The Key To Grimdark Fiction is Showing How Things Could Have Been Better

From A Song of Ice and Fire to the far future of Warhammer 40,000, grimdark fiction takes many forms. However, while the details of the settings, worlds, and stories may vary from one book to another, the key to really making these tales work is that they're tragedies on a whole other level. But for a tragedy to really hit home, and to resonate with the audience, it's important to show the audience how things could work out... to make them really wonder if maybe this time characters will get a happy ending.

They won't, of course, but the reader needs to at least think it's possible.

They need to drop their guard for you to land the blow.

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The Spoonful of Sugar Helps The Poised Pill Go Down

I've been thinking on this topic for a good while now, especially while working on some Warhammer 40K tales of my own like Field Test, which is about an experimental deployment of a previously untested weapon by an inquisitor, and Waking Dogs: A World Eaters Tale, which is about one of the fallen legionnaires deciding he's had enough of his lot in life. And something I realized while I was doing all that thinking is that a major flaw in a lot of grimdark fiction is that a lot of writers mistake bleakness for tragedy. This really undermines a story, and it can stop readers from getting invested in what's going on.

What makes grimdark fiction (and really any tragic story) work is that the audience has to actively want the tragedy to not occur, even if they're reasonably certain that it will. If things start bad, and only get worse with no suggestion that they could ever have been better, then there's no contrast for the audience to be impacted by. It's just a parade of rakes to the face as they try to walk across the yard.

A perfect example of what I'm talking about is slasher movies. While neither grimdark nor tragic (usually, anyway), a good slasher movie gets the audience invested in the survival of the protagonists. We watch them being stalked by an implacable, masked killer, and we know they're in a bad situation, but we're hoping they will make the right decisions and survive (if not triumph) because we've developed empathy for these characters. Even if everything in the story, the score, and our experience says they're going to fail, we hope they don't. In bad slasher movies (much like in bad grimdark fiction) we often have characters that bad things continually happen to with no reprieve or chance that they might not happen. And because it feels like there's no chance things could turn out better, it creates a sense of bored Nihilism; why bother getting emotionally invested when it feels like there's no point?

One of the best ways to do this is to give the audiences glimpses of how things could happen. Show them how our protagonists might triumph, or what things they could do to avoid the terrible fate. Can our lead overcome their pride and make restitution? Could our coward nobly sacrifice themself to save everyone else? Would someone selfish give up their most prized possessions, or their power, for the good of others?

The answer to all of these is usually, "no," because we're still talking about grimdark stories here. However, if the audience sees the possibilities, it can be a lot like seeing the bomb under the table. They know what could happen, and because you've put that possibility in play they can't un-know it. The only question as they watch the tragedy unfold is will it be the road the story goes down? Or just a glimpse of what-might-have been that will make the grimness hit all the harder?

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That's all for this week's Craft of Writing! For more of my work, check out my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my cat noir novel Marked Territory, its sequel Painted Cats, my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife, or my most recent short story collection The Rejects!

 

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