: Re: How to write painful torture scenes without being over-the-top I'm trying to write torture scenes but I'm not really all that confident about it since I've never written anything like it before

@Candy753

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If the torture scene is happening to your MC or your current narrator, instead of focusing on all the blood and gore which can make a lot of readers queasy or uncomfortable, focus on the narrator's agony. If your goal is to both portray the goriness of torture to send a message AND show your narrator's pain, and especially since you said yourself you haven't really witnessed anything gory or violent, you should watch a horror movie or at least read up on torture.

If the torture scene is happening to someone else and your narrator is watching, focus on the narrator's absolute horror and disgust at what they see. You don't have to do a play by play of every single action, but to show the reader why your narrator is so terrified, you should give the reader a taste of what the narrator sees.

If you're totally uncomfortable with blood and gore and you just can't get it to work in your writing, try psychological torture. This focuses almost completely on the mind, so you can take it wherever you want to.

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