The Writer Will Take Your Questions Now #319 -- All Ages Writing

Do you write your pulp-style action stories with all ages in mind, 

intentionally targeting a particular age group as being okay for it?

Unless I'm mandated by a publisher, I don't set out with the intention of telling a G, PG, PG-13, R-rated story. I mainly just focus on being true to my characters.

If my dirty cop would cuss like a sailor, he's gonna cuss like a sailor. If my jaded P.I. would drink himself into a stupor and sleep around, then you can bet he's gonna do it in the story. If my struggling pastor recovering from an affair stays on guard and tries to be the most moral person in the room, by golly that's going to flavor the words he says and way he does things.

Nothing irks me worse than reading a cop thriller in which the cops all talk as if their moms were hiding behind the corner to wash their mouths out with soap at a moment's notice. Or to read about despicable people who do despicable, violent things, then talk like missionaries (unless that's an intentional affectation). Or worse, to read about lost, broken people who are looking for affection in a physical relationship, then have a writer chicken out and have them barely hold hands with each other and only hint about rainbows and doves and rain as euphemisms for physical interaction. I got enough of that in the overly sanitized religious fiction I used to sell when I worked in a Christian bookstore.

When I write, I write gritty, pulp-style narratives or adult literary prose. I don't write bloodless cozies or sweet young debutantes solving a murder with their local book club. I write about real people (or at least the closest I can get in prose) getting into life or death situations and struggles who react like the broken, angry, hurt, beleaguered, wounded, faulty, fallen people we all can be. My characters speak, think, and act in neither whites nor blacks for the most part. They live in the grays where we all have to.

My bottom line is to be true to the characters. If I'm writing for a younger market, I'll create and write about characters that are appropriate to that market. If I'm writing for a religious market, I'll create characters that fit that market, not sanitized characters who don't fit it until the point of overly sensitive artificiality.

If none of those cases apply, I'm going to assume I'm writing to adults who want to read my story the way it's supposed to be written.

The Writer Will Take Your Questions Now #305 -- Making Violence Resonate

How do you convey violence in your writing in a way 

that makes it resonate with readers and truly affect them?

There are a few tricks (though I prefer to call them techniques) I use to make my violent scenes connect with readers. Among them:

• I adjust my sentence length to make the violence felt, using longer sentences to set up the punch of the shorter ones. Just like a fight is a dance, the words and phrases used to reveal the fight can be a dance too. 
• I listen to the sounds (i.e. the poetry) of the language during the scene. I've said it before that soft sounds flow softly, meandering zealously for miles, and hard sounds hit like a brick, stopping readers abruptly and forcing them to slow down and feel each beat. (Hear what I did there?)
• I aim for visceral word choices in my nouns and adjectives (and tend to try to avoid adverbs during violence since they are weaker word choices typically). I prefer words that touch the senses through not only sight and sound, but also through smell, touch, and taste as much as I can get away with. And combinations of them can be doubly effective.
• I like the mix the familiar with the unfamiliar. For example hit like a brick is a common way of describing a punch, but combining it with a follow-sentence about the mash potato mush that the brick made of my face reinforces one without letting it slide into complete cliche. Plus it's very specific, which always helps. 
• I know when to stop. Too much is too much. Take your readers to the edge, but don't step over. Let them do that for themselves. 
• It sounds like the opposite advice, but I also have to know when not to stop. My job is to take the reader a little farther than he or she is comfortable, to make him or her face that unknown (or sometimes known) that incites an emotional reaction.

Hope all that helps. Happy writing.

The Writer Will Take Your Questions Now #287 -- Writing Violence

When and why is violence necessary in a good piece of fiction?

Violence is necessary when it is needed to carry the story and the characters from point A to point B. That's the easy answer that doesn't really say anything.

