posted
How do you approach the description of blood and/or gore (as the various media ratings systems like to call it) in your fiction? Do you go for the "less is more" approach, or slide toward the "bash and trash," blood-spattered side of the equation? Or, on the other hand, is the issue largely situational...depending more on the given circumstances at specific points in your work?
Inkwell ----------------- "The difference between a writer and someone who says they want to write is merely the width of a postage stamp." -Anonymous
posted
Wow, the words IT DEPENDS are ringing through my mind so loudly that I don't know where to begin.
First, what kind of story are you writing? what is the effect you are going for? Do you want people to read it snuggled up by the fireplace or hiding with a flashlight under the covers? There is an entire subsect of mystery that they call "cozies" which, by definition, need to have as little blood and gore as posible and in fact, it might be better to simply poison the victim so that no blood is necessary at all.
Then again, if you're writing horror then you need to horrify the reader. They expect it and demand it. There are all kinds of ways to do this, but if the way you've chosen is to have someone remove his own organs, one at at time, to see how much pain he can withstand before passing out and dying, then you're going to have to show me the whole thing and make me live through it. That's the horrifying part. If you're trying to horrify me with an unknown presence in a house it becomes less necessary to do blood and gore -- but then again, it depends where you go with it.
As a rule, I tend not to write a lot of blood and guts into my stories but when it happens, it happens. I don't sit there and focus on it for its own sake but neither to I pass over it.
posted
This is a good question and I feel the best answer doesn't help much. It depends.
Tolkein was brilliant not for what he wrote, but what he did not write, but allowed the reader to infer. He describes precious little of the bloody battles that you know must happen.
On the other hand, other types of writing use blood and gore effectively. Specifically, I think of the battle of Dumai's Wells in Jordan's WoT. He decsribes, in stark detail, heads exploding.
Less is More works at times and other times, more is exactly what you need. trust your instincts, if it feels right to you then do it. It is your writing, after all.
posted
The only time I use "blood and gore" is when a character is dying from a sword wound in the chest, thus saying he was coughing up blood, trying to close the wound etc.
But I agree with the **Depends** comments, as if you were writing a scene about your charactor fighting in battle, you wouldn't stop and say,
"He now bled from his arm from several wounds during the fighting.
It just slows down the pace of the action too much. But it also does depend on your charactors POV, if that charactor was watching the scene you could add:
During the fighting, Ben couldn't help but notice the vast pools of blood at the combatants feet.
I feel like going and writing a scene now.
[This message has been edited by Leigh (edited August 04, 2006).]
posted
What people imagine is usually pretty tame compared to the genuine effects of an event like the one they're reading about. Gore should be used judiciously, but think about all the senses.
[This message has been edited by hoptoad (edited August 04, 2006).]
posted
I see far too many inexperienced writers trying to describe each slash of a sword, each spurt of blood, as if they were giving us a forensic analysis. The reality is that stories in print are NOT the same as a screenplay. On the movie screen you can get away with a gore-fest because it's visual; it grabs you by the emotions. In a written story, it becomes clinical and boring. It's not exciting. It, in fact, will bring most stories to a screeching halt.
In my opinion, in print, less is more. If you want the reader to stay engaged, my advice is to focus on your MC's emotional reaction to the fight and the MC's clever tricks to get out of trouble and NOT on the graphic blow by blow of the action.
posted
I don't like being queasy, so I don't describe gross things. I hint at them. "The tiger had something bloody in its mouth."
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posted
I'm with the "it depends" camp on this one. Whenever I write B&G I keep three things in mind:
1) What is my target market? (Who will be reading the story?) 2) How will my target market react? (How do I want them to react?) 3) Does it fit with the style of the story? (Will it make sense?)
To expand, the target market has the most sway in this regard. If you are wrting a fantasy book for the YA/middle-grade crowd you don't want to go on a tirade about someone getting torturously killed and how the warm life blood sprays all over... yeah, you get the point. But if you're target market is the male testosterone action/adventure market, a description like that is fine.
Now two may seem the same as one, but they are not. One determines how far you can go, two determines how you want your readers to react. The length of description, depth of detail and written reactions by the person being attacked, anyone around him, and the person(s) doing the attacking will determin how readers may react. Here are some very quickly thrown together examples.
Example #1 - Dramatic with a twist of mystery:
Susie heard a loud bang and jumped. She turned to ask Brett what it was, but he wasn't there. "Brett," she said, instintively holding her arms tight against her body. She felt something warm on her face and wiped at it absently with her hand while she stumbled around calling Brett's name. Her foot kicked something and she looked down. Her scream echoed through the woods as she realized Brett was lying on the ground. The earth was already saturated with his blood and large whole opened through his chest where his heart should be. Susie finally looked at her hand and realized it was covered in blood.
Example #2 - Violent, shocking end:
"It can't be safe hiking in these parts of the mountain during hunting season," Susie said.
"Don't worry," Brett said with his cocky, yet assuring, smile, "we have our orange vests on, and nobody could mistake us for their favorite four footed meal."
"What about stray bullets?"
"Do you have any idea what the statistical..." Brett stopped short and jerked backwards. An explosion of blood errupted on his chest and back as he flew through air from the mysterious force. He hit the ground at the same time as the report echoed through the forest valley.
Susie screamed. Hysteria took hold as she tried to claw the warm liquid from her face. She tried to tear her eyes away, but the shock kept her body immobile. Blood began to ooze from the whole in Brett's chest, and the ground gredily drank it.
...okay, so those may not be the best thought out examples, but they hopefully show the point. Each example should give, in a well planned and edited story, a different reaction. The first a kind of suspenseful death, and the second a more shocking end. Each has about the same level of B&G, but the way the scene plays out and the way the character reacts makes can make a world of difference.
Lastly we have "How does it fit in?" If you are writing a high fantasy, the heroes are being chased by an army of ... troll warriors, and they have to make it into the sunlight to escape, you can't write drawn out fights. Anything drawn out will hurt the flow and the suspence of the escape. It will also make the escape unrealistic. After all, if you stop to fight everyone in the army you will eventually get tired and overrun and die.
Or if you are writing a gangster shootout. That too will not take a lot of "real world" time, but you can take more time and be dramatic with a fight like that, including a more descriptive B&G writing style. Or if you are writing a large modern military battle you would need to add the strategic and emotional elements on top of the B&G in order for it to really fit into the style of the fight. In this case you could go full tilt B&G and anyone reading the book would expect nothing less. And so on and so forth.
posted
Well, I can take reading or listening to anything, or so I think---after listening to years of my mother telling me all the trouble she went through to have me, all that talk has no effect on me, no matter how graphic.
As for writing it, well, I'm less confident of my ability to handle it. (It's somewhere above my ability to handle sex scenes, but well below my ability to handle intellectual conversation.) A couple of times, though, I've had characters get graphically wounded or killed, and then I get hung up in researching the how of it, the detailed medical reasons of what happens when my character gets it in that particular spot of their bodies...
As an additional aside, when writing action scenes I tend to find having a lot of generalized description with just one very specific, gore-heavy sentence thrown in tends to be quite effective.
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