The Emotional Toll of Writing Dark Fiction

Part Two of Writing Dark Fiction When Reality Feels Dystopian.

I am finishing my dystopian trilogy. And I will not sugarcoat it. Creating and writing about a dark world can be emotionally draining for writers who are unprepared. There are several things to keep in mind and many ways to lift yourself out of the darkness.

Two weeks ago, I posted the first part of this, How to: Writing DARK Fiction When Reality Feels Dystopian. In that post I discussed when I began My Soul to Keep, the first book in my series, The Fellowship Dystopia. I never imagined real life would make it difficult to keep writing. How my emotional responses to how strongly today’s American fervor for a version of Christianity parallels the world of book one, My Soul to Keep, and how I had created characters I thought couldn’t exist in modern day America, yet saw real-life masked men taking people off the public streets. And in the past year, I realized that creating characters and plots was only part of what a writer needs during the journey of creating a dystopian novel.

The Writer’s Journey

First, I strongly recommend you develop ways to bounce back, be kind to yourself, and prepare tools like the ones in my post called Do you have a mental health first aid kit? If you’re struggling to get back to your own dystopian WIP, here are some five-minute exercises to try: 

• Breath. Take a deep breath in through your nose. Hold it for 3-10 seconds, then breathe out slowly through your mouth.
• Dance, walk, take the stairs, do what you enjoy but use your body for five minutes. 
• Color with crayons, build a fort, do karaoke, roller-skate or choose something else and just have fun for five minutes.  
• If at the end of the five minutes you want to keep going—do. If not, try going back to writing.

Emotions Needed

To write authentic character emotions, you must tap into the personal emotions you have in common with the character. I access my personal emotions with my character through lengthy journal entries describing what I’m reacting to, how I want to react (what I do or don’t do, say, etc.), and how that emotion feels in my body. 

When my character’s situation called for rage, I’d re-read the sections I wrote when I was angry. I’d amplify what I felt to convey rage. If my character needed to feel suppressed anger, I’d use that same section of my journal but use the quieter, softer ways I felt anger.

But if you use your own emotions, how do you, the writer, separate your personal reactions from your characters? There are several techniques. One I use is to give the character I most identify with a trait that is opposite of me and make it an important part of the story. But to tell you the truth, in the first ten drafts of My Soul to Keep there was no separation. That many drafts over several years meant I’d learned a lot more about creating characters. I read a lot of books, analyzing why I liked or cared or didn’t like a character. And I read a ton of how-to write books. Learn everything you can about the craft of writing realistic characters. Try everything and learn what works for you.

What You Need

Develop self-awareness. Give yourself time at the end of your sessions to step out of the fictional world in your head. Don’t turn on the news or look at social media when you’re still in your story-writing mind. Discover what brings you joy in your life. Journal or list three things you are grateful for today. Reward yourself when you reach your goal for the day. One way I reward myself is by allowing myself to play an online game or read a book when my writing session is done. The point is, many writers immerse themselves in their current WIP, but writers of dark fiction, particularly in dark times, need to take a break from the darkness. How often? Trust the self-awareness you’ve developed. Don’t let it get to the point your throat and chest tighten when you even think about writing. Schedule breaks as often as you need them. Then, when you return to your writing, it’ll be quality time.

Craft Responsibilities

Remember that wonderful line  

With great power comes great responsibility.

Uncle Ben in the 2002 Spider-Man movie.

You can’t spin webs from your wrist, but you can spin stories that have the power to influence your readers. With that power, you have an author’s responsibility. An author’s responsibilities include research.

Research

Some writers do their research before they write. Others research only what they need when they need it. And still others write the complete rough draft, then do research.

No matter when you do your research, you want to make certain you use reliable sources. 

Librarians can be helpful in guiding you to reliable resources. Some more reliable sources include university sites or sites of large medical facilities and scientific laboratories. Another good way to check reliability, to verify the same fact also reported on a minimum of three well-known reliable sites and the resource list at the bottom of the article.

Memoirs written by and broadcast interviews with survivors and perpetrators can be helpful. 

Focus on details like how propaganda works, or how individuals maintained hope in dire circumstances. Research on the way tyranny works, or how people behave. 

Those types of details, grounded in reality, are more powerful than anything drawn from the imagination.

Accuracy Matters Even In Dystopian Fiction

By accuracy I don’t mean you accurately predict the future or create an “accurate” alternate history. I mean, your imaginative situations feel believable because you understand how things work in real life.

When I need a general overview of a topic, I go to the children’s nonfiction section of the library. Children’s nonfiction is very good at using simple terms for even the most complex subjects. They also have a list of resources at the back where you can get more detailed information.

Memoirs written by and broadcast interviews with survivors and perpetrators can be helpful. 

Librarians will guide you to reliable resources. Some more reliable sources include university sites or sites of large medical facilities and scientific laboratories. Another good way to check reliability, to verify the same fact also reported on a minimum of three well-known reliable sites and the resource list at the bottom of the article. 