The tougher answer is this: You need to write violence into your stories when you character would be violent or when your plot needs something violent to happen. Just how much and how graphic that violence becomes depends on the internal rules you've established for your story. A cozy mystery can be filled with murders but also with little to no blood. A street-wise thriller can -- on the other hand -- show you every bullet hole and each tendon as it is ripped by knives.

Or, if you need to move to shock and awe tactics as an author, you can introduce more graphic violence into a traditional cozy.

There's no science to this. It's completely an art, and you learn by doing it. Over and over again.

[Link] Hollywood and the Language of Violence

by Frank Fradella

NOTE: Frank's a long-time writer/editor friend who missed the window to join the roundtable about writing violence, but he did spend some time thinking about the topic and whipped up this simply amazing article about how violence is a language all its own. So, of course, I felt the need to share this with you. You really owe it to yourself to read this piece. It's that good. 

I was 10 years old the first time someone threw a fist at my face without the intention of striking me. (I’d faced my fair share of those who wanted to pummel me up until then.) Still, I flinched. It would take a while to separate these actions in the dojo from the real-world encounters where blood had been spilled and bones broken.

At 10 years old, I was years away from looking at violence as a language. Karate and kung fu were actions. Tools. A way to stop the bullies on San Juan Drive from making my school days hell. But after a hundred punches aimed at my head, after a thousand, after ten thousand, I had achieved a level of desensitization that allowed me to see each attack as a statement waiting for my response. The outstretched arm with the clenched fist at the end is a weapon, yes, but with experience you also begin to realize it’s a target. One can block or evade a punch, certainly. That’s a reasonable response, though it does allow for the attacker the freedom to attack again. But to control the arm in flight, to divert its force, to bend it back upon itself, to — yes — even break it, changes the tone of the conversation entirely.

To those who have been a victim of violence, it’s anything but honorable or logical. It’s brutality, pure and simple. But for those who have spent a goodly portion of their lives in the minutia of it, in its discipline, in its philosophy and path, we set our feet on the roads walked by samurai and Spartans alike. There are many ways to speak who we are to the world we live in. This is but one of them, and not a bad one at that.

Anything is language if it can be defined and replicated and used to communicate ideas and resolve conflict. The initial pleasantries we exchange in polite conversation — the “how are yous” and the “I’m fines” — are all tossed out thoughtlessly in those first breaths like the opening chess moves between competent players. Language is pattern. Communication. Violence, with its opening volley of snapped jabs and familiar stances is just setting the stage for the conversation that is to follow.

Continue reading: https://medium.com/p/5666f44442d3

Violence and Gore -- Write Less or Write More?

For our newest writers roundtable, we're going to look at writing scenes of violence and gore. Getting a violent and/or gory scene right isn't easy, and to find out how to do it, we're going to have some of the best writers of violent action I know teach us how to do it. 

Yep. This roundtable has all of it.
Well, except drugs. Don't do drugs, kids.
Drugs are bad. And stay in school. 

When and why is violence necessary in a good piece of fiction?

L. Andrew Cooper: I am not shy about saying that much (but not all) of my fiction both is about and is violence, so you might as well ask, is the kind of fiction I write necessary? I think so--violent fiction, and violence in fiction, not only safely allows readers to experience, or approach experiencing, one of the greatest (and most unpleasant) extremes of living and dying but also to reflect on how such experiences profoundly shape both individuals (our characters) and history (reflected in our stories). So violence is necessary in a good piece of fiction when violence appears in ways that make people scared of it, laugh at it, criticize it, or otherwise engage.

James Tuck: Violence is often necessary as a way to literally drive your character or plot forward. Characters react to stimulus and violence is a stimulus that makes them have no choice but to change.

Lance Stahlberg: I can't speak to “any” good piece of fiction. But people who pick up an action adventure or crime novel are looking to be immersed in a gritty world where the only way that the hero is only likely to overcome their obstacles is with their fists or a gun. Violence is an inescapable element of the genre.

