forum People that can write graphic violent gory scenes help me

Started July 12, 2018 by @mckapo

tune

How do you put the emotion into your writing when you are writing seriously messed up and crazy?

Like, I want to show, not tell, but during these intense scenes, I feel like most people do a lot of telling, and I don't want that. I want any readers to be able to imagine what im writing in their heads, I want to feel when that dagger is used to gut someone, or the tree vines that force their way into my MC's body, going through bone and muscle, how do I write and show that?

Disclaimer: I cannot write graphic violent gory scenes but here are a few ideas that may help.

• Use powerful words in what you're describing. Like, don’t say the tree vine went through, use speared, splintered, shattered…
• Match your sentence length to your pacing. If this is a sudden and graphically violent scene, short, tight sentences will give it punch. If it's more of a long, agonising torture scene, you can use longer sentences to draw it out.

With the MC thing, if it's from their POV just be aware of how much they can cope with. Their perception of outside events is going to be way off if they're being skewered with a tree.

One thing that might help is to replace commonly used words and expressions with synonyms that people are less use to hearing. Even something as simple as the difference between "She punched him in the face" and "She drove her knuckles into his teeth". And on that note personally I find that not using words people are used to reading (Face, Torso, gut etc) and use more specific thing things like Cheekbones, spine, rib cage, I mean it's not a big difference but I think it helps simply on the principle that you normally don't think about your hair being painful until you read a line about being lifted off the ground by it.
Also Pro tip with blood: It's gross (duh) it's thick and hot and heavy and even a little of it smears all over and makes your skin sticky and you throat swell shut with the suffocating smell of iron. and let me tell you, having someone else blood stained over your jaw is not nearly as sexy as your average writer would make it sound. Violence isn't pretty or attractive and wars aren't glorious things, murders aren't trendy, evil is real and humans are animals, just remember that and you'll do just fine.

Not to ruin the moment but yeah, BLOOD SMELLS REALLY BAD. Take it from someone who works at an animal clinic, it's like iron but also very coppery-smelling, and once you get it in your nose its gonna stay there for the rest of the day, even if you shower. If you want to describe what old blood looks like, it turns brown and dry and crackly (if there's a lot of it) after a while. Also! Depending on how much pain/violence your character has experienced, they will have very different involuntary reactions to getting hurt. I haven't ever gotten seriously hurt in my life. The two worst times that come to mind are:
-Slicing my finger open with a sharp knife. Way more blood than I expected, although the pain wasn't too bad. My head was perfectly clear and I knew enough to put pressure on the cut and hold it over my head to stop the bleeding, but my heart still pounded like crazy and I started to feel kind of panicky. That feeling only goes away if you get hurt regularly, I think.
-The other time was when I got my thumbnail crushed under a very heavy table. Almost burst the tip of my thumb and REALLY REALLY HURT. I was able to tough it out for like five minutes. Then I started to feel sick, I saw spots and my hearing stopped working. I just barely sat down in time to keep myself from blacking out, and I had to stay sitting for quite a while to get rid of the dizziness. I think those are some good details to put in if a character gets a really sudden, painful injury, especially if they're a bit scared and don't know what to do. Hope that helps! ^^

Oh, ho, ho, my time has come.
You want to know how to write gore? With feeling and passion?
I, the author of several gory scenes that are explored with a burning passion, shall over my advice.
First off, YES THE BLOOD THING. CANNOT STRESS ENOUGH. BLOOD IS DISGUSTING. Never let any maniac convince you otherwise. I literally don't think it's possible to like the smell of blood. If someone tells you they do, seriously doubt how much blood they've actually seen in their lives. I fully agree with the two people above me on that. It will make you cough and physically recoil. There have been times where I'm dealing with a boatload of blood, and I've genuinely had to take breaks to avoid throwing up. And let me just say, I am not squeamish at all. Murder and violence is never pretty or easy, unless you're a freaking expert. It's desperate, painful, scary, and most often even the people doing the murdering will feel one or all of the above emotions, unless they're truly sadists, or that hell-bent on killing someone.

Now, the actual writing of a gory scene with emotion and showing, not telling, here's my advice.
I usually only write aftermaths, so do bear that in mind. Most of what I have going for me is in the reactions of whoever stumbles across the gratuitous carnage.

I'll use my current story as my example, because in it, my main comes home to their farm, (after an already emotionally taxing day), to find a trail of brutalized animal carcasses leading up the burned out remains of their house and the mangled bodies of their parents, tangled in barb wire.
So the emotions go hand in hand with the descriptions, looking something like this:
Character runs over a chicken carcass because they weren't paying attention to the road. Startlment and mild confusion ensue. Upon finding the chicken's body, and then looking forward and realizing the entire road ahead of them is covered in animal bodies, (it was night out, so they didn't see before they got out of their truck), we actually cut past any confusion, going into raw shock and fear. Their next thought is of their parents, and they run to their house, to find the bodies. Shock grows, and at this point, MC begins to doubt their own eyes. This will ultimately lead to them believing they are insane, and hallucinated the entire event.

The main things that you want to do when writing reactions and such to gore, is take into account your character's personality, their past experiences with violence, and, perhaps most importantly, if their fear response is fight, flight or freeze. You can base most their reactions off that.
ex: my main is a freeze/flight person, so their reactions were to mentally go numb, then avoid facing the issue by thinking up any excuse they could as to why it couldn't be so.
Also, confusion is too often the predominant emotion of the day when it comes to pieces like this. Confusion is an action thing, not a reaction thing. In a battle, that's where people's blood will be pumping, their adrenaline high, and their brains trying to process. If they stumble across a scene of carnage later, confusion will rapidly fade as the brain tries to cover their butts and protect them from being traumatized. Your brain doesn't WANT you to process right now, in most cases. So be thinking more about the avoidance aspect of the reactions, how they might justify what's happened, make excuses, or in my kiddo's case, convince themself that none of it's real.

So really what I'm getting at is that you have to marry the emotions with each action, and make them inseparable in the POV. Don't make the mistake of slipping to far out of your characters head. Keep things small-scale. mention details only as they would notice them and no faster. Keep in mind that depending on the situation, your character might not have the cognitive ability to notice every important detail, so you'll have to cover for them in that way, but for the most part, only describe what your character can touch, see, smell, taste, and hear. With everything that comes their way, remember their fear response and have them react accordingly. Humans are pretty much flight creatures, and I think our responses order like this: Flight, freeze, fight. Which means we'll only fight if running and hiding doesn't work.

Also, I agree with Azuresbend, use abnormal words to jar your readers out of their complacent, passive role. Make them uncomfortable. Use words like carcass instead of body, gush, spurt, flood, ooze etc instead of drip, trace, smear, etc. Find the gross words, the ones that have a lot of hard sounds in them, or just make things sound uncomfortable. Brutal, mangle, those words are great descriptives, because of how heavy they sound .Describe with the most vivid words you can find, and don't be ashamed to google "synonyms for _____" because you can get some really good ones that way.

Anyways, hope this helped, good luck!!