“ And, just when the pain was at its worst, it dissipated, like fog off some terrible lake.” Go forth. “The pain in my shoulder ramped up the from stiffness all the way to searing, blinding agony faster than I could blink.” So, too, can the agony of your characters: It can be debilitating in one minute, bearable the next. And yet I can see how much pain she’s in when we work together by the way she walks, talks, and carries herself. She’s also had spinal fusion, has multiple slipped discs, and takes a boatload of pain medication. One Final Technique: The Transmission of Agony Huzzah!įor a breakdown of possible conflict scenarios that can lead to your character experiencing pain, go here. It’s a reminder, but it’s also a small challenge that they’re solving before your very eyes. However, we can choose something closer to the show route, by watching the character work around their injuries: “she opened the door awkwardly with her left hand to avoid the burn on her right” “she led each step on the staircase with her good leg” “Martin fiddled with his sling irritably”. If you want to show their pain, the easiest way is to tell: “her shoulder ached” “she rubbed her aching shoulder” “she rolled her shoulder subconsciously, trying to work out the aching stiffness” all convey what we want.įor frequency, try to limit those mentions to once per scene at the most, and perhaps as rarely as once per chapter. There are three main ways to remind a reader of your character’s suffering: show them suffering, show them working around their suffering, and a third, more advanced, technique that I’ll mention in a moment. A broken bone should send a jarring blast of lightning into the brain if that bone is jostled or hit. A gunshot wound should burn and itch and ache as it heals. Most pain that matters in fiction isn’t a one-and-done kind of a deal. How Often Should We Remind Readers of a Character’s Pain? For instance, don’t mix stinging with searing when finding a metaphor to build. Metaphors, of course, are going to play somewhere on this spectrum, but I would suggest picking one level of pain and targeting it. Consider words like ripping, tearing, writhing. Obliterating: This is the kind of pain that prohibits anything else except being in pain (and doing anything to alleviate it). Consider words like agony, anguish, suffering, throes, torment, stabbing. It will stop them from doing much of anything. Severe: This is pain your character can’t ignore.
Consider words like ache, throb, distress, flare. Moderate: This is pain that distracts your character but doesn’t truly stop them. Consider words like pinch, sting, smart, stiffness. Minor/Mild: This is pain that your character notices but doesn’t distract them. How Much Does It Hurt? A Pain Scale for Writers
#Human struck by lightning scars how to#
So I’m here today to give you a pain scale to work with, and provide some pointers on how to keep in mind a character’s injuries without turning off your readers. There’s a fine line to walk between forgetting your character’s pain, elucidating it, and over-describing it. In another story, a character breaks his ribs in one scene, then has, uhhh, intimate moments with his Special Someone in the next. Let’s be honest, you gave up reading that paragraph by the third sentence. For your readers, though, it can become a grind. The pain was like needles that had been dipped in alcohol had been jammed through her skin, like her arm had been replaced with ice and electricity wired straight into her spine.įor your characters, at its worst the pain can be all-consuming. It exploded in her head with a blinding whiteness. So why can reading about pain be so boring? Consider the following (made-up) example: It heightens drama, raises the stakes, adds yet another hurdle for our hero to jump before they reach their glorious climax.
In good writing, physical suffering often mirrors emotional suffering. Characters in fiction suffer, because their suffering mirrors our own. It’s the root of some of our best metaphors, our most elegant writing. Pain is a fundamental part of the human experience, which means that it’s a fundamental part of storytelling.
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