Superbad Sheikh and Bringing the Light Into the Dark

I received word from my editor today that my 16th Presents is all signed off on. Superbad Sheikh (title TBC!), the first book in a duet all about powerful men getting some unexpected bundles of joy, has gotten final approval! I’m so pleased, because it was a bear of a book to write.

In fact, the past few books I’ve written have been hugely ebil in terms of having super dark conflicts. It gets a little eeeeuuuccchh to write after a while.

Before Superbad there was Mr. Personality (now titled Her Little White Lie) and he was no better. He may have been worse. He was tormented by an extremely (EXTREMELY) traumatic event in his childhood and it altered his ability to relate to people, to emotion and even pain, on a normal level.

Getting in the heads of these super tortured heroes, with tragedies in their past that make MY skin crawl, isn’t easy. I actually started weeping (seriously weeping, not just tearing up) writing Mr. Personality and I had to close the doc and walk away for a while. And I felt annoyed because I honestly didn’t want to write what I was writing. It was yucky, and sad and I hated having to try and pull the emotion out of myself to find a way to convey it on the page. In the end though, I’m glad I did.

But the thing with this kind of darkness in a book, is that you need light to punctuate it. Otherwise, your readers eyes just adjust, so to speak, and I think you lose a lot of the impact. And all that snot crying over your keyboard is wasted.

In college I futzed away some credits taking Creative Writing for three terms. The most important thing I learned in that class was how I didn’t want to act (read: self-important, self-aggrandizing weirdo with personal space issues). But there were other things.

I still remember I brought in some pages and I had written a scene where the two main characters were standing out on the porch. It was dark, the porch light was on. My prof stood up and flailed and said “Excellent way of bringing the light into the darkness!” And I thought…It’s not a metaphorical porch light. It’s a literal porch light, and they had it on because they wanted to be able to see. She thought it was symbolism. I went with it.

But, here’s the thing. As silly as that whole moment was, there is a lot of truth in the concept. Bringing an element of light into a dark book, breaking things up, allowing the reader a moment to catch their breath, a moment to laugh instead of just feeling miserable, is important.

My method of adding light is to add humor. I like to have banter in a book. I like to have moments that (hopefully!) make people laugh out loud. In the case of Superbad Sheikh, the heroine, who has a lighter perspective in general, forces my hero to develop a bit of a sense of humor.

Or in the case of Mr. Personality…some gold glitter on a custom made suit served up a little bit of a break.

The point of this isn’t to undermine the drama, quite the opposite, it’s to lull your reader into a false sense of security so you can really deliver a shocking death blow…erm. I mean…it’s to give your reader a break. Like I said, your eyes adjust to the dark, but if you turn on the light for a bit, being plunged into darkness gets its drama back.

Unsurprisingly, Joss Whedon said it best:  “Make it dark, make it grim, make it tough, but then, for the love of God, tell a joke.”

In other words…turn on a porch light.