We live in a storytelling moment deeply fascinated by darkness—and for good reason. Stories have always descended into shadow to help us metabolize our fear, trauma, and moral failure. They name the monster, bringing it out of the shadows where it can be faced and perhaps integrated or understood. But stories don’t just explore darkness; they also orient us within it as part of a larger narrative. This is why writers need to continue exploring a sense of wonder in fiction more than ever—not as escape or denial, but as a way of completing the arc. Wonder, hope, and other life-affirming paradigms are what allow stories to move through the descent rather than getting stuck there, which in turn shapes how both individuals and cultures imagine whether the journey is ultimately worth it.
Stories have always been our portals to the unknown that is both inside and beyond ourselves. Sometimes that unknown is a wonderful mystery. Other times, it is a terrifying mystery. Both are true. Writers are the keepers of this strange paradox. When we carry the understanding that, even in facing the terrifying mysteries, it is our capacity to tell those stories with a corresponding sense of wonder that allows our readers’ descent to resolve into meaning rather than cynicism.
I often tell people, “Stories are my language.”
This, I think, is true of humanity as a whole. We are, as Jonathan Gottschall calls us, the storytelling animal.
Stories are our means for making sense of the sometimes impossible complexities of consciousness—of allowing the light of our left-brained egoic selves to shine upon the symbolic and archetypal depths of our right-brained intuitive selves. Through that sense, we gain meaning and purpose.
From an on-the-nose perspective, stories are seemingly little more than factual recountings (or plausible pseudo-recountings) of linear events. But I would argue that even hyper-realistic stories are still representative of deeper symbolism—not least the plot arc at the center of our strongest storytelling.
Too often, we fail to appreciate the psychological power with which we are interacting when we read or watch stories. Because of their profound capacity to bypass the conscious brain and engage directly with the most primal parts of our psyche, stories do not merely reflect worldview, they also actively participate in shaping it. Story’s capacity to influence our contextual perception is self-evident. This is one of its great strengths—and our best storytellers wield it with care and thoughtfulness.
This is why it is important to question what the stories we are writing (or consuming) are pointing us toward. I do not mean that stories that explore darkness—whether realistically or hyperbolically—should be eschewed. Quite the opposite. But as so many storytellers already intuitively understand, darkness must be reckoned with as part of a larger cycle.
Last year, over 700 of you contributed to a survey exploring how and why people interact with stories. At the end of the survey, I offered space for suggestions about what you’d like me to post about this year. One of the most requested themes was some variant of “dark vs. hopeful stories.”
I will be posting on this more specifically later this year, but it felt timely to begin the year with a look at the bigger picture, including why we need both darkness and “wonder” in our stories, but also why they work as part of a continuum that charts not just the psychological arcs of individual characters in individual stories—but the great millennia-long arc of storytelling itself and its impact upon all of us. Seen this way, the persistence of hopeful, meaningful stories throughout history is itself evidence that wonder has never disappeared.
TL;DR
Dark stories play an essential role in helping us face fear, trauma, and moral failure—but darkness is not meant to be the destination. A sense of wonder in fiction allows stories to complete the arc, transforming descent into meaning rather than cynicism. Importantly, many stories—especially books—already do this well, carrying hope, sacrifice, and return with quiet integrity. Wonder is not escapism or denial; it is the imaginative capacity to believe the journey is worth finishing and that a good future remains possible. Through this work, writers can continue to help both individuals and cultures move forward with meaning, courage, and care.
Why We Actually Do Need Dark Stories
Dark fiction has a purpose. It always has. Descent stories, shadow journeys (Ursula Le Guin’s Wizard of Earthsea comes to mind), tragedies, and cautionary tales: these are how cultures deal with fear, trauma, and moral failure. They are how we name the monster, so it stops being invisible. They are how we seek and find catharsis. But I believe it is important, as storytellers, to consider the idea that darkness is not a destination. Rather, it is a single point in the journey.
That distinction matters.
Last year, I shared a post expressing my personal readiness to see a turn in the cycle of storytelling—away from deconstructionist, anti-heroic stories and back toward what I always think of as “wonder.”
However, darkness—not just in individual stories but in storytelling trends—is culturally necessary as part of this larger cycle. If we consider storytelling as a whole, it is mostly about bad things happening. This is ultimately the root of our sometimes maligned aphorism “no conflict, no story.”
