: Re: How to be mindful of the reader when handling disturbing/distressing subjects? I’m attempting to write some ‘difficult to read’ scenes such as violence, rape, trauma, etc. And I’m not talking

@Welton431

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I suggest writing it with all the detail you can muster, then returning to it cold and rewriting to delete repetitiveness and all the detail you can stand to give up.

Remember these passages are like any other in the story: They serve a purpose to the larger story, and should have some consequence later. You can apply this to each and every sentence of the description in question. figure out WHY each is necessary, to this scene and to the reader's understanding, to show the brutality of the scene.

If this is a rape scene, how did your character resist, and how was that resistance met? What made their resistance useless? What made their subjugation complete and resistance pointless?

The way to be mindful of the reader is to not stretch the description out and revel in every thrust of a rape. The entire move-by-move description is not necessary. Stories are about change, and what is necessary is to understand this chain of transformations in the victim, and how this incident changed them from version 1.0 to the version 2.0 we see before us now. How their instincts were shaped, their hatreds were shaped, their judgment warped or their ability to love or trust crippled.

So you don't want to leave anything out, but you also don't want to be repetitive. If you have several lines conveying the same sense of terror or disbelief at what is happening, cut them all and write a better line, a better comparison or metaphor or whatever, to state it once and for all.

If you mean, by "mindful of the reader", hiding the worst from them, that falls under the heading of necessity to the rest of the story. If the worst is really necessary to explain and justify the future actions of your victim, you need to write it. But if the worst moments of a rape are not really needed to justify the future actions of the victim, if just the basics of the rape are enough, then you can leave out those worst moments, whatever you imagine them to be.

Which is why I say write it all, as best you can, then come back to it cold (so you can get closer to the reader experience: They read it cold), and delete all you can without damaging the final "sense of it all" to the reader.

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