Your Complete Publisher Specializing in Unabridged Works

How do you describe pain? Pain is a constant in everyone’s lives, or at the least, it is a possibility at any given moment. Pain is also relative to the person experiencing it. So, what can a writer do to draw their reader into the pain a character is supposed to experience?

I believe the old writer’s axiom, “show, don’t tell” is perhaps the best advice I can give. Or is it? Sometimes telling the pain is as often as not as good as showing it. I am once again drawn to the Chekov quotation of “Don’t tell me the moon is out. Tell me about the glint of light in the glass.” Or something of that sort. 

Pain is best when the reader can walk away from the story to go to the bathroom and feel the character’s pain after they put the book down. Stephen King is the master at getting people to feel something. His ability to draw the reader into a character’s fear or anxiety or worry is perhaps one of the best I have known. Funny thing is, he has said if he can’t get the reader with terror he goes for gore. 

Which is what I do if I can’t quite get the reader into the pain of a character. I go for the gore. I tell them about the ugliness of the blood as it oozes out black. I tell them about the smell. Pain is often associated with our most powerful sense – smell. Use it. Use all the senses.

Use feeling. We have all felt pain, but no one knew we were experiencing it at the time. I have told those about the agony of walking when my feet hurt so much it feels like I am stomping on white hot shards of glass.

What about the actual word pain? The word itself is like so many simple words which convey a thousand meanings based upon the person who is reading it. They reference their own version of what they think pain is. What they feel as painful. How do you connect those readers to experience pain outside their own experiences?

Use other words of course. I have never been shot and yet, I have read the experience of being shot in many books. The one which made me feel the pain of being shot the most was the book Battle Cry about a group of Marines in World War Two. 

I highly recommend this book by the way. It lets you see the world through the eyes of the people who lived it. 

One of those things the book Battle Cry explored, which was not approved of in those times, was the emotional pain of war. It let me experience the agony of a young man as he faced his enemy, a person he had been told to kill. The traumatic effect this young man experienced as he shoved a bayonet into the living flesh of another human haunted this young man for the rest of his life.

The author, Leon Uris, was a Marine during World War Two who fought at Guadalcanal and several other hot spots in the South Pacific. He was intimately familiar with the horrors of war and the pain it causes to both those who fought and those who waited. He dealt with emotional and physical trauma with a distinct lack of sensitivity. He let you feel the pain in deep gritty detail.

In the scene where the young Marine kills his enemy with a bayonet, the author added more pain to this character. He added the pain of horror. It seems when you stab someone in the gut the muscles there can latch down on the object shoved into it and force the person to shoot themselves free. 

It is a painful scene written in gruesome detail. The author drew you into the agony of this young man as he is surrounded by death and destruction and the hideous atrocities of war only to have to blow a man apart to free his weapon up so he could continue to use it to survive. Is that not painful?

I’m Ross, The Editor-in Chief at the Pyrateheart Press and I’m out.