As both social reflection and social catalyst, the storytelling cycle reflects the reality of our lives. It reflects the outer events of our history. And it reflects the inner thrashings of each generation’s struggles to confront, evolve, grow, and ultimately survive. From their very earliest iteration, stories have been mandates for survival. That writers continue to engage this mandate with thoughtfulness, honesty, and courage is worth acknowledging and celebrating.
When in times of personal and cultural crisis, the primal instinct to stare down the monsters in the dark becomes strong in all of us. We see this reflected in the types of stories that become popular at any given turn of the zeitgeist.
However, as any sojourner of the Dark Night of the Soul can tell you, when we courageously dare to venture into the darkness, there is always the very real possibility of getting stuck there. And this is precisely where attentive storytellers matter most.
The Danger of Getting Stuck in the Descent—and Why Stories Must Complete the Arc
Stories don’t just reflect culture; they train it.
They don’t merely express what we feel; they quietly instruct us in what to expect.
Over time, expectation often becomes prophetic. When a culture repeatedly tells itself that power corrupts, love fails, heroism is naïve, and meaning is a lie—eventually, that story stops being cathartic and starts being formative.
At that point, darkness ceases to be a warning and becomes a worldview. It’s true that at the waning end of hopeful cycles (e.g., 1980s and 2000s), there comes a moment when speaking darkness into the light actually becomes a radically life-affirming act. This happens when positivism can no longer support paradigms that have become tyrannical or even just simply outgrown their usefulness (and therefore their truthfulness). This is often a moment when our interaction with certain archetypes (e.g., the Hero) has become too literal—and the deeper meaning is in danger of being lost.
We can argue this is what happened in the late 2000s and 2010s when an assembly-line approach to such myths as the Hero’s Journey flatlined the archetype’s symbolic grittiness. In response, storytelling trends rightly begin pushing back with their own form of critique by exploring other aspects of what Robert McKee calls the thematic square.
Whereas one decade may explore the Positive, another decade may in turn seek balance by exploring the Contrary or Contradictory corners. Eventually, however, this leads us to the Negation of the Negation—and we remain in this hellscape of nihilism at our peril. What keeps us from staying there? The quiet, persistent work of storytellers who continue to finish the arc.
Darkness and deconstruction is never meant to be the whole story. The story arc itself teaches movement: descent → transformation → return. When stories linger too long in cynicism, they stop being cathartic and start being formative. Deconstruction is not the problem. The problem is deconstruction without reconstruction.
Why Stories Must Promise a Return to Wonder
As storytellers, we should be willing to go into the shadows, yes—but, even more, to go through them. Let your stories descend, but also let them return. Let your heroes break, but let something inside them remain inviolable. Let the future be uncertain, but not unthinkable.
Stories teach us how to live forward. To do so, stories must promise—or at least hint—at a return to wonder in the end. It is a promise that the darkness is worth it. This needn’t be explicit. Sometimes it is just a tonal inflection.
Think about the endings of such stories as Children of Men or Casablanca, in which—in many ways—all things are lost for the main characters. And yet, it is understood that what they have sacrificed or what they will risk offers at least the hope that it is in service to something greater.
The closing moments of Children of Men remind us that even in a broken world, sacrifice can still point toward a future worth believing in. (Children of Men (2006), Universal Pictures.)
It is a promise that the tribulations of the character arc are worth enduring—that to devote one’s life to the long, arduous, and sometimes unrewarding quest of being heroic is worth it. Like Frodo and Sam, stories walk us through hell, through the darkest parts and deepest fears of this fragile human existence—and then they show us there is something worth it on the other side.
When the journey feels impossible, Sam’s choice to carry Frodo reminds us that finishing the arc often depends on love, endurance, and shared sacrifice. (The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003), New Line Cinema.)
Stories exist because arcs exist. Going into the shadows is not the same as staying there.
The Sense of Wonder in Fiction as Moral Imagination
What do I mean by this idea of “wonder” in a story? By it, I am trying to encapsulate the idea of what allows humanity to believe—sometimes improbably—that life is worth living. It is a feeling I daresay we have all experienced in response to story.
To me, that feeling of wonder is the whole rhyme and reason of story.
It is why I write, why I read, watch, listen. It is a feeling that rises up from somewhere deep within that enlivens and ennervates every particle of body and soul. It shows us that just as the story may reflect our deepest parts back to ourselves, it also reflects upon something deeper and greater than ourselves and our small egoic understandings of what this existence is all about.
Wonder is the promise of a good future.
