Category Archives: violence

TKZ’s Words of Wisdom

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Now and again we reach back into the TKZ archives for some timeless advice and offer them to you for discussion. Please reply, riff, or rant in the comments and interact with each other!

Today, we have discussions on violence and desensitization, reading reviews, and messy desks. Here’s to a spirited discussion.

In movies, books and television, I wonder sometimes if the downplayed violence–the off-screen murder that drives the meat of the plot–isn’t more of a disservice to society than their counterparts which take you and your senses into the true horror that violent crime inflicts. The dead butler in the library didn’t just arrive there to provide a puzzle for our sleuth to solve. He was a person whose last moments were anguished and wracked with agony. I’m not sure it’s good that the likes of Miss Marple, Jessica and Hercule are so able to push that aside.

Obviously, tastes vary. I respect that different forms of suspense attract different readers, but when it comes to desensitizing people to violence, I do wonder which form erodes the social fabric more. Or, as an alternative, does fiction have a measurable impact at all on such real-life sensitivities? What do you think? What are your violence thresholds? – John Gilstrap, January 2010

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I know this is going to sound counter-intuitive, and for many authors, nearly impossible, but here’s my advice: don’t read your reviews, ever. Turn off that Google alert. Skip the Amazon reviews section. Ignore your GoodReads ratings. And if you must know what a blogger or traditional media reviewer is saying about your book, enlist someone you trust to skim the contents and give you the highlights.

This applies not only to negative reviews, but positive ones. Because here’s the thing. As we all know, a reader’s opinion of a book is enormously subjective. The way they approach a story can vary at different points in their lives, or even their day. They read things into it that you might never have intended–and they’re all going to have vastly different opinions about what worked and what didn’t. – Joe Moore, January 2013

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I was pleased to read that this phenomenon is borne out in a book called The Perfect Mess by Dave Freedman and Eric Abrahamson which contends that those with cluttered, messy desks are often more efficient and creative than their neatnik brethren. Since my desk always looks like a disaster zone, I think I am going to stick with the Freedman/Abrahamson interpretation…but nonetheless I have to wonder whether most writers are like me – or whether I am just deluding myself that disorder is merely a sign of a great author in the making.

So, what about my fellow writers? Do you, like me, have a messy desk full of piles of paper or are you a neat freak with everything organized and de-cluttered for the sake of productivity and sanity? What do you think, is a messy desk a sign of creativity or just plain slovenliness? – Clare Langley-Hawthorne, February 2011

I will respond to comments this morning. This afternoon I will be away from my computer for a family gathering, and I will respond to your comments later this evening.

Walking Gore

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by Clare Langley-Hawthorne

I’ve been up to my eyeballs in boxes over the last two weeks as we unpack and settle into our new house in Colorado. In the weeks before the move, however, I confess to becoming a reluctant fan of The Walking Dead. Reluctant because at first I couldn’t watch beyond about ten minutes before I had to switch off. Gore, you see, isn’t my thing. And The Walking Dead is full of gore…

But then I tried again (fast forwarding through the truly stomach churning bits) and I became hooked. Despite the copious amounts of blood, guts and brains, I found myself invested in the characters and the story and, though I still couldn’t stomach the amount of gore, I had to keep watching. Story had triumphed over queasy stomach. 

When it comes to thrillers and mysteries, I usually draw the line at unnecessary violence and gore. I’ve never been one to go to horror movies and I don’t enjoy flinching at detailed, bloodied, descriptions of death or mutilation. But the key for me is the term ‘unnecessary’. Sometimes the story requires a degree of explicitness for it to remain authentic – and in this case, sometimes (only sometimes) I will forgo my usual sensibilities and keep reading. 

For me there are three critical elements needed for me to suspend my natural gag reflex and read on:

  • Firstly I must totally trust the writer – I need to feel assured that the violence/gore is both necessary and sufficient and that my trust in the writer won’t be destroyed. I don’t want to suddenly face a completely gratuitous scene which makes me doubt the authenticity of the experience the writer has provided.
  • Secondly, the context of the story must demand the level of explicitness/violence/horror or gore provided. I don’t pick up a cozy mystery expecting to find a hacked corpse oozing bodily fluids and explicit description on page 100…
  • Thirdly, the explicit descriptions must be compelling and accurate. I don’t want to find my stomach churning with a mishmash of innards only to suddenly think ‘whoa, that doesn’t sound right’. I’m no forensic pathologist or anatomy expert but sometimes explicit descriptions can easily veer into the realm of farce.  A good rule of thumb is probably not to involve too many body parts…

Still, there are lines that I am reluctant to cross. These include scenes involving children and animals. The story had better be the most compelling, viscerally affecting, and most brilliantly written piece of all time for me to cross over those lines.

So what about you? Any Walking Dead fans out there? How do you feel about gore in thrillers and mysteries? Are there lines you won’t cross (as either a writer or a reader?)

The Violence Threshold

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by John Gilstrap
www.johngilstrap.com

The first corpse I ever saw outside of a funeral home was that of a twenty-something newly-wed who’d been given a terminal diagnosis by his physician earlier in the day. Unwilling to face death in slow motion, he decided to die on his own terms. He stripped naked, sat Indian-style on his bed and rested his forehead on the muzzle of a .357 magnum revolver, his thumb on the trigger. His wife heard the shot from downstairs and rushed up to find the resultant horror show.

I got involved as a rookie firefighter riding as “third aid” on the ambulance. (That means I got to carry the heavy stuff and do my best to stay out of the way.) “Horror show” didn’t touch the reality. The panic-stricken wife, streaked red from her efforts to revive her husband. The anatomical eruption that was the bullet’s path. One of the most vivid memories for me is the fineness of the blood spatter, and how it settled on everything. To this day, I wonder how anyone can live in a house where a shooting has occurred. I guess you just have to replace everything.

Subsequent to that first fatality, over the course of fifteen years in the fire and rescue service, I witnessed hundreds more fatalities, more than a few the result of violence. Unless you’ve experienced it, I’m not sure you can understand how it changes you; how it molds you into the person you ultimately become.

Now I’m a thriller writer. People die in my books, and every now and then I get slammed by a critic for over-the-top violence, and every time I read that, I am shocked. Certainly, the violence is vivid, true to my memories of what bullets and knives and baseball bats do to people, but to my mind, I never cross over into what I think of as violence-as-pornography. The violence in my books has consequence. Every time my protagonists are forced to take a life, they become damaged goods. The violence evolves them, shapes them into more interesting, darker people. Consider those creative values against the consequence-free pornographic bloodfest that is The Matrix and its ilk.

In movies, books and television, I wonder sometimes if the downplayed violence–the off-screen murder that drives the meat of the plot–isn’t more of a disservice to society than their couterparts which take you and your senses into the true horror that violent crime inflicts. The dead butler in the library didn’t just arrive there to provide a puzzle for our sleuth to solve. He was a person whose last moments were anguished and wracked with agony. I’m not sure it’s good that the likes of Miss Marple, Jessica and Hercule are so able to push that aside.

Obviously, tastes vary. I respect that different forms of suspense attract different readers, but when it comes to desensitizing people to violence, I do wonder which form erodes the social fabric more. Or, as an alternative, does fiction have a measurable impact at all on such real-life sensitivities? What do you think? What are your violence thresholds?