Writing Ugly

[michaeldthomas]

jenwrites just put up an excellent essay called "Writing Ugly." For the handful out there who have read my work, you can probably understand why I was nodding my head a lot while I was reading it.

rarelylynne and I spent the morning cleaning up Caitlin and her bed after little miss let loose with a fury of excrement during the night. That is a major part of my world. Not surprisingly, my writing is infused with a lot of biological ugliness. It's an aspect of the human condition that I can't ignore.

This means that lots of people are going to hate reading my stuff. One of the lessons of the WindyCon workshop was that there will be readers who want all of those icky and profane aspects removed. That's not who I am as a writer. The trick for me will always be about figuring out where that line is between the gratuitous and the point where there's just enough ugly to serve the story that I want to tell. I am not going to dial it down just because somebody thinks I can transform things into a more marketable YA novel.