When I discovered “Grocery Store Rules Apply” lurking in my subconscious, it wasn’t a happy story, but it wasn’t all that bad either.
Today is Day 8 of the on-and-off writing marathon for this story and after writing 600+ words of my new hook scene, I told a very funny joke that had me chortling all the way to Twitter. Just as I ate lunch and took a break, the realization hit me just how brutal this world had become.
Don’t get me wrong. As of a few days ago, I knew this story would be told using beautiful language that painted over the brutality of a dystopian reality. To that end, poetry and metaphor became the vehicles of every day descriptions. But until yesterday, when the SO rightfully pointed out that such a hard world needed soft language, GSRA’s world was functionally post-communist 20th century Eastern Europe.
Then I told wrote the joke, which took five sentences to reach the punchline. Buried in one of those sentences was a nugget, a gem of a world detail, that took me twenty minutes to comprehend and has left me shaken and shocked. This is exactly the reaction I want from my readers, but I did not expect to do it to myself. I am the author of this story. Things like this should be planned, not accidental.
And yet, my characters say and do the damndest things when I’m busy paying attention to other details.
Such is the life of an author. While beauty is often described as soft and luminous, it hides a sharp and deadly edge which people only feel after it has come and gone. Beauty is the paper cut you never feel slicing until hours later when you spill salt or lemon juice across it. Such is poetry’s brutality, unseen and unfelt until you put it down and try to walk away.
My literary headspace is currently sitting in a very dark and dangerous place. Beauty is a myth, a disguise worn by a wolf who hunts other wolves who themselves are disguised as sheep. This new world is unforgiving. The people who live there are neither heroes or villains. There is no good or evil. There is only survival.
This is what I am writing right now, and the story scares me. I can’t tell yet if that’s a good indicator or a bad one. All I know is that I’ve ventured out of my comfort zone with this story. This kind of risk will either produce fantastic rewards or horrible failure. Here’s hoping I land on the rewards side of the equation.
Have you taken writing risks before? Have your stories ever scared you? If not, why?
#sfwapro