I.A. Watson: Narrative fiction almost always requires a climax. Climax is almost always as a result of a problem or conflict. Problems and conflicts are often resolved via action, and one for of action is violence. Violence can be catharsis, and including it in a story sometimes has that effect too. It can be shocking, and that's another effect writers may want to have. So many climaxes are violent.

Violence can also establish threat, set a tone, elicit reader emotional reaction, and grab reader attention at any time in a story. Like all the other narrative choices available, it should be used at the right time in the right way for best effect.

J.H.. Glaze: Violence is a necessary plot device in genre based material to drive the plot and introduce conflict that can later be resolved,. Often the resolution to the conflict involves some type of violence.

Bill Craig: Violent action in the opening of a book can set the pace and quickly draw the reader in, and lead to more exciting action sequences.

Lee Houston Jr.: I personally feel, as both a reader and a writer, that violence should only be representative of just how evil the villain(s) of the story are. Without violence and the villains who create it, the heroes of our tales would have less to do each adventure. Yet we must remember that some people read for the escapism fiction gives them from the troubles and stress of the real world, and respond accordingly.

Name your weapon of choice. We'll write them all. 

How do you convey violence in your writing in a way that makes it resonate with readers and truly affect them?

Lance Stahlberg: Too much violence, just for the sake of violence, loses its effectiveness. Like any element of the story, it has to have a purpose. Maybe that point is just to illustrate that the situation is dangerous or the enemy is brutal. Or maybe it gives some insight into the character by how they react to it. I think it's important not to ignore the effect that that violence has an on the characters involved, beyond the obvious. The person who dished out a beating, or killed someone, is just as permanently effected as the victim. So are any witnesses. I think that fantasy novels miss that especially.

Acts of violence should not be casual if the character is supposed to be a normal, healthy, tax paying citizen. Nor should they necessarily be angsty hand-wringing events if your character is a hardened thug. Either scenario should present something interesting for the reader.

J.H.. Glaze: I try to convey the violence in one of two ways, a simmering, brooding violence that is built up over a period of time in the story. This would usually be used in a crime of passion. Or a random act of violence often perpetrated by a creature of some kind and is spontaneous and comes out of nowhere. It is the evil jumping out of the shadows and adds a shock value.

Bill Craig: When I write a violent action sequence, I try to make the reader feel the impact as much as possible. Here's an example from my new spy series Caribe:

"Nick stood, smiling like they were old friends. As soon as they were close enough, he snatched his beer bottle from the table and broke it across the nearest man’s face. As he cried out in both pain and surprise, Nick launched a kick to the second man’s groin that lifted him into the air. As he dropped to the marble floor, Nick snapped a punch into the first man’s broken nose that dropped him to the floor.
"Nick hurried across the courtyard and out the door. Once on the street, Storm pulled a white baseball cap out of his back pocket and pulled it onto his head. The sunglasses came off and went into his shirt pocket. His appearance was changed enough to throw off and description that the two men or Melendez could give of him."

I.A. Watson: I like the reader to have a dog in the fight, by which I mean there has to be a reason for the reader to care about what's happening. So I like to establish the reason for the violence so they know who to root for or against. If the baddie or monster's going to win this violent encounter I want the readers to care that he won, so that they;re rooting against him and taking him seriously next fight along.

Good fights have to be storyboarded like mini-stories in their own right. Violence has to be described as coherently and literately as anything else in the tale. It requires at least as much skill and technique as love scenes or back story exposition.

Violence doesn't have to mean fighting, either. A villain beating up a helpless old man tied to his chair can be pretty violent - and you bet the readers will care about our hero catching up with the bad guy after. Nor does it have to be physical. The bad guy slowly pulling the arms and legs off a captive child's beloved doll in front of her then popping the toy's eyes and stamping on them out can be just as horrifying because it's emotionally violent.

Violence can have various tones. It can be intense and brutal, it can be freewheeling and swashbuckling, it can even be humorous sometimes. It works best when it's pitched to serve the story.

