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Writing a Darker Story

Dark and gritty, this certainly seems to be the prevalent theme in Hollywood. Ever since Batman Begins created a darker, more realistic version of the capped crusader, every other movie seems to want to create darker, grittier stories. This type of story telling didn't just infect movies.

Comic books have entire ages as they switched from the silly shenanigans of the 50s and 60s into the grittier, darker, bloodier and more complex stories of the modern era. And of course, I wouldn't be talking about it if this trend didn't hit books too. Every genre seems to have their own version of an awakening towards darker themes. The Fantasy genre started out with Tolkien... but is currently having a run through Game of Thrones. Just look at the progression of Harry Potter books from the innocent 'destroy evil with love' of the first book to loosing half the characters in the final book to see this dark swing.

And it's not always easy to say when a story is darker. What seemed dark when you first saw it comes off cartoonish and juvenile over the years. The Matrix once seemed dark and moody, but now it seems almost juvenile. You typically know darkness when you see it, but if you were ever asked to change a story to make it darker, or describe the elements of a story that made that story dark, you might struggle.

We've all seen stories that come off dark. However, we've also all seen stories that were supposed to be dark, but turned out to not really meet the quota. Oh, they tried to do the things dark movies do. They set the atmosphere, the color scheme, the emo dialogue, but something along the lines was lost, and instead of getting the dark story they wanted, they end up with something silly and childish. Instead of making the next 'Nightmare before Christmas', they end up making 'Monkeybones'.

There are a few trends I've noticed when I see these failures to be dark. For example, people often relate darkness to a few key things. How bad the characters act, for example. They'll create characters that are completely unlikable douchbags, because it's dark! A complete and utter lack of humor would be another common pitfall. If you're being dark, you obviously can't be funny. Increasing the kill count yet another go to making a movie darker and grittier. Murder is dark, right? Well, if murder is dark, rape is double dark!

As the logic seems to go, make a bunch of arseholes, have them rape and murder each other, give it not a single ounce of humor, and boom, you have to have a story that's dark, right?

Let's target the weakest link here first. If you can't have humor in something dark, what the heck is dark humor? Oh... so I guess there is a kind of humor that can work in a dark story, as long as that humor is a dark humor. But what is a dark humor?

I'm sure you could write an entire English doctoral dissertation on what is dark humor, and I don't think any long running conversation is going to benefit you here. I'm simply going to leave the dissection of dark humor for a time. Instead, I'd rather talk about what it takes to make a story dark, as opposed to darkly humorous. In that respect, I will point out that most of the examples I presented above were not the ways to achieve darkness. If you want to write a dark story, it isn't enough to simply make 'dark' things happen in it.

What happens in your story will never be enough to makes it dark, instead, you need to be concerned about the how and the why. Any 'good' dark story needs to establish a strong morality (back to a previous chapter, eh?). You can have murder in all kinds of stories. Rambo can mow down a hundred soldiers and it certainly isn't dark, because his motives are hero motives and he's usually doing it with a gun that doesn't even create any blood splatter.

So, it isn't the murder, the 'what', that makes a story dark. So, instead, it's how that murder takes place, and why it's taking place. How is pretty simple to grasp. It would usually be in a harder to stomach way. If it was easy, it wouldn't be dark. As to the why, I think any dark story is always going to have a psychological component to it, which may be simplifying things a bit.