This is kind of just a rambling blog post.
I’ve been dealing with the notion that I’ve been, for the most part, writing what I guess could be called ‘feel good’ stories, or fluff, or whatever you want to call it, basically since the beginning. Its obvious to me that one of my weaknesses (I’m sure there are many more I’m not even aware of) as a writer is that a lot of my stories lack conflict.
I feel like I’m getting a little better about it with my latest works, primarily my Demoness series, but for someone who writes a LOT about romantic entanglements and harem situations, I don’t really put any relationship drama into my works.
The honest truth about why my stories, which are frequently part of a genre or archetype plot that is supposed to be full to bursting with drama, lack that quality, is that…I just don’t like it.
I’ve always been a pretty laid back person. Even in my youth, when I was a lot more emotionally unstable, I never liked conflict. For the most part, I don’t feed off of conflict and drama the way so many other people seem to.
I think the simple notion that reality TV exists and is popular speaks to the fact that there is apparently a vast demographic of people who basically get off on watching other people scream at each other, or scheme and connive behind each other’s backs, trying to figure out the best way to fuck each other over.
I’ve never seen the appeal in that. I don’t like my characters fighting, I don’t like the ‘will-they, won’t-they?’ drama that so many romance stories seem to be built on. I mean hell, most of my characters just start having sex within a few hours of meeting each other, if not sooner.
I suppose the primary reason, if I’m looking at it with a more critical writer’s eye, that I don’t do this is because it feels false. When I’m coming up with my plots, I never try to inject…well, anything, really. Everything that I put in my books, I want to feel natural, like it belongs there.
Drama feels really artificial to me. It’s like how a lot of people are uncomfortable with the more modern Avengers movies because some of them have some seriously unnecessary jokes written into them. I hate forced comedy. Not every scenes needs a fucking joke, and it really just robs a lot of scenes of any power they have when a character unnecessarily shoots off a one-liner.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind comedy in movies, and there are some comedy movies that I love. I hate forced comedy. I hate it when it felt like someone had to use a prybar to wedge a completely unnecessary joke into a scene. Thor 3 and Guardians of the Galaxy 2 were guilty of this. And yes, I do understand that Guardians is largely a sillier and more comedic, but that’s just it. Guardians 1, and most of the scenes with the Guardians in Infinity War, felt a lot more natural because the writing was better and it didn’t feel like the writers were trying to force comedy in there. They let the situation be as funny as it needed to be.
I’m sure this is being done because Disney is trying to appeal to not only as broad an audience as possible, but also to a younger demographic.
I frequently find myself just getting frustrated when drama arises because it so often seems unnecessary. Thus, my stories are largely bereft of relationship drama. Amazonian’s Love is a definite example of the opposite of this, where I actually tried to put a little bit of drama into it from the beginning, it was the mindset I had when I began planning it. I don’t know if I did a good job or not. I just hope people liked it.
But honestly, the more I think about it, the more time goes on, the less bad I feel about writing feel good stories. It’s never been any mystery to me that life fucking sucks. There’s a lot of bad shit out there, a lot of bad people. A lot of shit people, honestly. People that just hate. I think it’s why I write what I write. I’d rather write about love, and people getting along, and being happy, and dealing with problems in a more realistic way. (Emotional problems, I mean. Using magic or sci-fi tech isn’t the most realistic way to deal with your problems.)
I’d rather write about people feeling good than people suffering. I guess I feel like there’s enough suffering out there. Of course that doesn’t necessarily stop me from writing about different kinds of conflict, and stories can’t be all happy all the time, even feel good harem stories where everyone gets along and fucks. Conflict is part of the storytelling process.
So yeah, kind of a rambling rant on why there’s no relationship drama in most of my works. Hopefully it was an entertaining read. I guess I should get back to writing Parasexual 2 and Demoness IV!