Light and Dark in Fiction by Allison Symes

Image Credit:  Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos. AI images avoided. 

Fiction reflects life in all its shades of grey (I believe someone once thought there were fifty of those and then considered there were another fifty after that). At either end of the spectrum, fiction has its light and dark sides. 

I’ve written both kinds in my flash and short story work. Indeed when I was putting my debut flash fiction collection together, the moods of the stories inspired the title, From Light to Dark and Back Again. This was also useful as the moods of the stories helped me with my ordering for this collection. 

I always prefer writing and reading the lighter side of fiction but know that for some of my characters at least, the darker side of the spectrum is where they “fit”. This is due to their being of a darker nature or their situation is such the likely outcome will be on the darker side. The important thing here is it will ring true and that truth matters for all fiction, I think. 

 I have a soft spot for what I call fairytales with bite and I write many of these. There is often irony involved and they are anything but twee, as the original fairytales themselves are not. Just as we can’t totally ignore the darker side of life, much as we’d love to, I think fiction should reflect this too but I do wish the lighter side was appreciated more.

Light/humorous writing is tough to do precisely because humour is subjective. I also think there is more of a need for it than ever. I suppose it can be looked down on because it is easy to read and there may be an underlying assumption that must mean it was easy to write. Nothing of course could be further from the truth. I think poetry and humorous writing are the two most difficult forms to write well.

Yet ironically humorous work can convey great truths. For me, Sir Terry Pratchett was the master of this with his Discworld series. There are so many wonderful one liners in those books which do this. And P.G. Wodehouse did use his most famous creation, Bertie Wooster, to make it clear what Bertie felt of the far right pretensions of Roderick Spode. It’s not a huge leap of the imagination to realise Bertie was likely to be a “cover” for what the author thought at least here.

Dark fiction shows up life - and us - for what we are and can be and it doesn’t flatter.

Lighter fiction can do the same but make us smile as it does so. Sometimes those smiles can be rueful self recognition ones - no prizes for guessing why I think that! But then a piece of writing which makes me sit up and take notice, and smile, is something I’m going to remember. It gets the point across without preaching. 

What has the bigger effect on a reader? I’d go for the lighter option every time here.