Monday 23 August 2010

This post is rated 18, probably

So Sky Sports News has disappeared off the telly thanks to Rupert Murdoch being a money-grabbing so-and-so. This has nothing to do with today's blog, other than it annoys me and therefore I have to mention it. I also have to mention that it's probably going to result in an upsurge of writing activity because I'll no longer be distracted by Natalie Sawyer telling me that Samir Nasri is out of Arsenal's clash with Birmingham. Bah!

I'm actually writing about the fact I'm managing to scare myself with my writing at the moment. In the past I was a fairly genteel, non-violent, non-sexy writer. The worst you'd get would be an action scene from a '12' rated film, with relatively little blood and certainly no sex or bad language. In fact, it was all a bit boring.

A couple of weeks ago I had an idea. I won't go into too much detail about the idea as I think that, with a bit of tweaking in the second draft, it's definitely stands a chance of publication. But I was surprised what I was writing. A foul-mouthed Geordie lass was in it, absolutely starkers from the very first word. There was blood. There was even the suggestion of some seriously non-U scenes at the end. In short, it was at the very least a '15'. And I really don't know where all of it came from. It isn't as if I was reading anything too violent or sexy, and yet my subconscious had managed to come up with this idea.

Fast forward a couple of weeks, and I sat down this afternoon with half-a-dozen stories on the go at once. I pulled my usual trick: I ignored what was in progress and moved on to the latest in a long line of ideas I've had this summer. And it's yet another one with language, sex, violence and other. This time, it's even more disturbing; once again, no details (partly because I don't want to scare people until they read the thing itself), but the themes are something I've rarely come across in real life, so why is my subconscious coming up with these ideas?

In between times, there have been one or two ideas which have been in a similar vein of darkness. My writing's always been pretty bleak (to match my mental outlook, in all honesty), so it's not too much of a surprise to find characters who are outsiders plotting murder and what have you, but at least in the past their motives were for more than just the heck of a particular thing. It's not that I'm worried, but I'd be interested in knowing where this new level of darkness has come from.

1 comment:

  1. Dude, I both come up with horribly dark story ideas and have some pretty horrendous nightmares (once, I dreamt I was leaving work and there were puddles of blood all over the parking lot-then I got to my car, and there was a man all cut up and bleeding huddled on the ground, and someone had written threats in blood all over my car), but I don't watch or read anything like that, and I've really never been exposed to anything very scary at all. Strange, the things that go on in my mind sometimes...I'd like to know where it comes from, too.

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