: How to realistically describe pain? So, I was doing a writing excersie, I came up with, to help me with sentence structuring and developing my style. One thing, I ran into, however, was that

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Show the visible effects of the pain. Let the reader feel it.

I think the issue is that you're being sidetracked into trying to describe the feeling of pain. Pain is a very subjective feeling. It is so subjective that in the medical profession they try to ascertain the degree of pain by either asking the patient to choose from a spectrum of emoticons, or to give it a number between 0 and 10. Only then they ask precise question on whether it is a stinging pain, a pulsing pain and so forth: oftentimes the patient is unable to properly characterize their pain besides its intensity, despite external suggestions from the physician.

While the feeling of pain may be taken to the grave by the one experiencing it, the outcome on their actions and looks is very much objective. Regardless of whether a pain is the worst of one's life, the feeling of it may cause one to recoil, to squirm, to scream or to even madly fight back in a primordial attempt to get rid of the cause.

Even if you haven't experienced the pain, you are somehow familiar to the reaction to pain. You would easily identify whether a living being is hurt. It is that information that you need to give to the reader. Actually, it would be a great success if you manage to stab the Dragon and make the reader feel its pain, without using the word 'pain'

For instance, if we tried to show a dragon in pain, like an outgrown lizard in pain:

the Dragon howled with a shriek that shook the cave. It raised its eyes to the sky, and pointing at the knight, it snorted, steaming from the open mouth, but not a flame came out of it. It clasped the bottom of the cave with its claws, scarring the granite, twitching and splashing in its fuming blood.

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In college English class, we were assigned Write to the Point by Bill Stott. He has a chapter on this, which I'm probably badly paraphrasing: just describe what happens. Like you would anything else.

He compares two writing samples, one about waiting in a dentist office with unbearable tooth pain, and the other about a mountain man who has to pull his own painful tooth. He breaks it down, and goes over what works and what doesn't in each passage.

Support you were writing about water. Is it a frozen arctic glacier, crystal and blue? Is it a rushing torrent, churning and foaming over rocks?

Does your character have a migraine? Are they in bed, lying perfectly still, while vibrations of pain emanate from their head? Did they break their ankle on stage, collapse to the floor with a throbbing floppy mess on the end of their leg?

I think your passage is pretty good. The only thing I would change is the superlative: "... than ever before in his life." But I think you have a good start.

Edit also, I don't think many people in the world today have lived through a sword-stabbing, so nobody can really call you on your description of it ; )

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When I don't know how to do something, I look for examples of how somebody else did it. Here's an example from Jim Butcher's Dresden Files series. The main character, a wizard, had a kinetic shield spell ready, while the enemies came with a flamethrower. Turns out shield doesn't stop heat:

It hurt. Oh, God, it hurt. The fingers of my left hand were the first to feel it, and then my palm and wrist, all in the space of a second. If you've never been burned, you can't imagine the pain. And my fingers, where millions of tactile nerves were able to send panicked damage-messages to my brain, felt as if they had simply exploded and been replaced with howling agony.
I jerked my hand back, and felt my focus waver, the shield start to fade. I gritted my teeth, and somehow managed to dig up the strength to extend my hand again, hardening the shield and my will. I backed away in shuffling half steps, my mind almost drowning in pain, desperately keeping the shield up.
[...]
I saw blisters rising on my left hand. I felt my fingers curling into a claw. They looked thinner, as if made of melting wax, and I could see the shadows of my bones beneath the flesh.
Jim Butcher, Blood Rites, chapter 33

There are several things going on here.

First, there's what is happening. A man's hand is being burnt. You think of that, it makes you shiver. And there's detail: the fingers curling involuntarily, the flesh melting away from the bone. Your thought is made to linger on that uncomfortable shiver. You imagine the pain, you don't even need to be told that it hurts - you know it does.

Second, we are told that it's painful: "it hurt", "my mind almost drowning in pain". Such statements are empty on their own - we've heard them too often. But within the picture already created, they support the overall structure. They are like the cerebral part of the mind registering that "it hurts".

Third, "Oh God". This is the cry of pain that escapes one's lips, the loss of control. It's almost an involuntary reaction, very familiar to anyone who's experienced any sudden pain. It's an accent, and a signal.

Fourth, there is the description: "my fingers, where millions of tactile nerves were able to send panicked damage-messages to my brain, felt as if they had simply exploded and been replaced with howling agony". One image. You don't want more than one - it becomes confusing and repetitive. That one image makes the reader linger for a moment on imagining the pain - while they're reading this description, they cannot move on. This image needs to be sufficiently imaginative and brief - otherwise boredom sets in, we lose sympathy for the character. And again, it cannot stand on its own.

Do you need all those elements? Definitely not. They are tools you can use. And there are other tools, such as the physiological reaction to pain (dizziness, nausea, etc.)

The most important thing is, you don't need to describe pain. You need your readers to imagine pain. Those aren't quite the same thing. Sometimes less description, less detail, can do the trick - you give the reader enough, and let them fill in the blanks. In particular, it's very hard to imagine "abstract" pain. One imagines a particular kind of pain (burns feel differently from blunt trauma, for instance) in a particular organ. So before you describe pain, you need to paint the picture of what's going on. Once you've done that, the reader's imagination will do half the work for you. We're wired to empathise.

(Which by the way makes the task of describing a non-humanoid's pain harder - I do not intuitively feel what wings or air sacks feel like. You'd have to do the work for me - compare the sensation to something I know better. Sure, air sacks are like lungs, I understand that. But I don't feel that, unless you evoke some sensation - being unable to get enough air, or something similar.)

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I don’t feel that you have to experience intense near-death pain, describe it and be concerned that it would disingenuous. Why? Because your point of view is omniscient subjective. You are the narrator and the voice of the story. In my opinion, your paragraph does an excellent job telling us from your point of view as narrator what Gyvaris may be experiencing and thinking while the knight impales Gyvaris.

On the other hand, what if you were writing this story in Gyvaris’ point of view as opposed to your point of view as a narrator? In that case, you would narrate from Gyvaris’ point of view and convey the experience through Gyvaris’ action, thoughts, feeling and speech.

In either case the experience is written in context to the point of view. Again, in my opinion, I like what you have already. The only changes I might suggest is changing the first sentence. If it has been established who the knight is, at this point in time, in the story, then use the knight’s name. It seems like we know that Gyvaris is the dragon, so use Gyvaris name instead of dragon. First sentence could read like this:

Sir Debin sunk his sword deep into Gyvaris’s chest.

Also you make good use of some pattern of motivation reaction units too in the paragraph. I like that. Good job.

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