L. Andrew Cooper: As for how I convey violence, I have to ask, what kind? Psychological? Physical? Social? Systemic? Psychological violence tends to appear best in dialogue or descriptions of reactions that tell readers more about characters than characters have figured out about themselves (or vice versa --interactions that begin to hint at larger psychological twists yet to be mapped). Physical violence can appear in all shapes and sizes. More on that in a moment. Social violence manipulates scenarios to play on larger social fears rooted in demographic/political concerns, which can range from standard scenarios involving victimizing people who are already at a disadvantage (Leatherface cuts through the guy in a wheelchair) to more specific, quasi-allegorical violence, like the violence that begins the TV reboot of Battlestar Galactica. As for systemic violence, that tends to involve concerns about large systems designed to destroy us... we're in conspiracy territory... to unfold such violence, you tend to need massive narrative, such as, say, the Cthulhu Mythos or what I'm doing in my own rather conspiratorial novels.

James Tuck: Violence is necessary for its careful use of sensory and physical cues that jar the impact into the reader's mind. It's one thing to have someone get punched. It's another for them to be punched so hard it made their spleen flop against their pancreas.

Lee Houston Jr.: I always go more for portraying the emotional impact of a violent situation than dwelling on the physical damage that might occur.

So does this interview.

Now for the obvious question... To gore or not to gore when writing violent scenes? How much is too much? How much is needed? Or is it just a cop-out used by lazy writers?

James Tuck: Gore is fine as long as it's applied in a logical (for the rules of the story) way... people don't have buckets of blood inside them.. shotguns don't rip people in half... etc. But used artfully, gore can really drive home the actual ramifications of violence being used or received.

Lee Houston Jr.: Unfortunately, there are times when it is painfully obvious that we live within a violent world. The nightly news proves that. However, I never dwell upon the specific details of a violent act, for I do not need to gross out neither the readers or myself. You acknowledge the violent act(s), set the hero(es) upon the villain(s) trail, and go on with the story.

I.A. Watson: Gore is another tool in the kit. It's a specialized tool, like graphic sex and obscene language, but like those things it can have a big impact when its used right. The problem comes when it gets dropped into the middle of an otherwise less explicit story. Nobody expects a full-on three way sex scene in Harry Potter (except on certain very specialized websites) because it would be inappropriate to the tone and effect of the story. On the other hand, James Bond can get genital electrode torture without his readership offering more than a reflex wince of sympathy. So it's about horses for courses.

I tend to reserve graphic descriptions for very special occasions, when I want the reader to be horrified by what has happened. Even then I think less is more. Prose can't compete with movies for splatter effects. It can outdo the best 3D VFX in the world when it gets inside a reader's head and turns their own imagination to supplying the detail. With every respect to H.P. Lovecraft, M.R. James is scarier.

Bill Craig: You want to use enough to paint the proper picture but no go overboard. Say you are writing a story dealing with a serial killer, then yeah more gore may be needed than say in a western, unless your character is being tortured by Apaches or Comanches. But in say your average mystery, usually a body laying in a pool of blood is graphic enough.

L. Andrew Cooper: Gore. Lots of lazy writers use it. A few great writers use it. Then again, we only get a few truly great writers per region per generation. I get tired of people who think we're reaching "all-time-lows" or whatever of gore and sexualized violence. I want to tell such people to go read the complete works of the Marquis de Sade, look at the dates when they were first published, look at the dates on their smarmy phones, and then, brutalized as they are by having read thousands of pages of intentionally unreadable prose that I could never get through, they can realize that nothing has changed in hundreds of years and they can go, well, politely walk to the end of a pier and decide for themselves.

