one’s own standing within that contextual balance. Truly, the greatest work we as writers can do isn’t always at the page, but in the personal work we then bring to the page.
I do see dark stories with bad endings as a hard read. What, in my view, helps us to understand the story and make it somewhat palatable and, in the same way, the world at large is that even in the midst of evil or despair, trauma and hopelessness, there can be some bright spot, some small element of hope or promise that whatever is going on in the story will pass, and a better future will come forth.
I am thinking here of All Quiet on the Western Front. Not the recent remake, but the original movie. Towards the end, the MC, who started with romantic dreams of what war was, has descended into an inhuman killing machine. Then, whilst lying in wait to snipe an enemy, he finds a butterfly lands beside him. He is enchanted by it. It is a reminder, a symbol of what his life might have been like.
The movie ends with his death, but we, as viewers, are encouraged by the fact that what was portrayed will indeed pass, and a better future awaits. There is hope.
Yes, this is such a classic, indelible moment. I have been reading Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, the classic 20th-century critique of the meat-packing industry in Chicago. It is unremittingly awful in its details of systemic cruelty, suffering, and corruption–and yet it is incredibly gripping. I have been pondering how a book like this (and my own visceral interest in it) fits into this discussion. I have yet to finish it, so don’t know quite how it ends, but it is interesting to feel that even as the awfulness of this system chips away at the goodness with which the characters begin the story (and which, we assume, will be largely lost by the end), there is a sense of the enduring human spirit and the hope with which the story was written that change was possible. The book is famous largely *because* that hope was fulfilled in that it did inspire reform.
With regard to Sinclair, whenever I see it referenced it’s usually in the context of a books designed to call attention to specific problems. Social issues-books, rather than moral-instruction books. And an important factor is that they have an actionable point. “Stop doing X and this specific [bad] thing will stop happening. Start doing Y and this particular [good] outcome will result.”
Plus there’s the expose factor, where ordinary people can genuinely say they didn’t know about X until they read the book, and now they think there’s something specific they can do about it. I suspect this type of book can get away with being as bleak and as you’re describing, primarily because of those factors. Absent those factors, I’m not sure the average reader of the day, then or now, would have been as likely to stick with the book. Which is something for writers to keep in mind.
It’s actually a good story in its own right. Sometimes I limp through books like that, reading them more for academic or intellectual reasons, but this one is gripping. I keep reading late into the night!
Yes. I am writing paranormal suspense novels – thrillers with ghosts. – which are broadly categorized as horror books. But so much of horror seems to peddle only in despair. The writers crank up the gore and misery and say their artistic intent is to reflect their nihilistic view of society.
I don’t see the point in that. I have bad things happen in my stories – they are thrillers after all – but in general, the good guys manage to eke out a victory. There is a hint of continuing malevolent forces, as it is a series, and no book quite has a happy ending, but they do end on hopeful notes.
My view on horror changed greatly after reading John Truby’s take on it in Anatony of Genre, in which he frames horror not as an exercise in despair, but as a genre that grapples with the shadow side of humanity in order to confront it. From this perspective, good horror isn’t nihilistic; it’s a morality play. I find it bears many surprising similarities to the coming-of-age Maiden Arc, which grapples with the antagonistic Predator in a loss of innocence that presages rational adulthood.
What you’ve written grips me as an author. I write about stories that face the darkness but end in light. I refer to it as Redemptive realism. My Stories of Consequence explore some of the darkest facets of the human nature, but I always point to the fact that hope and redemption can be found at the end, that there is grace available. Life isn’t always black and white, good and bad. There are shades of gray, some of them deep charcoal! But there is always hope. I’m a woman of faith, and I believe that as long as God exists, there is hope and light. It’s essential, in my opinion, for fiction to have the courage to engage in the darkness so that the opposite can be understood much more clearly.
I resonate with that emphasis on hope. Stories engage us when they honestly grapple with darkness, but they endure because they don’t stop there. When fiction acknowledges the complexity and grayness of human experience and still allows room for meaning, redemption, or forward motion, it feels truer to life. Hope is what clarifies the struggle. Without some glimmer of light–however hard-won–darkness loses contrast, and the story fails to offer a strong sense of meaning or purpose.
