: 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

@Deb2945533

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You might find it helpful to look at the Torture Porn trope, to have a clearer idea of what to avoid. A work would be called "torture porn" when it appears to seek to disgust the reader/viewer while at the same time giving visceral thrills. Consequently, it would be full of "lovingly described" details of the torture.

Descriptions of pain and agony too can be "too much", in which case your reader would close off. There's a point where a readers capacity to "feel the characters' pain" is filled, after which it's "he suffers, I get it, move on". You've basically made the reader numb. You don't want that. (This is not meant to imply that readers are unfeeling monsters. You can think of it rather as a defence mechanism.)

So what do you do, to help your readers stay with you, instead of closing off either due to excessive gore or excessive agony? You administer a smaller dose, or you dilute it until it is bearable.

For example, in Alexandre Dumas' La Reine Margot, two characters are taken to be tortured. We follow one character as he is strapped down, the exact way the particular way of torture works is explained, its consequences mentioned, we share the character's fear right before. Only, he's not tortured. The whole thing is faked. The other character is tortured for real, but we're not with him. We only hear the screams, and even then, we don't realise he's not just play-acting, like the first, until after. Then it hits you like a ton of bricks.

In The Princess Bride we are not told exactly what is being done to Westley, only that "he suffered not at all" under months of regular torture, until he is hooked up to "the machine". There is no description of the thing that makes any sense whatsoever, there's nothing for the mind to latch onto, to try and imagine what it's like. The only clue is Westley's reaction: the guy who up until then was busy with wisecracks, "cried like a baby". It's his response that makes you shiver. If the unbreakable guy broke, what he was made to suffer must have been terrible. No description needed.

There are other methods you can use. You can time-skip, to only show the character after they've been tortured. You can have the character faint early on. With torture, less is very often more. It is only so long as you haven't made your reader go numb, that you can deliver a punch.

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