Sue Coletta’s excellent post on Monday took us into the reality of murder. When I finished reading it, I wished I could un-read it. That’s no insult to Sue. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. Good writing makes you squirm. (Or laugh, or cry . . .) I read the piece to the end out of respect not just for the author, but for the victims. It’s important for people to understand what those young ladies endured in their final moments (or, God help us, final hours).
If that same scene were included in a novel I was reading, though, written by someone I didn’t know, I’d have closed the book and banned the author from my shelf.
Having been a first responder for 15 years, I was eyewitness to the aftermath unspeakable acts of cruelty. I’ve tucked in protruding viscera and I’ve bagged a few heads.
I’ve comforted the bereaved, but that was the part I hated the most. I was fire and rescue, not police. My job was to bring order to chaos–to stabilize dangerous situations–and then go home. No one ever died on my watch or in my ambulance because back then, only a medical doctor could pronounce death. Thus, people were either victims who were clearly dead when I arrived at the scene, or they were patients receiving life-saving care when I delivered them to the emergency room.
I was then–and am now–something of a Pollyanna. There’s always a way to win, always a route to a positive outcome. All I need to do is never give up. If the first strategy doesn’t work, you throw that aside and try something else. And then something else again. If the positive outcome does not arrive, it won’t be because I didn’t do everything I could. It’s a theme that drives my fiction. There’s always a way for the good guys to win. Or they die trying.
When I was researching my nonfiction book Six Minutes to Freedom (2006) and I finally got permission to talk to the Delta Force operators who performed Kurt Muse’s daring rescue, there was a common theme that drove every interview. To a man, the operators I spoke with told me that come hell or high water, they were bringing Kurt home. If he stayed, they stayed. When Operation ACID GAMBIT was done, more than a few of those operators were shot to pieces–one of them amputated his own foot to escape his crashed rescue chopper–but they never stopped fighting. And they delivered Kurt to his family five days before Christmas.
Victimhood makes me uncomfortable. I have no desire to read torture porn, which is one of the reasons why I don’t like reading about fictional serial killers. Those scenes with the suffering victims are all about hopelessness. Yes, it happens in real life, and if I want access to real-life case files, I can gain it with a phone call. It’s a call I’ll never make.
In reality, violence smells bad. It’s sticky and it’s ugly. It’s unnerving. When I commanded a horrific auto accident or occupational injury, my standing order to my crew was, “If it’s ugly, cover it up.” No one functions well in the presence of mangled people. I bring some of that to my fiction, and I get occasional hate mail as a result, but that level of reality–the reality of the aftermath–doesn’t push me beyond my limits.
The irony is not lost on me that I write violent books, and that good guys occasionally die at my hand. I can’t define where my breaking point is on how much is too much, but there’s a line there somewhere. The knee-jerk response is to say that violence against children is the line not to be crossed, but I cross that all the time. I don’t do it gratuitously, though. At least I don’t think I do. I will not write a scene with sexual violence against women. Come to think of it, I don’t write much about sex at all.
What are your thoughts, TKZ family? How much squirming are you willing to endure when reading books? At what point do you send a book sailing?
Thank you for a great post, Mr. Gilstrap.
When it comes to intestines, I get really squeamish. I skipped an entire chapter by one of my favorite authors when Afghani tribes people began torturing a captured American in this way. Luckily, I didn’t seem to miss much required story when I skipped it.
For torture scenes I prefer the dental approach. Marathon Man (the film) is a good example.
I was in high school when I watched Marathon Man in the theater with my buddies. By the time that dental scene was over, I was coiled into a tight ball in my seat. Gives me chills to think about it.
I cannot stand to read or hear of the torture or killing of children especially, or young people such as the girls in Sue’s article, or of our elders.
In my stories, men or women do such things die, finally and horribly.
Oh, it’s a given that perpetrators of such horrors will die. Horribly. When I’m elected king, such will be the law of the land.
Great post, John. Thought-provoking. I read it twice.
You’re right. Standard wisdom says don’t write violence against children. Secondary to that is to not write violence (sexual or otherwise) against women. I’ve crossed both of those, even on-stage, usually to evoke an emotional response from the reader. And of course, it’s open season against men.