Seriously, though, gore is and long has been a serious art. You can use it it to brutalize audiences into forms of thought they could not achieve otherwise. You can use it to create forms of the sublime and forms of the beautiful only available by tapping into all the cultural weight we attach to images of the human insides, the blood, the guts, the things we're never supposed to see. Our job as artists is not only to show what people are not supposed to see, but show it in ways that challenge the way they were looking in the first place.

Lance Stahlberg: There are scads of movies and comics out there that I just call “violence porn”. Again, it's violence just for the sake of violence. If the scene is just an excuse to describe gore, why do I care? Unless you are specifically writing a horror or something aimed at fans who are really into gruesome or macabre subject matter, then well, yeah. Have at it.

In the action adventure world, gore can be effective, so long as it's not thrown around so much that it loses any shock value it's meant to have. Perhaps you need to establish just how brutal a character can be, or you need to drive home the very real threat a character is facing. I have a scene in a novella that's about to be released where we see a sharp contrast between how our hero was introduced, and what she's truly capable of.

J.H.. Glaze: I like gore, but since most of today's readers are women, I try to only use a lot of it when it is needed, and when I think the reader can accept it. A 'nice' person in the story who dies may get eaten by a creature, but at the point of attack, I turn the story camera away and focus on other action. Whereas a BAD person may get the top of their head bitten off and I will describe the curvature of the eyeballs poking above the jagged edge of their separated skull. If I set the character up just right, people will cheer at the gore in that scene. As far as it being a cop out, it depends on the story surrounding it, and really, I believe heavy gore has a very limited audience in the reading community so there is no real reason to be off the charts. Sometimes the best bits are the ones you can hear and not see.

Oh no! It can't be almost over!

What are some tips and tools to help new writers master the art of writing violence in their work?

L. Andrew Cooper: Remember that "violence" is an extremely broad range of experiences and emotions, not all of them necessarily bad. I've read hundreds of descriptions of intestines dangling in various ways. Don't overestimate the power of shock or the ability of violence to galvanize your writing by itself. Violence is the collision of characters, events, descriptions--if you're into that sort of thing (I am), you earn the luscious descriptions of the taboo by embedding them in contexts that actually MAKE them taboo.

Lance Stahlberg: Same advice applies to any tool. In all things, moderation. Don't overdo it. When writing a scene, ask yourself how realistic it is. There can be a fine line between brutal and parody. If the level of violence gets so absurd it feels like a Troma movie, might want to scale back.
Also keep pacing in mind. If you spend too much page space describing the violence, there might not be enough room for the action to move forward. The story always comes first.

Lee Houston Jr.:  First and foremost (in my mind), the hero(es) should NEVER stoop to the villains' level! Otherwise, why are they the hero(es) of your story? Otherwise, how I handle violent situations in my creative works is reflected in my answers to your first three questions, and any other writer is welcome to do with my advice as they see fit.

J.H.. Glaze: A tip for new writers - build a scene that will contain violence, slowly. Take the story in a direction where violence is inevitable, but the character tries to avoid it at all costs. That results in a climax to the scene that can be referred to as pulse pounding and edge of seat. Make sure you have developed the readers relationship with the character so they give a shit before they get killed or injured, I like the thrill of making my reader like a character at first, but by the time they get taken out, the reader is actually cheering for them to die.

James Tuck: Don't flinch. If you are going to write it then sit your ass down and fucking write it. No off page coward moves. Don't be a punk.

I.A. Watson: Set the scene well. If the hero's going to grab up a chair and smash the bad guy with it, establish the chair is in the room before the fight starts, or at least that it;s the kind of room that has chairs in it. If there's a cliff edge let's hear about it beforehand.

Establish the reason for the fight. Give the readers something to care about.

Consider multiple perils. A punch-up's great. A punch-up in a burning barn is better. A punch-up in a burning barn with the baby screaming in his pram near the smoldering haystack is better yet.

Use shorter sentences than normal. It has more punch. Then vary with a lengthier, more descriptive sentence. Then toss in a line of dialogue. Then a "wide-shot" description of some associated event - people racing away from the gunfire say. Then back to short, sharp descriptions.

