my mom said the saddest thing ever to me the other day. she told me she liked my novel except for the sex and drugs parts. the novel is about sex and drugs. it kind of devastated me and made me feel disgusted because for a moment she made me want to censor myself. but then i snapped back into reality: my writing style is incredibly edgy and raw and in your face, i never want to EVER have to fucking censor myself. everyone i respect pushes boundries and tests the limits and says "this is REAL, this is what's happening, and i'm not going to fucking sugar coat it for you!"
the one "story" my parents apparently loved and have asked me about multiple times is a character study that was one scene long about a little mayan girl. there was no plot. no conflict. no fucking story. it was a description. it was all rainbows and butterflies. and apparently that is what they like. and what they like me to write. apparently, if they think that is me, they are also delusional. i have a sick, twisted mind and they just need to accept me for who i am.
they can be so incredibly prude and i don't understand why - it's not like either of them have lead particularly sheltered lives. it's not like they're hardcore religious.
my writing is incredibly dark and twisted and full of trauma. i put my characters in fucked up situations. conflict is what readers what to read about. it's life. every fiction class i've ever taken, we've been encouraged to make the situation more fucked up. to push our limits and comfort zones. to make more conflict happen to our characters. every single SCENE needs something to happen. i forget what author it was, but my advisor was telling us that this author tried an experiment where she intentionally wrote a novel where nothing bad happened to any of the characters, they were all happy the whole time, and it was the most boring novel ever written. that isn't realistic. at all. life happens in real life. and it does in my novel, too. anyone who isn't comfortable with that -- don't read the book.
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