Stories with Taboo Themes

What could be more fun that watching or reading a toe-curling scene? The nerve-wracking, embarrassing, bizarre, taboo or totally unexpected, to make your hair stand on end? Well, TV programs such as The Office, Miranda and Seinfeld have made the toe curling a fine art. I believe this is the secret to their success.

Taboo Story Ideas

I will not embark a novel unless the storyline potentially has a boundary that should not be crossed. This is likely to yield a taboo situation. The reader may think ‘please don’t go there.’ Well, yes, let’s go there.

Novels that explore this theme are Nabokov’s Lolita, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and the Roman myth Venus and Mars. Love out of place, shamed and forbidden cannot fail to add great tension to a novel.

Taboo situations are fun to write. Without this risk element, I will not embark a writing project. In all plots, the main protagonists inhabit polar positions to one another. A Hard Lesson features a teacher and a student; The Shuttered Room, examines the hostage and the captor, and in Falling Awake, we find a voyeur and an exhibitionist.

Stories of Forbidden Passion

With such contrasting roles, there is a sense that a boundary exists between the two characters. But making a scene excruciating requires a setup. The reader must get to know the characters first. And the characters must be believable, or the scene will fall flat. By injecting emotional depth into these characters this effect is enhanced.

In Falling Awake, debt-stricken Gemma is cornered into performing erotic routines for an insomniac, Luke, who watches from a hidden view. But Gemma’s disabled son, Ben thinks that she is performing for a stage play for VIPs. To protect him from the seedy reality, Gemmas finds herself fostering this fantasy. But Ben is so excited about his mum’s glamorous evening ‘job’, he makes her a cat mask in school. He even involves his art teacher, Miss Potts.

Prohibited Feelings in Fiction

The unseen voyeur, Luke, is in fact repressed, immaculate and polite, in stark contrast to suburban and impetuous Gemma. On encountering Gemma for the first time, he realises that her twelve-year old son had made the cat mask intended for sexual voyeurism. In the following excerpt, Luke has just entered Gemma’s garden unexpectedly whilst she was gardening. The two now stand in silence until Ben bursts into the scene.

Unforseen Situations in Fiction

Ben’s slender form emerged from the house behind Luke. ‘Hey! Mum! Where did you say I should hang this?’

Gemma’s eyes flicked towards Ben. Ben was standing on the patio steps holding up her cat mask. A hot and momentous ball-bearing rolled up from her gut to her throat, rending her speechless. The heat radiated to her scalp, setting every follicle on her scalp aglow.

Luke turned on hearing Ben.

Gemma gritted her teeth. Released from Luke’s scrutiny, she leapt about like a pogostick, making slashing motions with her hands and across her neck, mouthing empathically at Ben to get rid of it.

This scene would not have worked if the characters had not been in stark contrast to one another. To help the reader empathize with them, I injected a little of my own emotional experiences into these characters. I know what it is like to be horribly embarrassed about something. The silence could not have been more awkward as the three of them stand in the garden, Ben holding the cat mask like a toy.

Taboo Stories about Forbidden Love

In my second novel, the Shuttered Room, hostage, Jess, starts to experience inappropriate feelings for her captor, Jake, as he cuts her hair. She tries to imagine her husband undertaking the task instead, but the fantasy dies when she does so.

In A Hard Lesson, teacher Sarah sets her thuggish pupil an assignment on erotic art to get him engaged with his work. She is afflicted with pride and correctness; he in contrast comes from a gang culture and suffers dyslexia. As a result of these assignments, Sarah starts to feel uncomfortably intimate with her pupil. And everyone knows that crossing the line between teacher and pupil is a no-no.

Thrillers’ Driving Force

I would never have written these novels had there not been a risk or taboo within. Risk entails a scene that crosses a line of no return. But in order to make these scenes work, the characters must have some emotional depth and (in these cases) inhabit opposing positions in the story. The scenes could otherwise fall flat.

Excerpt from Falling Awake by Charles J Harwood

Other themes relating to this novel

Understanding gambling addiction

Unique experience of an insomniac

Great themes in literature and Maslow's model

Cynic's view of office politics and business planning

Physical sensation of being in debt