I really like this idea, that darkness in stories is necessary but it isn’t the end. It’s a constant cycle in the history of mankind as well as in our own personal lives. Light follows darkness, darkness follows light. Sometimes it can take decades for the wheel to turn, as it were, and when you are personally inside the darkness it seems as though it will never end. The light *also* seems like it will never end, when we’re in the good times, but both do. But it’s hard to believe.
Darkness is good in a story. The best stories show us the darkness and let us believe and hope that light can come again, that as Sam says, there is something good worth fighting for. Sam *did not expect to win* or even to live but he kept going anyway.
Off-topic: a possible post idea is to dig into the relationship between the Midpoint and the Third Plot Point. I always get confused about these two when trying to plot out my stories. As I understand it, the Midpoint is when things go very wrong and the Third is when the protagonist decides to fully commit despite the disaster of the Midpoint. But in practice when I use them the 3rd always seem to end up happening very close to the Midpoint, as the sequel to the scene of the Midpoint. Is it supposed to work that way? Or is there supposed to be more “story” before the protagonist works up the courage to try again?
To me, this idea of the cyclical nature of darkness and light is really the entire foundation of story’s archetypal shape. I’m going to be posting a bit more on that in a few weeks.
As for the difference between the Midpoint and the Third Plot Point, in short, no, the Third Plot Point isn’t meant to function as an immediate sequel to the Midpoint. The Midpoint is a revelation or reversal that reframes the conflict (often raising the stakes or exposing the true nature of the antagonistic force). Thematically within the character arc, it offers a Moment of Truth in which this central revelation shows the character a better way of moving forward (whether personally or practically).
What follows is the entire Second Half of the Second Act (including the Second Pinch Point around the 67% mark), in which the character tries to act on that new understanding, but is limited because he is still unwilling to fully give up his old way of being (i.e., the Lie the Character Believes).
The Third Plot Point opens the Third Act around the 75% mark. It is where things finally go as wrong as they possibly can, creating as Low Moment that strips away any remaining illusions and forcing the protagonist to choose whether to fully relinquish the old Lie and commit to the new Truth.
If your Third Plot Point is collapsing into the Midpoint, it’s could be a sign the post-Midpoint consequences haven’t been allowed to fully play out yet–or that you’re introducing the Low Moment too soon.
More here: https://www.helpingwritersbecomeauthors.com/story-structure-second-half-of-the-second-act/
This reminds me of a joke my pastor likes to say re: the 23rd Psalm: You walk THROUGH the valley of the shadow of death. You don’t build a house and start paying a mortgage in it. You go through it, and don’t linger!
Storywise, I like the VotS, because it’s a great crucible to show what the characters stand for. Adversity introduces a man to himself (supposedly said by Leonardo da Vinci, but who really knows). But if there’s no light end to the valley, why would the character struggle through it? What would be the *point* of fighting if the VotS was without end?
And to be honest, I personally find nihilism and cynicism to be utterly childish and ignorant. In an otherwise trippy anime series I watched, one of the heroines responds to the villain, who claimed he had to show everyone that the world wasn’t all sunshine and roses.
“We *know* that,” the heroine snapped. “We didn’t need you to *teach* us!”
That’s my general reaction to stories that are pointlessly dark, because the authors usually claim that the story is meant to be didactic. But the execution is far too simpleminded, and I think that’s why the Upton Sinclair scenario is more palatable to me, because they focus on specific real life problems that point to real life solutions. Similarly, the darkness works best in stories that show the way *out* of the VotS.
Distrust in general is so rampant right now, as a part of the deconstruction phase we’re in, that I think cynicism and nihilism can sometimes feel like the “smart” stance. It’s the stance of someone who will not again be fooled by the fairy tales that adult life has insisted we disabuse. However, over-identifying with a knee-jerk response that insists nothing is worth believing in or everything must be deconstructed is really just the shadow twin of credulous ideology.
If this period of deconstruction is here to teach us anything, I think it is to grow the individual muscles of discernment and integrity that allow us to parse truth for ourselves. Some things are not true; but some are. We will always be partially mistaken in sorting reality into those two buckets, but to deny there *are* buckets just because we cannot perfectly recognize them means we will never grow our own capacity for that recognition.
I like your point about discernment. In my fantasy, the heroines capture a woman who was actually a spirit of deception in disguise. She had actively targeted a princess in a palace governed by “the Lie.” When the princess recovers, she and the heroines have to figure out what was true and what was false in order to strategize their next move.
