TRUE GRIT
Readers always come back to gritty reality, but that need not always mean confrontational detail. Gary Dalkin weighs up the options and encourages you to play with reality
Gary Dalkin
Sex, violence and strong language have always been part of life. Without the former none of us would be here, and human beings have a long-standing propensity to violence which sees no sign of abating. In every society there have always been words that were taboo, some causing greater offence than others. These things are givens, so much so that it is often argued that for fiction to be realistic it must be steeped in them, and in general face the darkest aspects of life with an uncompromising pen.
What changes are the standards of acceptability regarding sex, violence and strong language. For instance, I’m pretty sure the WM editor doesn’t want me to quote at length from The Wolf of Wall Street (the film which holds the record for the most swearing in any Hollywood movie) as an example to illustrate this article. Stark realism is often all about context, and what is acceptable in a deliberately hard-hitting film aimed strictly at an adult audience isn’t appropriate for a family magazine.
Reflecting society
Writing Magazine’s more senior readers were born into a UK in which DH Lawrence’s novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover was banned because of its very frank discussions and descriptions of sex. When Penguin issued a paperback edition in 1960 the company was prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act. A jury found Penguin innocent, a decision which can be seen as paving the way for the greater liberalisation of the arts in the 1960s.
Today it might seem anything goes. Lady Chatterley’s defence against prosecution was that it was a work of serious artistic integrity. No such defence is required today, which is probably as well for EL James and her 50 Shades of Grey trilogy, a series which made BDSM mainstream and sold over 130 million books despite being widely considered to be of little literary merit.
Similarly, the depiction of violence has changed radically. The crime novels, thrillers, horror and war stories and from the 1920s to the 1960s generally kept descriptions of violence and other gritty realities to a discrete minimum. This was even so during a period in which the world experienced the largest scale war ever known. Think of the difference in the depiction of violence crime between an Agatha Christie novel, where the killing was usually ‘off stage’ and the physical results only described in as much detail as necessary for the reader to follow the intricacies of the author’s labyrinthine plotting, and any modern crime bestseller.