Is It Dark Writing or Is It Edgy Writing?
There is a bit of controversy between the two and it’s up to speculation about how to divide the two into and describe each well.
In my opinion, the best description is this: edgy is dark for the sake of being dark whereas dark is dark for the sake of being real.
Do you prefer edgy or dark writing?
For me personally, I prefer dark. I’d rather consume something like Fury than a story that’s just trying to push the envelope.
Edgy has to be done extremely well in order to not just become cheesy at some point.
Realism is at some points refreshing and enlightening. Of course, this can go too far and there is a cliff not worth jumping off of, but for some dark stories, it just makes sense that the story is dark. It’s not trying to be dark, it has to be.
Stay true to the world.
When a story is dark it may be set in a world full of war and turmoil. When it gets dark the point should be to stay true to the world and the story.
The Book of Eli is a good example of dark in my opinion. It’s an apocalyptic setting and its dark events transpire in a realistic way for how the writers told the story.
You can tell when something starts to get edgy. The writer writes in scenes that were unnecessary but will bring about a feeling from the audience they want. For scenes like this, you can look no further than the Tremors franchise.
A man will get eaten in an outhouse, not because it’s a realistic scenario, but because the writer wanted someone to get dragged into the bottom of an outhouse. And then a scene later a character can have dialogue that makes a cheesy joke about it.
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Edgy wants to pick up jaws.
Edgy is always looking for the next shock factor or gross-out factor. The point is to make as many jaws drop in 30 minutes as possible.
They go from scene to scene and want things to get so chaotic that you feel emotionally tired by the end of it.
It’s like riding a roller coaster of the story where the main plot isn’t really the point. The point is to get you to be shocked at least 5-7 times from the beginning to end.
They’ll try to tie up loose ends and make it coherent, but in the end they really just want you to be shocked by what they came up with.
It’s like going to a carnival instead of a museum. One is entertaining because of deep meaning and realism, whereas the other is meant to entertain with continually quick cheap tricks.
They both can be fun in different ways if done right.
What’s the point?
If we want to write something that is dark it is okay to have sad and hard times in the story. Even things that are realistically hard to deal with like material in Hacksaw Ridge or Saving Private Ryan.
In the end, though, there has to be a point to it, and we have to be sure it isn’t in unnecessary gross amounts.
If we want to step into edgy then yes we are going to push those boundaries and push into writing scenes that don’t have a point other than to shock the reader.
What type of audience are we drawing in.
If we write more dark novels our audience might turn out to be an audience of more deep thinkers that are looking to see the true happenings, thoughts, and feelings of reality.
Even readers that want to see the reality of works that aren’t their own.
If we write edgier we are entertaining an audience that is looking more for cheap thrills.
Both are enjoying your writing and they could be a part of the same crowd.
I love Fury, but also very much enjoy something edgy like MadMax. Just depends on what you’re feeling at the moment.
In the end, it comes down to what you want to be perceived as something that creates stories.
Not saying one is better than the other, but it might be worth thinking about. (I do think edgy is harder to do well, but can and has been done.)
Do you want people to look up what you’ve written because they are looking for a quick cheap thrill, or do you want to appeal to an audience that is killing for a deeper look into the stories you’ve created?
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