Why are we experiencing such a glorification of dark stories in current culture? Why, even here at Covenant College, do professors assign many dark (depressing, shocking, gory, sexual, etc.) stories for students to read? Where are the stories that show true joy and happiness?
I have felt this reality since I entered literary circles in high school. I’ve had writer friends who couldn’t get out of their depression (and didn’t want to) because it made them more eloquent and their stories more impactful. I watched them perpetuate their mental health struggles and found myself falling into those same ideas. If I wasn’t deeply depressed, was my writing even any good?
Many amateur writers and even experienced authors feel that you cannot produce good stories/prose out of happiness. Or, they will say that we hide too much of the bad, that to show the whole of human experience and life we have to write and read intensely negative feeling stories. I would argue that our world today needs a feeling of hope more than anything else within stories.
As Christians especially, I think we need to stand up and show true joy and hope that is reflective of our individual salvation and relationship with Christ. Paul says in Romans 15:13, “Now may the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you believe so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit” (ESV). We are to “overflow with hope,” which should especially enter our storytelling in the context of our culture’s mental health crisis.
I am not advocating for only happy-go-lucky strictly Christian stories that don’t acknowledge the effect that sin and Satan have on our world today. We need accurate representations of fallenness in our stories but we also need to show the goodness that there is in life. The hope we have in Christ, and the joy that we experience in our relationship with God should overflow into our writing.
You should write about your true experience—paying careful attention to showing hope and joy as the readers are gasping for even a hint of it in their own lives. We all experience the full width of human emotions; today, you and I need to remind our world that life is inherently valuable and we do experience happiness. Even when we are going through a time when it feels like we are incapable of any pleasure, we have moments of happiness. Hope always shines through in life, and it should always shine through the stories we read and write.