If you’re lucky, you may find a diary that gives you some inspiration for characters or behavior.

Gather Details

Focus on details like how propaganda works, or how individuals maintained hope in dire circumstances. Those types of details, grounded in reality, are more powerful than anything drawn from the imagination.

This kind of accuracy means making sure any human suffering and acts of oppression or trauma are respectful of how complicated actual pain and suffering, and oppression are. It also shows you understand both the topic and that unfair treatment isn’t simply a plot device.

Besides accuracy, your responsibilities also include honoring your reader’s trust.

Don’t Break Your Reader’s Trust

When you write a book for other people to read, do not betray your reader’s trust. Your book description and your first few chapters set your reader’s expectations with a promise. If you’ve labeled your story as dystopian, your reader rightfully expects there to be a dystopian environment, society, corporation, or government.

Based on your writing, your reader may expect a technological dystopia (cyberpunk), an environmental dystopian, or a corporate dystopia, or any of the other sub-genres in dystopian fiction. By setting up that expectation, you’ve promised to make it worth what readers spend on it: money, time, and emotion. If you have written a cyberpunk story but never read one, you will probably miss one or more of the tropes your reader expected to see, and you’ve broken that promise. If you started the book with the implied “this story will end well for the protagonist,” then it ends with the protagonist dying or hopeless, that will probably frustrate the reader. (Yes, I know some writers do that as a setup for the next book in a series. I strongly recommend against that unless you’ve ended this story, having solved the problem introduced at the beginning of the book but learned about an additional problem that leads to the next book.)

Avoid Exploiting Themes

It’s extremely easy to slip from memorable storytelling into using people and situations for shock value. Avoiding exploitation isn’t about avoiding difficult topics. It’s about researching your topics with sufficient depth so you can write about their complexities regarding the real-life experiences that inspire your stories. 

Using trauma, oppression, and suffering as a plot device, as set dressing, reduces those systems and your characters to flat characters who are all good, all bad, or just there to suffer. 

Avoid exploitation by giving your villains, collaborators, victims, and survivor characters full inner lives, agency, strengths and flaws, and motivations that show different ways individuals respond to their circumstances—some seize power, some fight back, some work with the system, and some just try to survive. Give some characters dignity, humor, love and kindness, and hope.

Explore how people become leaders of or complicit with oppressive governments. At least hint at how the bureaucratic, economic, and social structures work. Show how privilege protects some people.

Research

To successfully avoid exploitation, you need to understand some psychology. Learn what personality types your characters need to display. Study the biographies of tyrants and survivors. Understand the trauma response (it’s a variety of responses, not just one.) Research compliance and resistance patterns of behavior. You don’t need to get a PhD in psychology. But learn enough to write with depth about it. Depth of understanding is also important when we write about sensitive topics.

What We Owe Readers When Writing About Sensitive Topics

Avoiding exploitation isn’t about avoiding difficult topics, but about approaching them with sufficient depth, research, and respect for the real-life experiences that inspire fictional scenarios.

Ask yourself, 

1. Why am I using this? Is it to explore my book’s themes or to shock my reader?

2. Am I using the systems to push my plot around? If yes, research the systems that created or drove oppression (or other systems) and invest your plot with the details that make your characters care.

3. Have I done enough research so that I understand the systems I want to explore, and can handle this topic respectfully? If not, research similar or perhaps opposite systems. Find more reliable resources to get different information and details.

4. Am I creating characters or events that reinforce bias or are hurtful to a group of individuals? If yes, how can I give my characters more agency, complexity, and dignity?

5. Would individuals or communities who have experienced similar trauma feel disrespected by my treatment of this? If you aren’t sure, you probably need a sensitivity reader or two.

6. What do I want readers to take away from this suffering?

Sensitivity Readers

To be certain your words are respectful of readers, ask a trusted writing partner or sensitivity reader to read your work and give you honest feedback.

Sensitivity readers are readers with personal experience or extensive education in the particular topic. Some sensitivity readers work for free; for others, you’ll have to pay. Ask for recommendations on your favorite social media platform or writing association. Get more than one reference (you can even ask the reader for references), ask about how specific the reader’s comments were, how long they’ve worked as a sensitivity reader, and what connection they have to the sensitive topic is.

Some people will avoid fiction with sensitive topics. They are protecting themselves. Other people will read your story with sensitive topics in a story that balances those topics with hope.

Balancing Dystopia with Hope

Remember why you love to read dystopian novels? No? Let me refresh your memory. It gives us hope. Hope that we can regain control against all odds. It invites us to analyze our lives against the grittiness of the fictional world. It offers glimpses of people who choose to do awful things and ways, and people find the courage to face and fight and hopefully beat the awfulness. 