Your ban in your own writing of “sexual” violence against women raised a question in my mind regarding how you define “sexual violence.” If you mean a rape scene, I agree. I won’t write that either. No need, and in my mind, any such scene would be gratuitous.
That being said, I’ve written scenes in which a rape occurs off-stage to serve as a catalyst for other events in the story. I’ve also written scenes in which agents and operators (both male and female) were captured and tortured, sometimes slashed, because it was in the story. So if the female were slashed through the breasts, would that be sexual violence? (Just musing here.)
Perhaps the best advice I’ve ever heard (probably because I agree with it) is write what makes you “uneasy” or “squirm” or “what scares you” (Bradbury, King, et al). I seem to do that at least a little in every novel. But I don’t differentiate among men, women and children.
Thanks, Harvey. Yes, in my opinion, what you describe would definitely be sexual violence.
I think that “writing what scares you” is different from writing what makes you “squirm.” Kidnapping scares me. Incarceration scares me. Confronting a killer in an alley scares me. Those are all great settings and emotional sources for stories.
Squirmy things, however, are choices made within those settings. I certainly would never write something I wouldn’t want to read.
My imagination is far too good to tolerate physical torture scenes in books. I’ll skip chapters and lower or kill my enthusiasm for an author who puts too many words into a torture scene. As I write this I’m sure that people are being tortured all over planet earth, but for my own mental health, I don’t need to read about in a work of fiction. If I can skip the chapter or scene of torture and continue with the book, did it even need to be there to start with?
And as someone once said, the secret to good writing is to leave out the parts that people skip. 🙂
Good post. Now I need to read one of your books, Mr. Gilstrap.
I love a good police procedural novel or movie. And courtroom drama tickles my fancy, too. But I like to be able to clearly identify the black hats from the white hats. I don’t like it (even though we authors are counseled to create well-rounded good guys and bad guys) when the bad guy has too many good traits or the good guy has too many bad traits. I don’t want to be sympathetic toward the character who has no conscience, but takes care of his mother. And I don’t want to be disgusted because the good guy takes bribes to keep a drug dealer in business so they can round up the whole gang. At the end of the story, I want to be able to cheer for the hero and watch evil be damned.
I can take enough violence to make all this clear in my mind. But, I have lines in the sand. I can’t watch or read a scene with graphic violence, especially involving children or women. Just enough to make me hate the bad and hope for the good, please. I already know what goes on out there in the real world. The sensation-loving media see to that. I do not need to bring it into my home and subject my soul to it.
Hi, Deb. Well, I hope you do pick up one of my books! If you like it, tell all your friends. If you don’t like it, tell them that it was written by a guy named Grisham. 🙂
I’ve encountered a number of readers over the years who’ve talked about violence in my books that was never actually on the page, but was nevertheless real in their minds. I guess that means I did my job.
My rule for violence and sexual tension has always been to show only what would have made it into a 1940s film noir. It worked then, it works now.
Jim, do you think the new generation of readers is entertained by 1940s film noir?
Yes indeed. Classic film noir is huge among Millennials and college film students. Not only that, there is a huge swath of the reading public of all ages that is fed up with the gratuitous nature of so many current books and movies.
The most horrible scene I’ve seen in a movie was from Fritz Lang’s 1931 movie M. Here is Wikipedia’s description of the scene:
Little Elsie Beckmann leaves school, bouncing a ball on her way home. She is approached by Hans Beckert (played by Peter Lorie) who is whistling “In the Hall of the Mountain King” by Edvard Grieg. He offers to buy her a balloon from a blind street-vendor and walks and talks with her. Elsie’s place at the dinner table remains empty, her ball is shown rolling away across a patch of grass and her balloon is lost in the telephone lines overhead.
What makes it horrible is what your mind fills in. For me, this is the best way to write a horrible scene.
I love M! That static shot where the mother is searching the apartment building as her panic grows is utterly chilling.
I’d forgotten that scene. It was very chilling.
Oh my! Have to see it now…
It depends on what you write and the reader expectations. You don’t torture or rape, even off page, if you write cozies or most romances. Even some types of thrillers and suspense aren’t that hardcore.
I’m not a fan of serial killer turned into torture/pain stories so I don’t read that type of book. If there’s even a possibility that a child, pet, or innocent will have something horrific happen to them in what I do read, I stop reading. I can no longer deal with that.
