: 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

@Annie587

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It's easy to vary the level of graphicness. (Is "graphicness" a word? Whatever.) If you write, "George was captured and tortured", and that's the total description, it would take an extremely sensitive person to be disturbed by that. If you give step by step details of how he was skinned alive, how they peeled back the skin, how he screamed in agony and the torturers laughed, describe the look of the raw skin, the blood, etc, that could be very creepy.

I don't think the problem is how to make it more or less disturbing. The problem is deciding what the right level is. For one reader, if you say, "they stabbed him with hot pokers", the reader will cringe and be on the verge of fainting. For others the most detailed and graphic descriptions will leave them saying, "huh, sounds painful I guess".

You have to know your intended audience. If you're writing for children I'd presume you'd be much less graphic than if writing for adults. Women generally have much lower tolerance for gruesomeness then men. Etc.

To at least some extent, you let the story determine the audience rather than vice versa. That is, if you write a story with graphic descriptions of torture, then that will determine who your readers are. People who are more squeamish won't want to read it, people who like that kind of thing will.

It's a lot like sex scenes. For some readers, if you say "Bob and Sally kissed" they get all embarrassed and question if they want to continue reading this salacious story. For others, detailed descriptions of the kinkiest sex acts leave them saying, "Is that all? What dull sex lives these characters have."

My general advice -- and maybe I'm speaking more for myself here than readers in general, I've never seen a study on the subject -- is that being too graphic is more likely to hurt the market for your book than not being graphic enough. If I'm reading a novel and it gets too gruesome, I often quit reading. I'm looking for something entertaining and fun: I don't want to be grossed out. I don't remember ever saying, "That could have been a good book, but there just weren't enough scenes of graphic torture." Hey, people have occasionally asked me if I've seen some movie about Nazi concentration camps or the like, and my response is generally, "No, and I don't plan to see it. I know the Holocaust was terrible. I don't need to be reminded of the gruesome details." But obviously there are people who love to watch gruesome horror movies, so there certainly is a substantial market for such material. I don't want to overstate my case here.

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