The first idea I ever had for my novel was a torture scene. Specifically, I wanted my male lead to be tortured so terribly that his screams would be heard from the female lead’s room so she could go and save him. Yeah. It’s called whumping.

This was borne out of a frustration for a lack of violence in the books I was reading (OK, I was a weird kid). The character is this close to being tortured… and then the calvary comes. The character is this close to being raped… and then someone comes and saves her. Every time, violence is either averted, happens off screen, or is the normal gory blood-and-war type. I have not yet written the scene in my head, for various reasons, one of which is that I am afraid of it.

I have seen it done with Charlie-whumping fanfics, but how do you effectively write traumatizing or harsh conditions in a novel? Do you avert it, have it happen off-screen, or simply don’t have it come up? (you being you specifically)

IMO, if you can portray the after-effects properly, it’s probably just as effective for that sort of thing to happen offscreen. It’s like keeping the monster unseen in a horror movie, where you let each reader dream up something uniquely horrifying. If you do report the violence directly, you ought to be very careful to maintain tight control over what you relate. You might be going for shock and horror but you may only disgust the reader, and not in the way you want.

Of course, that depends entirely on your ability to suggest effectively, or else it just reads like a cop-out.

Don’t worry, it does.

That's like in _Spider-Man 2_ when Doc Ock threatens to "peel the flesh off [Mary Jane's] bones". An eight year old kid could tell you that was never going to happen, even off-screen.

I like to portray the pain and severity, but I despise over-the-top splatter. My stories inevitably deal with various levels of physical conflict, so injury comes with the territory. I don't like it when the main characters are only injured to service the DRAMATIC element of the story. There are ocassions when I'll give some gross detail about a death or wound, but that usually services a specific character aspect.

I enjoy totally the wrong word, but, if a torture scene is fitting in a book, then it should be there. However, like TakuGifian said, I also want to see the the psychological effects. I find that makes a character much more believable.

Yeah, books where nothing bad can ever possibly happen annoy me. I mean, sure, it might be tough to kill off a character or hurt your precious little baby, Author, but it can add so much to a story! Like in the Dark Knight, I never, ever, ever, ever thought they were going to kill off Rachel, because that just doesn’t happen- no one ever kills off one of the leads.

Gore is not always the way to show the aftermath, though. Like The Dark Knight- there is no blood whatsoever, yet it’s extremely violent and dark.

Nope, there’s no gore in the pencil scene- you see everything up until where the guy’s head gets slammed into the pencil, but you never actually see the act of a pencil shoving through his head. There’s no blood- it’s all completely implied violence.

I don’t write especially violent things; I just have a character that actually feeds off of suffering.

So he’s kind of a ‘once in a blue moon let’s toss in a ton of violence’ because it actually makes sense. I mean, he feeds off of pain.

I prefer to imply things and then show the aftereffects, especially with such touchy issues as rape, and doubly so when the one being raped is one of the MCs. It partially cashes in on the unknown being terrifying while at the same time, it avoids the trap of looking as if the author is trying too hard to make things “gritty” and “serious,” even as the reader still knows the general details of what happened. There’s also generally less squick for more disturbing. Overall a very effective technique.

Anyways, explicit violence/torture or not, flinching is no fun, especially when it comes to abusing favorite characters. :P

@Snow White Queen

>There’s something to be said for experiencing what your character experiences, but I think we all agree that there’s a limit to that reasoning.

Not true. I would never have had the deep, personal knowledge of addiction that fueled my passion for Rob Newark, the junkie in my last novella, Pride’s Fall, without having first been a heroin addict myself.

@SWQ

This is where research comes into play. If you have access to a sociology and/or psychology database, you can look up a number of case studies dealing with the psychological after-effects of torture, abuse, and rape in addition to why people torture, abuse, and rape. Additional information can be researched from historical sources detailing things such as attitudes towards the above, methods, and how victims were viewed, if they survived. Keeping a medical/anatomical reference on hand will also help add to the realism.

Basically, research what you don’t know so that, at the very least, you know the core details of what you are talking/writing about. Once you’ve got the research out of the way, you can take liberties to fill in the gaps/elaborate so that the scene doesn’t read like a dry case study/detatched text.

I really dislike books where something bad happens to the character and by the next chapter, he’s forgotten about it.

That gets completely subverted by Tamora Pierce, because not one, but two of her characters in the Circle series get PTSD, one of them because she accidentally killed several innocent people as a result of her defense of her home (she calls down lightening on their ships), and the other one because he and his teacher tried to warn a country of their upcoming invasion and were imprisoned for a while by the enemy.

The best thing of all, I suppose, would be to actually talk to someone who’d experienced what you want to write about- although this might be a bit difficult if you’re writing a book with a torture scene set during the Spanish Inquisition.

To use Tamora Pierce as an example again, you can take elements of the present and put them into your story. They didn’t call it PTSD in the Middle Ages, but there probably were knights who came back and had nightmares about killing Saracens. You can tailor things to your individual needs.