As a society and as individuals, it is imperative we believe that. Our stories tell us, at any given moment, whether or not we do believe it. The best of our stories have always been those that tell us—whether through critique or through affirmation—how to seek it.
This sense of wonder in fiction is emphatically not escapism and not saccharine optimism. Wonder is not denial; wonder is expectation. Indeed, wonder is structural to story itself. The symbolic underpinnings of the story arc—for both plot and character—are founded upon it.
Wonder is the capacity to believe something better is possible without denying what is broken. It is the refusal to let cynicism have the final word.
Wonder says:
- Yes, the world is dangerous—and still worth saving.
- Yes, people fail—and are still capable of transformation.
- Yes, the shadows are real—but still not the deepest truth.
Stories that understand wonder are not shallow. They are structural. They are stories that remember the shape of meaning and understand how the journey cycles over and over again throughout history.
Like all literary cycles, the anti-hero era reveals something important—in this case that unexamined ideals can become hollow, performative, or even oppressive. But the answer to corrupted ideals is not their demolition. Rather, it is their redemption. Although we stand in a moment that often feels stripped of innocence, this does not mean our heroes should be stripped of purpose. Otherwise, we haven’t yet told a truer story than those of our ancestors—just a smaller one.
We get what we focus on. Writers, especially, live inside our material. If our imaginative diet is exclusively murder, disillusionment, manipulation, nihilism, and power games (no matter how artful), the cost is not neutral. The psyche absorbs patterns before it critiques them.
This doesn’t mean every story needs a happy ending, but it does mean every story needs the capacity to at least point forward along the trajectory of the greater arc toward that moment of redemption. Even classic tragedies traditionally offered wonder, in meaning if not in outcome. There was loss because first there had been the potential for value. That, too, is hope.
Stories That Build, Not Just Dismantle—And Why Writers Need Them
Writers are cultural architects. This is because stories do more than just reflect reality. They create it.
Society begins with us. We are the dreamers—whether we are dreaming of love or justice or enlightenment or peace or a child’s laughter or the good death. That writers continue to dream boldly, even in uncertain times, is no small thing.
We dream our stories and, together, our stories dream our culture, our society, and our world. Even now, we are dreaming into existence the next generations and their paradigms.
Humans cannot live indefinitely without hope. If our stories can’t imagine goodness, then goodness becomes unimaginable. Stories teach us what kind of future is possible and whether it’s worth striving for. Without this, what happens to imagination? What happens to agency? That writers keep choosing to imagine such futures—again and again—is an act of quiet courage.
I have sometimes felt uncertain of my deep belief in this need for wonder at the heart of all storytelling. A voice in my head tells me, “That’s just naïvety or idealism talking.” But I don’t think so. Balance is important in all things, and bypassing the terrors of shadow work to play endlessly in fields of sunshine is neither healthy nor helpful. But there is a time when it becomes an act of radical courage to raise our hands and say, I dare to be happy, I defiantly choose hope, I will build toward wonder.
Wonder is not denial. Wonder is expectation.
Wonder is the quiet, radical act of believing that the story—our story—is going somewhere good even if the road is hard.
Dark stories matter. Shadow work matters. Descent matters. But wonder is what allows those experiences to resolve into meaning rather than despair. Stories that finish the arc do not deny suffering; they contextualize it. In doing so, they help both individuals and cultures imagine a future worth moving toward.
I don’t think that’s naïvety. I think that’s responsibility.
Want More?
Writing Your Story’s Theme (Amazon affiliate link)
If this exploration of darkness, wonder, and meaning resonated with you, it’s because—at its heart—it’s really about theme. It’s about what our stories are proving beneath the surface of plot and character, and how those underlying beliefs shape not just our stories, but ourselves.
That’s why I wrote Writing Your Story’s Theme. I wanted to help writers move beyond accidental or unconscious themes and instead engage intentionally with the deeper moral and symbolic questions their stories are already asking. Theme is where descent finds its meaning, where wonder becomes structural rather than sentimental, and where stories learn how to finish the arc instead of abandoning it halfway through.
If you’ve ever sensed that your story wants to say something true but have struggled to articulate what that is or how to build the plot and character arcs around it, this book is designed to walk you through that process with clarity, depth, and respect for your creative intuition.
Available in paperback, e-book, and audio.
Wordplayers, tell me your opinions! How do you see the sense of wonder in fiction functioning in stories you love—or stories you’re writing right now? Do you feel darkness and hope working together, or pulling against each other? Tell me in the comments!
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Author: K.M. Weiland | @KMWeiland