Avoid cliche. There are a lot of violence cliches. Try not to rely on jackhammer fists, lightning-fast punches, or reeling heads. Find new descriptions. Keep it fresh.

Pitch your level of graphic-ness to the kind of fight scene you want. No point doing Indiana Jones-style fight descriptions if you're going to interrupt the derring-do with detailed information about the splattered vitreous humor from the pencil jabbed in the cop's eye. Likewise, body horror stories can be let down by common cliche like "spurting fountains."

The fight needs to have events in it, with twists and turns just like a full story. You can even get plot revelations and character development moments in there! It's a mini-three act drama in its own right, with set-up, follow-on, and pay-off.

Bill Craig: Watch a lot of movies, see how they handle the gore. Slasher movies go over the top, but study the way the cinema stages the gore, you can learn a lot and can incorporate it into your writing.

The Writer Will Take Your Questions Now (#40) -- Gratuitous Content

When do you think language, violence, or sexual content becomes gratuitous in a work of fiction?

The short answer: 

When it distracts a reader from the story.

The long answer: 

Let me respond by first telling you a story. (After it, it's what we storytellers do, right?)

Years ago, when I was in college taking a fiction writing class (My professor wrote an official biography of Joyce Carol Oates -- how cool is that?), I quickly identified with three other writers and we really hit it off. One introduced me to Lovecraft. One had an affinity for early British Lit. And one of them had a quirk that I still remember with affection -- she could write dialog for the saltiest of the salt of the earth characters, but she couldn't  always read her dialog aloud in class as she wrote it. So, she would say the word "fish" in place of a certain other f-word that she would write.

Why do I share that? Because she recognized the difference between what might be inappropriate to her personal sensibilities and what might be gratuitous for her stories. She understood that while certain words might make her uncomfortable, they fit her characters perfectly. 

That, and it was totally awesome to remember listening to her say "Fish you" when she read it aloud.

Repeat after me: My character aren't me. They will say things I won't say. They will do things I won't do. They will have different beliefs than I have.

Your characters don't have to behave like good boys and girls all the time. It's not their job to make your grandmother's idea of polite manners their standards of behavior. They are free to be themselves and do as they must in order for you to tell their tales and entertain readers. In short, they will behave in ways that you may or may not emulate. Or they may stop far short of what you yourself might say or do. 

That's the first step, Grasshopper.

So here's the G-Line (line of gratuitousness, I just coined that, like it?) for me. As long as our characters say or do it without breaking character or bogging down your story, it's on the right side of the line. When they have to break character to say or do it or when the action rips a reader from the illusion world the story is supposed to transport him or her into, then you've crossed that line and become gratuitous.

If people complain about the language or violence or sexual situations jarring them out of the story then it's bad writing on your part.

If they complain about the mere existence of language or violence or sexual situations in your work at all, then it's on the reader who needs to find a different book.

Caveat#1: This is all moot when you are writing for a publisher who requires or requests a certain level of rating (such as PG-13) from you. That's a contract, and you suck it up and play within the fence the publisher has built around your playground.

Caveat #2: Certain genres, such as YA or religious fiction for example, require a more conservative approach to language, violence and sex. In contemporary works it often can be there, but not in a direct manner. So you must have it happen off-screen, or euphemistically (like fireworks, a change of time on the clock, or a release of doves in old Hollywood flicks), etc. Establishing character based on these things must be more implied than implicit.

Caveat #3: Don't bill your story as something that is isn't. If it's a book meant for adult audiences, then have at it. It's intended for the YA market, let a potential reader know it's got a disturbing scene of violence or sex or even some language in it IF IT'S NOT TYPICAL FOR THE MARKET. DC Comics and video games are doing a great job of this at the moment. And no, it's not censorship to reveal the type of content in your book, no matter who tries to convince you that it is. It's respect for you readers.