One of them does point out that they *can’t* simply assume that they should believe the opposite of what the deceiving spirit said, because a truly good deception incorporates truth. Sometimes straightforward truths, and sometimes true, “but told slant.”
I’ve seen people take the “just go with the opposite” approach, but they never seem to realize they’re setting themselves up for another con. Still, I am optimistic that our present age will train up a generation to use their critical thinking muscles.
“One of them does point out that they *can’t* simply assume that they should believe the opposite of what the deceiving spirit said, because a truly good deception incorporates truth. Sometimes straightforward truths, and sometimes true, “but told slant.” ”
Ooh, I like that!
I’m almost speechless. This is beautiful and absolutely needs to be heard. I sure needed it! I’ve been outlining a 10-ish-book epic fantasy series, which will certainly have dark points. Though I have a lot of plot outlined, I haven’t decided the ending and I wasn’t sure it should end happily. This made me think on so many levels.
I’m so glad it spoke to you today. I hope you find the best and most truthful ending possible for your story. 🙂
Most of what I write is both dark and Christian. Though we may go through the valley of the shadow of death, there is a Light at the end of the story. Thank you for this fascinating article and for everyone’s great discussion in the comments!
So glad you enjoyed it! Thanks for chiming in.
Hi, wonderful post! I’m writing my seventh book, and after looking back on them, I can say that each one is some level of dark. Your words resonated with me because it’s true, we need dark stories in order to truly face what is out there and in ourselves, but the darkness shouldn’t be the end. We should come back into the light in victory over that darkness. Thanks for the thoughts. 😊
I had a question. A while ago you posted about how to publish a book, and I believe you said then that you published directly to KDP. I recently published my first book with the help of KDP services, and they put it on IngramSpark, from which my book would be distributed. I noticed that I certainly don’t get paid right away, and that shipping takes FOREVER. So I guess my question is, have you ever tried IngramSpark, and what platform would you recommend I publish with? I’m leaning toward only KDP next time, but wanted to hear your advice. Thank you.
I’m currently spending an hour every week on a call with my niece and nephews, sharing creative writing principles with them. My niece, who is eleven, started out writing a cozy story about a Squishmallow tending her beloved garden. When we started exploring the concept of conflict in a story, she gleefully introduced a plot twist in which the character was kidnapped. Darkness is present in almost all stories, even up from the innocence of a child’s imagination. She doesn’t yet understand *how* dark that is, but as her understanding grows, so will her ability to understand the light as well.
In answer to your question, I’ve not yet tried IngramSpark. It is on my long-term to-do list, since I would like a path that would allow me to start selling paperbacks direct from my site (rather than just from Amazon), but I don’t yet have any personal experience with it.
Oh, that was so funny, thanks for sharing! It got me thinking about my stories when I was her age, and younger. Looking back, I realized a lot of my games with my doll house were very dark, even at the age of eight. And that’s before things started happening in my family. To your point, yes, we do need dark stories so we can “face the monsters in the dark” by bringing them into the light. This post has been on my mind for the past several weeks, and it’s been good to think about.
Yeah, that’s one good thing about IngramSpark (I’m also trying to figure out how to sell books from my website), but I was also curious about publishing on Amazon. Since asking your question, I found a great video explaining why we should publish with both. I’ll link it in case anyone finds it helpful. 🙂
https://youtu.be/IbhY2omVsS0?si=qGX7IUkePRi7KXds
Thank you for this. I wholeheartedly agree. My middle-grade series was birthed out of wonder and a desire to instill hope and empowerment in the form of visionary fiction, which some might consider fantasy…
Sounds “wonder”ful! 😉
So many insightful points here, and beautifully written! The cyclical nature of our storytelling tendencies and the movement towards a contrasting type of narrative is interesting, both on the level of an individual story and societal consciousness. We wait for that moment that Gandalf crests the hill at dawn, and the gears shift from the descent to an upwards transformation – the re-entry of hope and wonder, which is definitely there in all the stories I really love. My current sci-fi fantasy project centers heavily on the theme of duality, which goes nicely with this idea of light-dark cycles and how both are necessary to find the way out through the chaos: you grow like a waterlily, in the hazy dark, but rise bloom in the light.
Thought provoking post…