How many short stories have followed that basic formula? Thousands? Millions? And many of them have been written by much better authors than me. There’s no way that I could write a top quality short story along those lines, but it hasn’t stopped me trying, many times.
No, if I’m to be successful in the short story field (however you might define ‘success’ – there’s a whole ‘nother blog in that) then I have to try something different. I have to make my stories stand out from the crowd in some way.
Fortunately I’m not afraid to take the road less travelled, to write about subjects that others might shy away from, so maybe this is the way that my writing should veer: towards the dark side. Don’t get me wring, I couldn’t and wouldn’t fill my tales with ‘gorenography’, sexual deviance or distasteful political and personal viewpoints just for the point of titillate the reader, but I wouldn’t automatically reject them as subjects if they were part of a good plot. For instance, I once wrote a short story about internet grooming. It conjured up unpleasant thought in me and hopefully in the reader too but it was integral to the storyline and, believe it or not, the final twist gave it a ‘feel-good’ ending. Sort of.
I’m currently working a tale about assisted suicide. That one doesn’t have any twist but hopefully gets the reader to ask a few questions about themselves and the society in which they live. The same applies to another about domestic abuse. These aren’t taboo thrills shoehorned into my prose for shock value. They’re jumping-on points, integral themes without which the story wouldn’t even exist.
So my question to you today is this: Am I wrong to tackle these subjects? And if not these, are there some topics that are just too raw to write about, just too objectionable to put into a piece of fiction the point of which is, let’s face it, simply to entertain?
© Shaun Finnie 2012
No comments:
Post a Comment