Writing Violence

I really hesitated before posting this, but I think it is important, if you’re going to be writing any sort of violence (including action violence) to write it correctly.  Both for good writing and out of general respect.

So, to start: violence falls into two major categories: blunt and visceral.

Blunt violence is written in broad, vague terms.  For example:

He hit her.

She shot him in the shoulder.

He blew up the building.

Blunt violence is great for big flashy action sequences that you want to be fun, and not just for the psychopaths in your audience.  Think PG-13 action flicks—those are almost all blunt violence.  

You can intensify blunt violence by increasing the vulnerability of the victim (such as making her a woman or child or by having the person be naked or barefoot) or of the location (such as a bathroom, dentist’s office) or by edging it toward visceral violence by using more specific word choices:

He ripped out her throat.

She jammed the knife between his ribs.

In general, blunt violence is not meant to be taken too seriously, and no one but the most tender-hearted will be bothered by it.  It’s cartoonish, vague, and no one really gets hurt.  Your characters generally shrug off their injuries and go on with their lives with a Band-Aid and a one-liner.

Visceral violence is a different beast.  Visceral violence is written in incredibly specific—preferably medical—terms, and targets the more vulnerable areas of the body.  For example:

He slid a needle under the nailbed of her thumb.

He dug out the veins in the undersides of her wrists.

He pressed the burning end of his cigar into the arch of her foot.

Visceral violence is used to make violence horrible instead of fun.  The reader squirms uncomfortably and maybe isn’t sure if they want to keep reading. 

Visceral violence is also extremely memorable.  On a ghost tour I went on, our guide showed us a collection of real torture devices that had been used.  This was thirteen years ago, but I’ve always remembered what she said, because it was so visceral: torture is about making things go pop that were never meant to go pop.  The specific example I remember is nipples.

If you’re going to use visceral violence in your book, make sure you do it correctly.  Anything beyond the most minimal use of visceral violence is tasteless and gratuitous.  Visceral violence has its uses (shouldn’t we always think of violence as being horrible?) but should never be used except when extremely necessary.  Furthermore, for maximum impact, and to be respectful toward real sufferers of violence, the writer should focus on making the visceral violence as realistic as possible.  And this includes the traumatic emotional and physical aftermath.

This also increases the severity of the perceived violence, because violence is most effective when written as non-fiction.

I first came to this conclusion while reading The Amityville Horror, which is published as non-fiction.  Its actual content is barely PG, but I found it one of the scarier books I’d ever read . . . because of the factual way it was written.  I have since then read a couple of nonfiction books that have included torture, and they’ve hit me much, much harder than anything in literature.  In the memoir Tortured for Christ, which I only got halfway through because I simply couldn’t take any more, the author seldom describes any of the torture he endured; and when he does, he focuses primarily on the details of his humiliation rather than on the sensation of pain.  Frankly, he doesn’t have to tell us there was pain.  His wails of agony echo through every line of the book. 

The other book is the memoir Between Silk and Cyanide.  In that book, the author’s friend, the famous White Rabbit, Yeo-Thomas, is captured and tortured by the Nazis.  The author does not describe what happened to his friend.  He does not describe what his friend looks like.  He says, when Yeo-Thomas’s wife goes to the train station, that she’d been “warned” about Yeo-Thomas’s appearance.  And when Yeo-Thomas comes to visit him, the author only describes him as looking like an old man.  And afterwards, “I waited until his footsteps had shuffled away, and then was violently sick on behalf of mankind.” (pg 580 in the hard cover)

I literally cannot think about that without tears coming to my eyes. 

Sometimes, the most effective violence is that which is not written at all.