It's the first Wednesday of the month and so it’s time for another Insecure Writer’s Support Group (IWSG) post! In an IWSG post, we writers bring our writing challenges and problems out into the open to share with each other and try to offer solutions. The challenge I bring to today’s post is the answer to the optional question of the month which is: Have you ever written something that afterwards you felt conflicted about? If so, did you let it stay how it was, take it out, or rewrite it? My answer to the first part of that question is: yes, I have. The answer to the second part: I rewrote it.
The conflicting part in my writing that I had to Rewrite was in one of my recent stories that I’m working on for my upcoming book of short fiction, “Bad Apps”. This book will consist of stories about strange and deadly mobile apps. The story I had the challenge with involves a demonic creature from another universe that gets summoned through a music video. The creature is so chaotic and evil that it feeds off of perverted, sexual acts. One of these acts is a rape that occurs in the video.
When I wrote this scene in the first draft, it was so terrifying to myself as the author that I knew it would be traumatic for many readers. So, I rewrote it toning down on the graphic details. Even then the scene was still disturbing. That was confirmed when I presented the story to my writers’ critique group. I had been sure to put a warning notice on the submission so that if anyone in the group was too easily disturbed by such traumatic scenes, they could pass up reading the story. And, sure enough, many did.
After the critique meetup for that week, I was sure to refine the attack scene even more and so made it as implicit as possible without sacrificing too much of the terror of this terror tale.
I’m not going into details of the changes I made for two reasons: 1) Even with the scene having been toned down twice, certain people may still find it too disturbing (we all have different tolerance levels); 2) For those who don’t get too disturbed by those things, especially those who like horror and suspense, I don’t want to create spoilers for when the book releases. I’m going to try to release it by fall sometime.
If you want more details of “Bad Apps” and the progress I’m making on it (without the spoilers), then sign up for my free author’s newsletter, “Night Creatures’ Call”. For those who have already signed up, check your in-boxes within the next week or two for the next edition of the newsletter.
Have you written anything that has bothered you so much that you needed to change it or even take it out completely?
Today’s IWSG is brought to you by these super co-hosts: Kate Larkindale, Diane Burton, Janet Alcorn, and Shannon Lawrence! IWSG was founded by awesome author Alex Cavanaugh, writer of the Cassa Series of novels!
Until next time . . .
