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 Posted: Tue Jul 13, 2010 2:40 pm
Hey, I was wondering, where do you, my fellow writers, draw the line between violence and excessive violence? A punch to the nose isn't that dramatic, but what if the writer decides to go into detail: the crunching cartilage, the blood funneling down into the throat.. When does a description of a violent act become excessive? When the author focuses on the physical gore, the mental trauma and desperation? What gets under your skin, so to speak?
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Posted: Wed Jul 14, 2010 7:07 pm
For me, the difference between violence and excessive violence depends on relevance to the plot. I'm not a fan of gratuitous torture, mostly because it rarely influences the plot after the first few moments, but Niel Gaiman's Neverwhere dabbles in some of the darkest scenes I read and his violence reinforces the insanity and sadism of his vilains.
So I suppose this is a hard question to answer.
I would say that excessive violence is violence for the sake of violence, not necissarily descriptive violence. For instance, I like you more descriptive example because it puts me in the story, but pages and pages of maningless violence waste my time and put me off of the story.
I don't know if that helped, but I tried.
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Posted: Thu Jul 15, 2010 1:15 pm
Thanks. As a Crime and Horror writer, one of my goals has been to never get caught up in the shock value of gore. Even if my characters are violent people and many scenes I write can be pretty horrific, I worry about becoming a writer that only appeals to the gore-hounds.
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Posted: Tue Jul 27, 2010 5:31 pm
To elucidate a little bit more, what readers want is to feel what's going on. It's mostly about appealing to the senses, but there's a fine line between appealing to the senses and overloading them. By this I don't mean that your making it pleasant for the senses, but allowing them some understanding of what's going on. Bombarding them is where, as you said, the shock value of gore comes in. Gratuitous gore may be descriptive, but that does not make it good. I would recommend you use some discernment when dealing with gore, and take some examples from Neil Gaiman and Stephen King. Especially King, as a horror writer. And even though you write from a thriller/mystery standpoint, there are still some lessons to be learned from his use of violence. Mostly, as Evermore already said, relating to the relevance of the gore. If you are writing it for the sake of shining some light on the inner mechanisms of your characters, more may be allowed. But, if you're doing it just for the sake of writing a good torture scene, less is more. Take, for example, the torture scene at the end of Casino Royale by Ian Flemming. By letting the audience think about it and fill in the blanks themselves, you enrich it rather than taking away by bombarding them with detail.
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deadzonedragon Vice Captain
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