As an ironic side note, one of my romances was about rape and horrible, brutal things appeared on the page, but it was my rebuttal to the rape-is-sexy trope that some sicko romance authors were spewing out. But it was science fiction adventure/romance, not straight romance.
I refuse to read a book with too much graphic detail with either violence or sex and I agree with, James, about the 1940’s films. They handled sex and violence with great impact without showing any details.
The description, Brian Hoffman, shared is a perfect example, one I try to implement in my novels, particularly since the first book in my series deals with child abductions.
The intent of the book is to draw awareness to the issue and spotlight the wonderful agencies working to save the children – not the illumination of the horrific acts of the criminal kidnappers. Several readers commented that my book gave them a much deeper insight and understanding of Amber alerts and the role of both local law enforcement and the Secret Service and left them hopeful. Other than a generic line that gives a rough impression of what would happen unless my heroine intervened, there is no description of violence.
Excellent post, John. I can’t imagine your experience as a first responder, even after listening to my husband’s descriptions of accidents and crime scenes. (He’s a retired police officer.)
When I was active in the fire service, my wife and I agreed that I would never bring the bad stuff home. That was my world, not hers, and I respected that. It wasn’t until I left the service that she revealed how she always knew when I’d seen something disturbing. My tell was that I would take a very long shower and just stand under the water. She called it my psychological scrub. I had no idea that I would do that.
I don’t like gratuitous violence or in-your-face torture, either, John. There are other, more effective ways to make readers squirm, if that’s the author’s intention. Real life, on the other hand, is ugly and messy and often doesn’t have a happy ending. So, I’m much more lenient when it comes to reading true crime… my writer brain wants all the details, no matter how unforgiving the act may be.
Thanks for the kind words, John. My blog audience surfs the same wavelength as I do, but TKZ readers are a different audience. I wavered for days on whether to re-post it here. In the end it came down to a safety issue. I’d rather make readers squirm and be safe than have something happen when I could’ve warned them.
Thank you for injecting humanity into the question about our portrayals of violence in our fiction. I refuse to portray sexual violence against women or anyone, for that matter, and I can’t see myself writing the killing of a child–or a dog or cat, either–in my fiction.
I write in the suspense genre, and at times the violence troubles me–we have enough violence already in our society. Ultimately, the story must come first, and there must be something more compelling in it than a messed-up person killing and killing until s/he is stopped. One writer I admire who’s superb at ratcheting up tension without resorting to a bunch of murders is Liane Moriarty.
After reading Sue’s post, and again today, I thought back over what I have read. Certainly, there are some violent books on my shelf. Most of them are true crimes. The wall of books on the Holocaust I would have to include in with them.
Some are fictional killers. Perhaps my mind draws a line between real and fiction. Maybe that line keeps Hannibal Lecter out of my dreams. Maybe it is the knowledge of something I said about DFS workers, on their desk is a file that would give Wes Craven nightmares.
I’m with you, John. I read Sue’s post and squirmed the whole way through. I was absolutely sickened and shocked by what those young women endured and it made me highly uncomfortable. But, I read it because it was the respectful thing to do for those young ladies.
I think we treat fiction and non-fiction very differently. One is a product of someone’s imagination; we *know* it’s not real. We can feel the terror and the unjustice of it all, but ultimately, we know it’s not real. But, with non-fiction, we have faces we can put to names, we have evidence- physical, oral/aural, visual- and that means it was real to someone.
Excessive sex doesn’t bother me- I’m a romance writer, and that’s what I write. But, what makes me throw a book across the room is gratuitous descriptions of gore, torture, and violence against someone (especially a child) for the sake of being shocking. Luckily, I’ve only read one of those books. At the time, I remember my skin crawling because the author was so visceral in her descriptions. I made it through to the end, but I don’t think I’d ever pick it up again.
The older I get, the less a fan I am of violence and brutality, especially not of the graphic variety. My imagination is good enough to take me places my memory doesn’t want to go, I don’t need to read about every blood drop and scrap of gore. That doesn’t mean I don’t read stories, though, that have some violent content, but i prefer it off camera like the beach kiss in from Here to Eternity…okay I just gave myself away 🙂