Purely pessimistic dystopian fiction fails readers. If it’s 100% pessimistic, there’s no room for resistance, growth, change, or hope. These stories invalidate the protagonist’s struggle, which leaves the reader unfulfilled or resentful.

As a writer of dystopian fiction, it’s my job to create a society that explores and warns against an area of concern. It’s also my job to find authentic moments of individual agency, of resistance, and of humanity in all my characters and my stories. These are the things that give us, including me, hope and the courage to go on when things are dark.

How do you create those moments? You give your characters an opportunity to make their own choices, even if it must be within their societal restrictions. Create situations where your characters have to choose to resist or to surrender to the society. Most of all, you have to be vulnerable enough to explore the human moments. The moments when we feel beaten or weak or betrayed. When some event exposes a person’s flaws, or she deeply needs something, or when she genuinely empathizes with someone who may or may not be deserving, she is most vulnerable.

These often tiny moments allow readers to identify with characters and give special depth and meaning to the story, making it feel more authentic. 

Reacting to Reader Reactions

What do you do when readers react emotionally to your story? This can be especially difficult during turbulent times. Anticipate negative reviews and how you might feel so you’re prepared to bounce back.

As a writer, it is essential to know your audience. Even family members differ from you as individuals. Their backgrounds, beliefs, emotions, triggers, every human part of them is different. That difference will influence how they interpret your story. Let them. It’s okay that they don’t see your story the same way you do. It becomes their story when they read it.

But what if they leave you a negative review? Bad reviews are an unfortunate part of an author’s life. Your story isn’t for everyone. There are people who will hate it. There are people who will love it. And lots of people won’t ever read it. Hopefully, many readers will love it. But you can’t please everyone, and someone will leave a review that seems unfair or inaccurate.

There Are Many Ways to Prepare for Negative Reviews

• Let some trusted beta readers read your book before it’s published.
• Hire a developmental editor to help you produce your best work.
• Read negative reviews of a classic that you loved. Read the reviews of a recently read and loved book. Reading their negative reviews will help take the sting out of receiving negative reviews.
• Decide whether reading your reviews affects whether you can write. If it does, don’t read them. If you can read them, give yourself a limited time frame to react emotionally, then let go and get back to writing.
• Have someone else read your reviews and let you know what you need to know.
• View negative reviews as evidence that real people read your book.

Please note:

If all your reviews are negative or if many of your reviews mention the same “flaw,” you may need to consider re-writing that story.

Also, take heart. 

I know all these mental tricks, but negative reviews still upset me. Sometimes you simply need to give yourself time to “feel the upset.” Depending on how strongly I feel about the negative review, I usually give myself permission to be upset for 24 hours. After that, I either fix the problem in the next book or I repeat a mantra like, “The review is one reader’s opinion/emotional reaction which belongs to the reader and has nothing to do with me or the book I wrote.” 

Most writers get at least one negative review, but it matters to your readers that you keep writing your dark stories now.

Why Writing Dark Stories Matters Now

All fiction is a safe space to explore dangerous ideas. But it is the authors of dystopian stories who help readers think or talk about difficult subjects. Your stories can help your readers process complex emotions about current events.

It is vital that you offer more than warnings in your dystopian or dark fiction. Dark stories without hope are unrealistic. In researching survivors of oppressive regimes or of abuse or other horrors, you learn that hope and connection and small acts of resistance sustained them in real life. 

Your readers don’t want to live in a dystopia; they want to have hope in individual autonomy. They want to see that connections, and small acts of resistance can sustain them through the darkest of circumstances.

Reading your story can illuminate choices and help build empathy across divides.

That’s why it’s vital to offer your readers hope. Hope is especially powerful when living in dystopian times. Hope is resistance.

Looking Forward: Writing Hope in Dark Times

Not only do you want to show there is hope in your stories. You want to show there are paths toward healing and change. You don’t have to have your character healed at the end of the story, but that the path is there.

Balance realism with the possibility of redemption. A path to redemption offers hope, compassion, and justice.

Completing And When I Wake meant confronting not just Miranda’s fate, but my own fears about America’s future. The tools in this post allowed me to finish a trilogy I once thought impossible to complete. Writing dystopian fiction during dystopian times requires both craft skill and emotional resilience. It demands that we research thoroughly, write responsibly, and remember that hope isn’t a weakness—it’s resistance. Your stories matter. They help readers process their fears, recognize warning signs, and remember their own agency. That’s why it’s worth the emotional toll, worth the research, worth getting it right. 

What techniques have sustained you through writing dark fiction? I’d love to hear your experiences.

In a chilling alternate America, betrayals and injustices have forged Miranda into a relentless force for justice, but her ultimate test isn’t defeating tyranny—it’s the darkness growing within her own soul.

If you have been waiting to see how Miranda’s story ends, don’t miss it!

 Click here to place your preorder today!

I’m looking forward to releasing the book on December 15^th. I hope you are too.