Thoughts on violence.

Recently I picked up a copy of the writing magazine, Poets & Writers , because I've been staring at the writing magazines for ages at work (BN) and wanted to give one a go. This issue looked promising, and in it I found an article about violence and blood in novels. The article asked when it was appropriate to "show" violence, and when it was appropriate to "hide" it, and leave it to the reader's imagination. It gave examples of mystery, fiction and crime novelists, and how they effectively freak out the readers without going into gruesome detail about every drop of blood or every knife plunge.

And, as writing thoughts do, it got me thinking about what I consider effective in fiction, in books and in movies and shows alike.

As SoF is a series that is 75% fighting and war and 25% talking and scheming, I am familiar with the concept of choosing to display what and where and how. King Allan, my antagonist, murders his father and mother violently in order to ascend to the throne (or is that his reason at all? ;) ). He cuts his father's throat and drowns his mother in the palace fountain, all with his bare hands. I could have easily gone into great detail in some flashback about how it happened in disgusting detail, but instead I focus on how Allan, at that moment, felt to have power enough to kill his own parents. They are his first kills, which are important in the life of any antagonist, but I purpose to leave the gruesome details to the readers. It's their imaginations that are being provoked to see it, after all. If I had gone into pages and pages of detail of the struggle (Allan's father and mother were not soft shadow cats- they were warriors through and through) I would have taken away a huge portion of the raw feeling I wanted the scene to have.

This morning I considered two of my favorite shows, CSI (the original way back when) and Castle, and how they portray murders. I love CSI dearly, but most of the time, I'd say 90%, they show the murder happen, either in the end when the suspect is caught, or in the beginning. While there are plenty of episodes of CSI that freaked the willies out of me (people living in your attic and spying on you at night? Noooo thank you.), I find that the gut response to those murders are not nearly as strong as what I experience when I watch something like Castle. In Castle, when the show begins with murders, we see the murder scene and the body with the suspect gone and the victim just waiting to be discovered. Immediately (especially if it's incredibly bloody) I'm drawn in, and immediately I want to know how it happened, and who was responsible (and how badly Beckett will kick their skull in, but that's not the point) and why. The murders are never shown (at least to my memory), even during one episode where they have a recording of the murder happening. The screen pans out and we focus on the characters watching it, on their reactions, instead of the actual violence happening on screen.

To me, the descriptions the detectives and investigators give are far more effective than the scenes of the murders actually happening in CSI. If I told you there was a man holding a family hostage, and he was executing them one by one, but doing it by dragging them into the other room or across the street to the woods where you can't see, and all you hear are gun shots, what do you think of? The unknown, and your imagination runs wild with it. This murderer is taking the kids one by one, taking the parents, with no mercy, and the others have to listen and know he's coming for them next. If he shot them all "on screen" and I described a brutal killing with punctured chest wounds and skulls splitting open, it would invoke either numbness, or disgusted horror- not quite the emotions needed for the scene.

Thats not to say I believe EVERYTHING should happen off screen. There's a need to know when to show the violence, when to describe it, and when to imply it. I don't describe Allan's first murder in detail, or how Se'vre kills off characters. There's a scene I wrote where he is sitting across from a woman (she's not important) he fully intends to kill, but he's seducing her into relaxing in his presence. She does, to his delight, and he, as Se'vre does, toys with his food and victims in such a way that it seems for several moments that he's actually quite harmless. The scene ends with him, in a "round about" way, telling her he intends to murder her. When Se'vre appears again, he has blood on his face and makes a comment alluding to her murder- but I never write about how it happens, what he did to her, or how the blood got on his face. Se'vre is a messy killer, and he likes it that way.

My antagonists are created to be horrible, twisted and rotten people through and through, but they are also written to be people. I want to invoke emotions and reasons and moments where the reader believes, for a fraction of a second, that whatever is about to happen has a chance of not happening because they see that Allan and Se'vre and Avlon and Revelin are just, in the end, people doing horrible things. And that it's a choice.

In the same way, I wrote an entire (albeit short) chapter of a character being tortured. I needed to show the reader everything that happened in that period of this character being brutalized and tortured in every which way possible, because later, those same readers needed to connect and remember what happened as this character remembers. I needed that connection of sympathy and horror when the character reacts the way they do to situations, of understanding, because this torture is an experience kept between the character it happened to and the audience. The other characters are suddenly the ones who heard about it but did not see it, did not feel it, and it switches the stage around so that the readers have a behind the curtain look at a huge aspect of this character's development. It was a hard chapter to write because of the violence, but it was necessary, and I believe it made the story, the latter books, more effective in their telling because of it.

Of course, SoF is about war, and there are many deaths I am forced to describe. However, I have tried to be careful in how I describe them. Saying a blade was run across someone's throat verses going into great detail about how the tendons were cut and the blood gushed is a line that needs to be recognized. I've read writing before where brutalization, especially by the antagonist, is described in such great detail and so often that I became numb to it. It desensitized me in every way as I read about these deeds this character committed, and I became less interested in his crimes and how to stop them. There's a point you reach where you cannot take it to the next level, where you are stopping your reader from teetering into suspense and horror because you've started the violence at the highest level it can get in the first place. They will flinch at first, sit on the edges of their seats and immerse themselves, but the second they see this is the norm, that this is what will be happening at every plot twist and turn, it becomes ineffective. They become less invested in the characters and their own emotions and reactions.

If I described every swing of Lonlor's sword as he fought in war (he fights in many of them), every limb he cuts off or every person he kills, it would get not only tedious, but annoying. Instead I focus on what he feels, or if he even does. Does it numb him, fighting for hours upon hours, watching his comrades and friends fall by his side? Does the smell of blood and death become so normal to him that he can't remember what clean air is? Shadow cats are a race that delight in blood, and they tend to bleed out their victims in gruesome ways. I wanted to include a scene in SoF where this is shown, and I did describe it through Lonlor's eyes. But I don't describe every murder and every happening of violence in such detail that it numbs the reader. At least, I like to think I've learned enough to not do so. Naturally, if acts of violence happen and are so important to the plot they need to be described in great detail, then do it.

But remember we live in a world where murder happens every day, unfortunately, and most readers will be well familiar with the motion of slashing someone's throat or running them through or shooting them. "He put three in her chest" can provoke more emotion then "The bullets hit her once in her shoulder, her collarbone, her chest, and spurted blood across her shirt". Don't take your reader's imagination for granted, especially if you write fiction. Give it help, show it what you want to get across, but don't assume that they have never seen a crime show in their life or don't know what bullet wounds look like. Give them a taste of the scene, but don't shove it down their throats. They won't be able to enjoy it then, and savoring is important.

And for goodness sake, please don't slather your fiction with blood every page. There are people who enjoy that type of fiction, but you would be doing yourself, your future shrink and your readers a favor by limiting it to when it's necessary.

Find the balance and stick with it. Don't be afraid to show some violence, but be wary of showing far too much.