Take an honest look at your novel. Evaluate your characters, theme, message and story goal then determine the types of darkness your story needs. As you do so, beware. Sometimes good intentions are not enough. If we are not careful, we can accidentally convey the opposite message we meant to through our use of evil.<\/strong><\/p>

Daniel Schwabauer, the creator of the One Year Adventure Novel<\/em>, describes story writing as a kind of translation. Your story starts as a video in your mind. You must then take that video and translate it into words. One day, your reader will pick up those same words and his mind will turn them into a video once again. As the writer, it is your job to make sure your version of the video and your reader\u2019s match up (195-196).<\/p>

This is often an extremely challenging task. Sometimes it seems downright impossible. Miscommunication happens. Often their significance is minor. Other times it is devastating, especially when it comes to our use of darkness.<\/p>

I believe The Hunger Games,<\/em> by Suzanne Collins, is an example of this disaster. The story is full of gore and darkness, but it could be argued that it is actually a message against gladiator-style entertainment. It seems Collins tries to show the evils of this barbaric entertainment by putting her protagonist into a high-tech arena and forcing her to fight to the death against boys and girls just like you and me.<\/p>

I always had the idea the story was meant to horrify audiences and cause them to turn away from this type of violence. Unfortunately, it seems to have had the opposite effect. People of all ages have become Hunger Games <\/em>fans. They cheer and boo just like the fictitious audiences depicted in Collins\u2019 story. They even play their own home versions of \u2018The Hunger Games<\/em>\u2019, fighting and pretending to kill their friends.<\/p>

The writer had a compelling character, a theme and a message<\/strong>. She picked her kinds of darkness accordingly, but her good intentions obviously weren\u2019t enough.<\/p>

Why? I have puzzled over the question, and the most obvious reason is that humans have a sinful nature. We are drawn toward evil, darkness, and, yes, gore. Sometimes darkness is alluring or exciting, but it is still wrong, and, truth be told, it ends in a painful trap. Your job, as a Christian writer, is to expose the darkness for what it is\u2014death.<\/strong>The Hunger Games<\/em> failed to convince the audience that gore and darkness are terrible, and I know why.<\/p>

Katniss, their hero, did not die.<\/strong><\/p>

Now, I\u2019m not a fan of killing off heroes, but because of the nature of Collin\u2019s story, Katniss\u2019 death becomes necessary to turn the audience away from violence. It is because she lives that the audience is affected the way they are; they get the sense that it is all a big game\u2026 In the end the hero won, and the darkness wasn\u2019t all that<\/em> bad. If Collins had allowed all the audience loved to be stolen from them, destroyed by the gore and darkness, perhaps we would see a different response.<\/strong> People would be outraged, and hurt, and cry out against the evil. They would see the truth, and though Collins\u2019 hero would not have won, her theme would have. Instead of using darkness simply as an enticing draw card, she would have shown it to be the destructive vice that it is.<\/strong> It is likely her story would never have come so far as it has, but at least her good intentions would have been enough.<\/p>

The final reason The Hunger Games <\/em>failed is hidden in plain sight. Panem, Collin\u2019s fictitious, dystopian world, seems to have no place for God. Without God, all things are relative.<\/strong> Moral absolutes cannot exist. Good and evil are more like personal preferences than anything else. They can switch places in a second. Because of this, Collin\u2019s moral point stands on shaky ground. It has no foundation\u2026 and sometimes foundations can make all the difference.<\/strong><\/p>